Mathangi Arulpragasm—known to her friends as Maya—was going to give birth in a bathtub. The 34-year-old mother-to-be was born in Sri Lanka, you see, and wears the Third World badge proudly. She rejects America’s compromising diplomacy and capitalist-fueled technology—even that used for health benefit. She not only wanted to endure the same conditions forced upon the impoverished masses, but she wanted to embrace the organic complexities that technology denies us. And she seemed confrontational enough to do it, preaching a fire-with-fire approach to problem solving throughout her first two albums.

But on her baby’s due date, Arulpragasm found herself in a much different environment than the one she swore by. Surrounded by four of music’s biggest aristocrats and donning a Henry Holland polka-dot dress, M.I.A.—as her fans know her—performed “Swagga Like Us” to a nationally televised audience.

Brushing elbows with T.I., Kanye West, Li’l Wayne and Jay-Z, M.I.A. didn’t seem so hostile. She was a pop starlet, no more or less accessible than, say, Rihanna. And that’s what M.I.A. has become. She’s no longer the militant provocateur she was on her early albums, but another cog in the wheel of western pop music. And that’s what we’re dealing with on her feverishly anticipated follow-up, /\/\/\Y/\. The persona she projects as M.I.A. and the life she lives as Arulpragasm are no longer one in the same, and that unresolved dichotomy tests our patience as listeners and ultimately stifles much of /\/\/\Y/\’s effect.

M.I.A. wastes no time making enemies. Album opener “The Message” calls out Google and the Internet as a whole as government pawns—inevitable contaminants tied to our anatomy. But without the Internet, how many of us would have heard of M.I.A. in the first place? And that’s where /\/\/\Y/\ loses touch—M.I.A. is picking fights for no good reason, and the longer she wages a war against this nameless, faceless enemy, the harder it is to tell the difference between the two sides.

It would be easy to think she made the same mistake a few times herself. After collaborating with Diplo for the majority of her most successful tracks, the two’s falling out as a couple put a hold on their creative output as well. And while Diplo continues to make infectious ethnic beats with The Very Best, M.I.A.’s new cohort, Rusko, trips over himself repeatedly. “XXXO” sounds like Lou Pearlman-run digitalized tribalism, and the squeaks and bloops on “Space” sound more like the Misadventures of ShamWow than any atmospheric odyssey. Although “Meds and Feds” does considerably improve the linear hook on N.E.E.T. label mates Sleigh Bells’ recent debut, it does nothing innovative enough to separate it from any of the other remixes flooding the Internet by the day. Even “Tell Me Why,” the most immediately arresting hook on the album, is too thin, too redundant to sustain repeated exposure.

But “Tell Me Why” is important because it showcases her voice as delicate and vulnerable, even while the production falls over behind it. She doesn’t punch through beats; she airs out her vocals and lets the beat quake beneath her. The truth is, as abrasive as M.I.A. is, she is at her best as an artist when she allows herself to be weightless, navigating her songs through aerial projection instead of terrestrial bulldozing.

M.I.A. might be a ferocious pop monster who denounces imperialism and writes hit songs as easily as she brushes her teeth, but Maya Arulpragasm is a mother-in-training who lives in a mansion in Los Angeles; and that’s the person this album is named after. So she had her baby in a hospital while receiving all the attentive care a millionaire can afford; is that really such a crime? Pop music doesn’t need to be hard-hitting or aggressive, it just needs to have enough sustenance not to crumble under scrutiny. We listeners might be tapped into the Internet, but we’re doing so with headphones, not hammers. And the sooner Maya Arulpragasm figures that out, the sooner we’ll have something that’s less painful to listen through.