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Pop music has a way of forgiving artists on a hot streak. You can say, do, or get accused of horrible things, but most of time, if you're delivering the goods, the public will remain on your side. This is why R. Kelly is like Teflon, and why outrage regarding Michael Jackson's scandals and peculiarities only truly hobbled him when the quality of his music began to slide in the early 1990s. Madonna, too, has proven herself capable of multiple comebacks following creative missteps and P.R. disasters. Right or wrong, the social contract is simple: If you bring the hits, we'll put up with your shit.

Through it all—the spats with journalists, the pot shots taken at other artists, the bandied-about allegations of truffle fry ordering—there’s a reason why we continued to pay attention to M.I.A. It wasn’t just because we love celebrities who harness the media’s insatiable appetite for news to their own ends (though, admittedly, that may have had something to do with it). Rather, it was because M.I.A. has consistently shown an ability to back up her boasts with groundbreaking records. Her first two albums, 2005’s Arular and 2007’s Kala offered an exhilarating vision of what pop music might look like in a world without borders, inviting us to witness what happens when western aesthetics go global and eventually come home to roost. In just five short years, M.I.A. has managed to make a name for herself as one of pop music’s most sonically adventurous heralds, capable of penning hits while keeping her eyes planted firmly on the horizon.

No matter what industry shit-stirrers say, self-loving supplement writers write or international governments allege about Maya Arulpragasam, there's one thing that, thankfully, they just can't do: shut her up. Like anybody advised (rather than forced) to quieten down a bit, Maya, with her third record /\/\ /\ Y /\, is making one hell of a brutal racket. And while it doesn't really need saying, there's something joyously brilliant about that. If every action has an equal and opposite reaction then the quite sizeable polito-pop agitprop impact that M.I.A. has made in the short time she has been around is clearly starting to catch up on the London-born Sri Lankan.

Amid the furore surrounding almost everything Mathangi ‘Maya’ Arulpragasam has done or said these last few months – whether it’s launching a one-woman tirade against a journalist who misquoted her in the New York Times, claiming the Government is inextricably linked with websites like Google and Facebook, or simply unleashing that video – it has become easy to overlook her achievements as an artist. It’s true that in many ways, she doesn’t help herself: from the beginning, her music has been that dressed up in the kind of iconography and blunt radicalism that it is nigh on impossible to separate the two, while her discernible lack of a filter has landed her in some awkward situations, many of her own making.