Vicki Leakx Mixtape

If you’ve paid attention to MIA from the start, you know her rebel tale has always had hairline cracks. But her intentions are true. And the fact is, in America, for a young, politically minded pop icon, MIA’s still the best we've got.

On December 31, 2010, MIA released a free mixtape through her Twitter titled VICKI LEAKX. It was a follow-up to last year’s ///Y/, the album that generated all the negative hype, and which was subsequently unfairly maligned by music critics and stalwart fans alike, despite being one of the most musically progressive albums in the mainstream last year. Typically overstuffed with globe-trotting beats, Bollywood-xeroxed samples and claustrophobic synths, the only thing about the mixtape that superseded the explosive innovation of its sound was the clear-headed, cutting nature of her lyrics.

MIA forever sounds like a playground double-dutch session in the middle of the Matrix, and the album’s content mirrored her main narratives -- the sometimes-unlawful transparency of an information society, the subjectivity of security cameras, the shameless profiteering of corporate war culture, global racism and oppression toward immigrants (often of color), the idea that we’re all being monitored at all times.

“Overdrive” puts a cutting anti-war cheer over a video game bass line; “Listen Up” charmingly defends her personal-is-political politics from detractors. On an ominous dubstep beat, “Generation N-E-Y” expresses an apocalypse generation’s dark defiance of corporate control, her chorus declaiming “You can have money but you can’t have me... Generation N-E-Y, we’re already dead.” On the tape’s intro, she’s programmed the generic MAC computer ladyrobot voice to say We choose the right format, we leak the information to the public, and we defend ourselves against inevitable legal and political attack.

She’s referring to Julian Assange, but she was also being self-referential. The mixtape’s WikiLeaks references were foreshadowed by MIA’s Twitter leading up to its release. For weeks, she’d been tweeting in defense of Assange and Bradley Manning, and the CableGate fall-out fit neatly into her viewpoints. More importantly, she finally backed up her seemingly out-of-nowhere comments about the Google-CIA connection, tweeting on December 7, “heres the CIA/GOOGLE shit that GOT ME IN SOOOOOO MUCH FUCKING TROUBLE IN 2010! finally found the site http://www.google-watch.org/inqtel.html.” The site details how, in 2003, a private leg of the CIA teamed up with the company developing the map technology that would eventually become Google Earth. That company was the Keyhole Corporation; Google Inc. acquired it in 2004.

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