A few more things I noticed about the M.I.A. mixtape during headphone sessions:

- The Prince mashup. Don't know how I missed this before, but there's totally the hook from "When Doves Cry" under "Baile Funk Two." It's quiet, so it's not really as mashuppy as the other tracks, but it's a lovely little touch, and is especially effective in smoothing the transition to the "Sweet Dreams" hook that "China Girl (Diplo Mix)" centers around--when it slides right from the Prince-synths into the Eurhythmics-synths, it's perfect. Oh, and the lyics to "China Girl" are fantastic too.

- The vocal line in "Amazon." It's lovely, but specifially the "chorus" ("Hello/this is MIA/could you please/come get me") where she rises up on the last syllable of "hello" and "please." Because this rises along with the annoying hook, it defuses its annoyingness by masking the tone (plus rides the beat a lot better than the original), but by not being repeated too much doesn't become annoying itself.

- The guitar noise before the 2nd chorus in "Sunshowers." I referred to this below, but after a close listening, I'm pretty sure it's the riff from "Push It" run through a distortion box. And it only appears once! Awesome. It could be from a different song, so correct me if I'm wrong, but it's definitely a sample there at 1:20.

posted by Mike B. at 11:04 AM 0 comments