Live Review: M.I.A.

Live Review: M.I.A.

Rebel rapper is raw and ready to party: Aidin Vaziri | The walls of Amoeba Music on Haight Street may be plastered with the faces of dead souls like Johnny Cash, Kurt Cobain and Sid Vicious, but on Saturday, the store's small corner stage was all about the face of the future. And at the moment that belongs to a Maya Arulpragasam, a.k.a. M.I.A., a 28- year-old rapper whose family narrowly escaped civil war in Sri Lanka only so she could grow up in one of south London's racially fractured housing projects. With a father who was a member of the notorious Tamil Tiger rebels and a debut album, "Arular," that prominently features images of rifles and bombs on the sleeve, M.I.A.'s street credibility is about eight notches above 50 Cent's. But it's her music -- a crude collision of primitive keyboards, cracked dancehall rhythms and deep slang -- that really makes her hardcore. "I'm bongo with my lingo/ Beat it like a wing you/ Can't stereotype my thing yo," she sings in "Sunshowers" before delivering the sober kicker: "Like PLO/ We don't surrender." The music was so bare, the melodies so minimal, M.I.A.'s voice so blatantly limited, it was hard to believe the 40-minute set actually came together as well as it did. Then again, those are the very elements all those tattered faces on the wall used to change the world. She was in good company.