Bad Girls

the complete version of "Bad Girls" premiered today; here's Molly Lambert's write-up of the Vicki Leekx version of this song when we made it Best New Track a year ago. Like Bruce Springsteen's The Promise, which came out this year and revealed the possibility of an entirely different version of Darkness on the Edge of Town that almost came to pass, M.I.A.'s NYE-released mixtape, Vicki Leekx, is a gateway to an alternate-universe /\/\/\Y/\. On a beat from Timbaland protégé Danja, M.I.A. reminds us what she does so well, building hooks out of words strung together for maximum phonaesthetic pleasure over a twisty synth bazaar, syncopated drums, and an SOS signal. It's the same thing Gucci Mane is great at, and the reason people are still playing Wiz Khalifa's "Black and Yellow": memorable semi-nonsensical phrases repeated until they become absurdly and transcendently powerful. If /\/\/\Y/\ represented M.I.A. at her noisiest, rawest, most interesting, experimental, and hard-to-market, "Bad Girls" shows it was a very conscious choice and that her pop instincts and talents remain as sharp as ever.