Boyz (song) - Composition

Composition

"Boyz" is an uptempo dance song, incorporating elements of worldbeat, electronica and dancehall music. "Boyz" follows the "nu world" music style that M.I.A. categorises Kala as presenting. M.I.A. has openly discussed her motivations for the song, saying in an interview that "Boyz" was recorded like all of her music, "like a collage" so as not to "fill the same formula" of composition technique amongst her peers, continuing "I don't really do it in a classic sense, like these are the five pieces of happiness dispersed through three and half minutes." Like fellow Kala track "Bird Flu", the song uses urumee drums, a signature instrument of gaana, a folk Tamil genre of music which M.I.A. was familiar with from her time spent living in Sri Lanka and India. Incorporating this style with 22 members of the drumming group The Tapes from Chennai, the songwriter took her material to Trinidad where vocals were recorded and she absorbed influences from the country's love of soca music, a West Indian genre. The song was then worked on further in Brooklyn. The rapper wanted to "create a new way to feel music" with the song by including "ups and downs: the basic chorus, soca for the tempo, and you just fuck around with that."

Tom Breihan of the Village Voice noted that the drums on Kala were "crazy disorienting", departing heavily from those on predecessor Arular. M.I.A highlighted that drums were recorded to introduce a more organic sound to electronic music while remaining digital and futuristic in the song's style, as she felt that the "world was going kind of disco/electro Justicey kind of beat the kind of dance-music revival of the 90s". As with the rest of Kala, M.I.A. and co-composer Switch relied heavily on Logic Pro, a digital audio workstation produced by Apple, and were able to capture vocals and background sounds outside the traditional studio environment, using a microphone and a Macbook Pro. Consisting of urumee drum percussion, trumpets, tambourines, electronic scratches and synths, the song's instrumentation also consists of repetitive pumped-up synthesizers and 4/4 beats. Sukant Chandan writing in the Green Left Weekly noted the percussion on "Boyz" contributed to the "cohesion and continuity throughout" Kala. M.I.A. likened the process of recording the album to "making a big old marble cake with lots of different countries and influences. Then you slice it up and call each slice a song", revealing how she set about achieving some continuum across the album with each song. M.I.A. has noted the resulting "very outdoors" sound as what she aimed for with the composition, despite the drum orchestra being recorded indoors at the Panchathan Record Inn and AM Studios.

The lyrics of "Boyz" display M.I.A.'s response to men following issues being a female in the music industry she faces and expectations in her personal life from her then boyfriend to give up making music and start a family. "Boyz" acknowledges the artist's time in Jamaica, and the singer has described the song as partly a tribute to the country. The song references Jamaican dance moves. As Michael Hubbard of MusicOMH notes, "Boyz" is ostensibly a ditty by a woman about the opposite sex, where the lyrics ask "how many boys are crazy and how many start a war" while Ann Powers of the Los Angeles Times said that the punch line of this "call-out to "no money boys" is that they go from being "crazy" and "raw" to starting a war," concluding that "Macho posturing plus poverty equals violence: There's a Third World reality that M.I.A.'s song renders anything but abstract."