Kala (album) - Music and Lyrics

Music and Lyrics

Kala is named after M.I.A.'s mother, in contrast to her previous album, Arular, which was named after her father. She contends that Arular was a "masculine" album, but that Kala "is about my mum and her struggle–how do you work, feed your children, nurture them and give them the power of information?" She further summed the album up as "shapes, colours, Africa, street, power, bitch, nu world, and brave."

The tracks "Boyz" and "Bird Flu" use urumee drums, a signature instrument of Gaana, a Tamil genre of music, with which M.I.A. was familiar from her time spent living in Sri Lanka. She later worked on these tracks in Trinidad, where she absorbed influences from the country's love of soca music. The lyrics of "Boyz" deal with the artist's time in Jamaica, and reference Jamaican dance moves. The song "Hussel" began as an image in M.I.A.'s head of refugees being smuggled in boats, which she expressed musically by imagining how "if they banged that beat on the side of a boat, what would it sound like? That's why it's all echo-y and submarine-y". The sounds on the intro were recorded from Keralan fishermen chanting as they pull their fishing boats into the water. "World Town" used instrumentation from the temple music she recalled waking up to as a child in Sri Lanka. After playing the track to children in Liberia, she expressed a desire to record a video for the song there. M.I.A.'s "flat, unaffected vocals and delivery of lyrics" on some songs drew comparisons to British post-punk bands such as Delta 5 and The Slits. She says it "was just what was happening to me naturally...I wanted it to be difficult and raw and not get into it so much".

Afrikan Boy, an exponent of grime, a UK-based genre of urban music, provided vocals on the song "Hussel". M.I.A. opted to work with him because she felt that he seemed comfortable with his identity as a "real immigrant" and because his background was different to that of most MCs in the genre. She had originally planned to include "Mango Pickle Down River"—her remix of The Wilcannia Mob's song "Down River"—on a mix-tape, but chose to include it on the album because she felt it was rare to hear the "aboriginal voice" in recorded music, and described opening track "Bamboo Banga" as having a "bamboo-stick beat, house-y feel". The song "Jimmy" was included as a tribute to her mother and is M.I.A.'s version of an old Bollywood film track to which she used to dance at parties as a child. Despite the involvement of Baltimore club musician Blaqstarr, "The Turn" turned out to be the album's only ballad, and the track has been described as the least like club music. "20 Dollar" was written about the relative ease of buying AK-47s in war-torn Liberia. "XR2" recalls part of the artist's life growing up with rave music in early 1990s London, while the song "Paper Planes" jokingly plays on M.I.A.'s problems with visas and certain perceptions of immigrants.