M.I.A. plays her second show tonight at the Echoplex, and Losanjelous, bless their hearts, has pictures from last night. The image above is from their nice assortment of close-ups. There's so much hype around these scarce shows: Apparently 1,000 people showed up Monday to get precious few tickets released at the last minute due to demand. If you're going tonight, blessings. Baile-funk the sh*t out of her new stuff. I'll be home a few blocks away in my sparkle-motion tights and floppy neon green painter cap (kidding), YouTubing her:
That's "Boyz," one of the new tracks. M.I.A., a Londoner-by-way-of-Sri Lanka, has a compelling personal saga, but as you can see, part of the phenomenon is how visually striking she is, and how much she's influenced street fashion by excessively piling on mismatched, painfully bright colors and shimmery prints until she and her fans start looking like some kind of deranged tribe of sugar-high post-ethnic Smurfs.
In any case, it's good she's back in "America" after running into visa trouble last year. M.I.A., hyper-stimulating grime goddess of the global subaltern, keeps a place in Brooklyn.
* Links: Losangelous, Pitchfork interview, YouTube, Village Voice feature, Rolling Stone feature, AIM story, official site.
** Add: The LA Weekly Play post on last week's Rapture show that I found a way into. Caught funky-fun Chromeo later that same night. Chromeo played new stuff too, but seeing them again just made me real nostalgic for 2005. * Thanks, Lxs.