Let’s hear it for rap’s barbarians. It’s always the off-the-map weirdos —from N.W.A to Missy Elliott to Lil Jon — who defy rap’s provincialism and punk, funk and crunk up the landscape. Slender, beautiful and so fashionable she makes Madonna seem like Diana DeGarmo, Maya Arulpragasam, 28, doesn’t look like a barbarian, but she makes music like one.

The Sri Lankan–born, London-bred MC calls her debut a “sketchbook of marginal sounds,” but “breathless house party with every one of the world’s hippest dance cultures” is closer to it. Interwoven here are the bee-in-a-vocoder synths and bootful-of-gravel drums of British grime; the gulping tablas of Indian bhangra; the cramped rhythms of Jamaican dancehall; and the 808 bass fetish of Brazilian baile funk. M.I.A. raps over these twitters and eruptions in cool, deadened tones, occasionally vaulting up into hooky chirps.

The single is “Galang,” a stomp of decaying drums, petty crime drama and an adhesive gibberish refrain. With obvious differences (she raps, not sings), she’s oddly reminiscent of Aaliyah, who glided and shadowboxed over treacherous Timbaland terrain.

With her immigrant childhood — a Tamil, the besieged minority in Sri Lanka’s civil war, she fled at age 10 — it makes sense that M.I.A. champions the marginalized. From a “pull up the poor” chant to PLO shout-outs to tales of paranoid drug dealers, the dance floor is her soapbox.

But it doesn’t feel like soapboxing; it feels like life, and that’s her biggest contribution to hip-hop. She isn’t joylessly polemical, doesn’t devote one token track to politics before returning to the club. She protests the whole party through, evoking parts of the world where anger, revolution and enjoying yourself regardless are the realities of lives spent dodging bullets and scrambling for food — whether it’s Compton or Colombo.

DOWNLOAD: “Pull Up the People,” “Galang,” “Bucky Done Gun”