Album Review: OST by Slumdog Millionaire

For a movie that’s been called “the film world’s first globalized masterpiece,” with its gritty portrayal of third-world impoverishment crashing into Western-style modernization and its visceral images of humanity-choked streets, glitzy game show sets, towering mountains of trash butting up against tony condo developments, and self-made men flashing rupees and dollars in brothels and from the back of Mercedes Benzes, Slumdog Millionaire’s music is much more than a soundtrack to a movie; it’s the sound of a city swiftly globalizing. Bollywood meets hip-hop and dirty house meets Bhangra in the frenetic urban scramble that is Mumbai and the whole mix is chewed up and spit out as the everyday cacophony of modernization. The composer who conjured up this feverish fusion of East and West, traditional and modern, is A.

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The Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack is perhaps the most appropriate way for M.I.A. to wrap up her triumphant 2008. Both the film, which tells the tale of a mostly illiterate 18-year-old from the slums of Bombay who wins the jackpot on India’s version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and M.I.A., rode critical hype to unlikely mainstream success. Thanks to M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” popping up in the trailer for a decidedly different movie (Pineapple Express), the song and her album spent lengthy portions of 2008 on the charts, a prospect that seemed incredibly unlikely in 2007.

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If you loved M.I.A.'s Paper Planes collabo with reigning Bollywood soundtrack king A.R. Rahman that was featured in Danny Boyle's left-field hit movie Slumdog Millionaire and were hoping there might be more of the same on the companion soundtrack, you're out of luck. Apart from the crazy-catchy Paper Planes and the dope downtempo DFA remix, there's only one other tune featuring M.I.A., and O...

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