Since her release of Kala and the resulting craze for shooting guns and taking people’s money, Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam — better known as M.I.A. — has been busy building her rebellious image by making her pop raison d’etre less and less clear.

She’s continued to present herself as a Tamil Tiger apologist, which has made her no friends in the State Department — from which she tried and failed to obtain an artist’s visa in 2007. We also saw her perform nine months pregnant at the 2009 Grammys, before the creator of hits like “Paper Planes” and “Bucky Done Gun” shifted gears; her pledge to give birth to her child, Ikhyd, in a bathtub to better understand women in the concentration camps of Sri Lanka was inexplicably cast aside as M.I.A. opted for the more comfortable setting of the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles (Nymag.com). Furthermore, she is still carrying on a french fry-induced beef via Twitter with New York Times writer Lynn Hirschberg, passive-aggressively tweeting the writer’s personal phone number for all the world to see (although, Hirschberg has coolly replied to reporters, she isn’t changing numbers).

So considering all the “Whaddaya got?” outbursts against whatever issue M.I.A. should find disagreeable at any given point in time, suffice it to say that she’s got plenty more agitprop snarkery to go around, well-founded or not. Enter Maya (/\/\ /\ Y /\), M.I.A.’s third studio release and her latest batch of lyrical ambiguity laid over the sonic backdrop of hip-hop, reggae dancehall, electro-punk and just about any other worldly sub-genre that she can weave in.

Maya warms up with a minute-long intro bemoaning the so-called growing reach of the feds on the web (“the handbone’s connected to the Internet connected to the Google connected to the government”) before mercifully switching lanes to the decidedly less political “Steppin Up.” “Steppin Up” and the following “XXXO” prove that M.I.A. hasn’t lost her touch on the mixing board; she boasts her club swag while the background effects suggest that she’s recording in some sort of electronic pastiche of a lumber mill, IndyCar pit stop and bomb-testing range.

Bangers like these are where M.I.A. is most effective, and the twelve-track Maya is dotted with them. But M.I.A. saves plenty of room for her murky agenda, as the relatively empty “Meds and Feds” and “Tell Me Why” remind the listener that M.I.A. hasn’t quite met the burden of proof that accompanies a stinking rich self-proclaimed freedom fighter. It’s a tall order to expect the world to jump on board with Tamil Tiger sympathies just because you want them to, and the see-saw of agenda promotion vis-a-vis pop innovation is regrettably sunk on the former.

But questionable politics don’t preclude artistic merit — consider the importance of Public Enemy or the Sex Pistols — and M.I.A.’s two foci of musical incorporation and political upheaval fit nicely on the Internet-leaked “Born Free,” if nowhere else. After a drumroll, “Born Free” quickly gets up to methamphetaminic speed and M.I.A. reels off vagary after vagary, a heavy guitar loop acting as a tonal reinforcement. It’s the closest she gets to another “Paper Planes” on the entire album, and proof that she can still make shaky agitprop work if the music backs it up.

But the shaky agitprop is still shaky, and often serves more as a blunder than a boon. The time and effort that it must take for the upkeep of such a provocative and obtrusive public image clearly leaves M.I.A. without sufficient means for a well-rounded music career. Unfortunately, the more we learn about M.I.A. — her combative veneer, her beyond-comfortable lifestyle, her panglossian faith in her own correctness, etc. — the more she needs to shift away from what got her the attention in the first place. The songs she writes are successful in spite of her agenda, not because of it.