In an effort to do less writing in which I know not of what I type, I downloaded M.I.A.'s Vicki Leekx mixtape once Peter Suderman recommended it. I'm not really qualified to make any judgements on the production, and the lyrics mostly didn't stand out to me (except in moments of occasional annoying puerility). But I enjoyed the tape for a couple of reasons.
First, in its staticky, minimalist way, listening to the album feels to me like having a conversation while walking down a street in Shanghai or Phnom Penh, a place where there are a lot of unfamiliar sounds and a language barrier. I had to concentrate on the lyrics to understand them, but it was hard, because there were a lot of interesting and not immediately identifiable or recognizable things happening around the words that kept grabbing tendrils of my attention. As a listener, I'm overly biased towards lyrics, mostly because they provide the meat of the kind of analysis I like to do. I tend to be more curious about the trend in rappers setting themselves up as serial killers than who they're sampling or what they're doing to the sample. But I would like to learn more about the stuff around the words.
Second, I assume there's a way to chop up a mixtape into tracks, but I have never really done it, and so I listened to the tape as a continuous track. I've mentioned repeatedly that I'm fairly biased towards singles, and rarely listen to albums as a coherent experience (in fact, I think one of the most important changes in my media consumption habits in 2010 were that I spent a lot of time listening to singles on YouTube and much less time in iTunes—downloading the mixtape, I realized that iTunes had changed through a couple of updates and that I wasn't really familiar with the new layout). So listening to this album all the way through the first time, without the ability to click back and forth and reabsorb individual tracks was a deviation for me. I don't think there's any section in it that particularly stands out to me as a viable candidate for a single anyway, and I wonder if, particular to my listening habits, the mixtape might work a lot better as background noise that absorbs an unusually high percentage of my attention. I'd have to change my listening habits considerably (and probably the fact that I am a multi-tasking fidget) to listen to full albums all the way through without doing anything else in the meantime. But it's probably worth trying to do more often. I'll definitely plan to give it a shot with Justin Townes Earle, at least.
And as a side note, wouldn't WikiLeaks be a hell of a lot more fun if it were run by a quasi-superheroine named Vicki Leekx instead of Julian Assange?