"Arular" was her father's album, "Kala" her mother's album, and "Maya" is Maya Arulpragasm--a.k.a. M.I.A.--'s "me" album. Understanding this makes its self-interest easier to forgive. There are individuals, verbal scythes in mind, ready to accept "Maya"'s unruliness and irregularity as a wide opening to chop down Maya the Artist, which they will do and which they've already begun doing, months early in the case of Lynn Hirschberg's trashy journalism. Those people are idiots. Even with its flaws, … more