About a month ago, I was driving to my favorite hiking trail, and I heard the first few bars of “Straight to Hell” by The Clash come on the radio. I was happy to hear a familiar song, instead of the mopey emo and rap-rock this station often plays. Until I heard a finger-snapping figure that isn’t in the original recording, after I heard M.I.A.’s distinctive sing-song flow, I thought, “That’s cute. She’s sampled The Clash.”

Apparently I didn’t learn my lesson because “Paper Planes” has fooled me a few times since. Being teased by M.I.A. and the program director had colored my attitude toward the song. I’m not crazy about artists who use really obvious samples like this one – I mean, the sample is almost the whole song – but great songs – like A Tribe Called Quest’s “Can I Kick it?” – have come out of obvious samples. I’ve since come around, if only because the finger-snapping figure makes it that darn catchy, and it is nice to hear something familar, non-white, and non-rock on a mainstream rock station.

The use of the Clash sample leads me to return to a few thoughts I had about M.I.A. since I first heard her work a few years ago. I wonder what relationship she has to Sri Lankan pop music made for a domestic audience. OK, it’s pretty clear that her music is more for audiences in London and Berlin than Colombo, but is there really anything Sri Lankan in her records? Would audiences there recognize it as something from their nation? It’s interesting that the video for “Paper Planes” is set in Brooklyn, considering INS refused her entry to the US for her 2005 SXSW appearance; her father is a leader of the Tamil Tigers resistance movement, which Homeland Security apparently considers a terrorist organization. Although her biography as a political refugee is a big part of her artistic persona and her lyrics make passing references to global political figures and cultural diaspora, I also wonder how genuinely political her work really is. Is it a call to consciousness or an instance of boutique multiculturalism, cloaking consumption in the guise of the other?