On my way in to work this morning, I flipped away from NPR when they started repeating stories and scanned the dial until something caught my ear. A snippet from “Straight to Hell,” by the Clash, was looped behind another singer, and the sampling song immediately interested me for a variety of reasons. It turned out to be Paper Planes, a controversial song by MIA, which was released in February 2008.

The song refers to other Clash songs as well, notably in the children’s chorus heard occasionally in the tune (a nod to the Clash covering itself on Sandinista with the kids’ version of Career Opportunities). The song became more and more complex to hear when I realized that the key rythym points in the chorus were sampled and processed gunshots, with the sound of a pinging shell ejection acting as a hi hat. The tune hooked me solid and I turned it up as loud as I could.

The morning DJ at KEXP, “John-in-the-Morning,” is a respected indie programmer who knows his stuff and how to put a set together, and while his musical programming only occasionally works to hold my attention, when he chooses to appeal to my demographic, he excels. In this instance, he knocked it out of the park by providing a seamless, beatmatched transition directly from the end of Paper Planes straight into Straight to Hell, which was exactly what I wanted to hear. I actually exclaimed out loud, “No way!”

Singing in English in quotations as drove my car to the drummer man’s beat, I savored the thematic interplay of the songs. I joined in that chorus of the Amerasian blues. Two songs later Kanye came on and bored me to catatonia. As I drifted off to sleep in the freeway merge lane a passing semi awakened me, and I turned the radio off.