After M.I.A.‘s Twitter tirade against New York Times writer Lynn Hirschberg over the paper’s profile of the often subsersive singer-songwriter, which had said scribe subsequently firing back in what quickly became a battle of she said/she said, I made a point to tune out any news regarding the reliably agitative artist. I’d certainly enjoyed M.I.A.’s genre-hopping music in the past, but this time I decided I much preferred my pop to be (mostly) drama-free.

The album that M.I.A. was ostensibly promoting, / \ / \ / \ Y / \, came out in July, but I didn’t seek it out. Somehow I’d also missed the mid-May debut of her single “XXXO” too, though it actually predated my self-imposed M.I.A. media blackout. But it wasn’t until this month that a video for “XXXO” premiered, and enough time had passed that I cared to pay attention.

The melody is nearly nursery-rhyme simple, though the song’s message is bold: “You want me be somebody who I’m really not.” Is M.I.A. addressing the record industry, the public, a former love, or all of the above? No matter; “XXXO” is hypnotically hooky enough to get down to whatever the impetus might have been.

The music video’s graphic treatment is another matter altogether. The clip looks like a elementary-school scrapbooking project (roses, swans, unicorns, and, well, swords — this is M.I.A., after all) that somehow got tangled up in the Interweb. And it ends with a very MySpace message that’s too soon to be truly ironic. Still, I couldn’t turn my eyes away:

Purchase M.I.A. – “XXXO” via iTunes, Amazon MP3.