I wouldn’t necessarily say M.I.A. is a great performer, but her show is perfectly executed if you take it more as an overall aesthetic experience. M.I.A. gets a lot of … liberal help from backing tracks. I think she was singing or rapping a lot of the time, but it wasn’t always so easy to tell due to the mix. For all intents and purposes, it’s more like she’s a functioning icon on that stage, more of a ringleader at the center of her musical/visual project than a touring musician. Before she comes onstage, the percussive sound of helicopter blades echoes in and out accompanied by oscillating white lights lining the as yet unlit Matangi backdrop ; it comes across as representing the harsh political realities of her life and her art rattling around the spiritual core of her new music from Matangi. Then she appears, in glittering outfits of gold and silver, a mic in one hand and a fan in the other. As her DJ cues up “Bring the Noize,” the sound is physically overpowering, the bass and drums vibrating up through your feet and reverberating through your skull and throat. The pulse feels militant in one way — it forces you to let it reorient you — but as one groove bleeds into the next it’s also trance-inducing.

Of course, it’s also party music. The popularity of “Paper Planes” spanned the time from when I was finishing high school to when I was starting college, which means I’m of the age where for a time Kala was inescapable any time I was around people drinking or dancing in any situation whatsoever. Much of the crowd comes from a similar experience, giddily throwing beach balls around throughout a set that dutifully touched on “Galang” and “Bad Girls.” It’s still a little bizarre to see a field of white Americans miming gun hands to the chorus of “Paper Planes,” but it’s just one in a whole network of contradictions that M.I.A. herself exploits. Seeing M.I.A. is an odd experience, one where you can get lost in thought and confronted by as many ideas as rhythms. But isn’t one you can look away from, really, and it might leave you thinking longer than you anticipated.