The crowd at the M.I.A. show at the Knitting Factory on Saturday night was so charged with subliminal fashion reference that it almost gave off an electrostatic crackle. Asian girls with spikey haircuts and off-the-shoulder goddess shirts. Stylized military jackets with patches. Camo trucker caps. Hoodie sweatshirts under camel-hair jackets. Dreads in reggae bonnets. Faces lit from below by the latest model Nokia cell phones. You could tell the music critics at a glance: They were the oldest and worst dressed people in the room.

This is music’s crucible, its primordial soup. The unformed mass caught before it branches off into cliques of style and genre and radio station format. Or perhaps it’s the postmodern realm beyond those things. This is the place from which fashionable neologisms issue. Words that function like a secret knock or handshake – eski-beat, blip-hop, baile funk, bhangra, reggaeton, crunk – identify the bearer as a member of the in-crowd, until they pass into popular usage and signify just the opposite, and are replaced by a fresh batch of mongrelogisms.

A merchandise table selling hard-to-find mixtapes (“Rare!”) posted a sign that read: “F- Ebay.” Even the people who operate off the map and under the radar are now being exploited, bootlegged, and overexposed. The parasites have parasites.

The opening act was a DJ called Diplo, one half of a duo from Philadelphia called Hollertronix, and also the man responsible for the mixtape “Piracy Funds Terrorism Volume I,” which put half-a-dozen unreleased songs by M.I.A. in circulation in November. He played a set that was at once familiar and unrecognizable: Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z, Ludacris, and J-Kwon vocals were all paired with depth-charge beats and bricolage world-music samples that would turn an ethnomusicologist’s brain into porridge. It’s music’s new high/low dynamic: pop/obscure.

At the center of this vortex is Maya Arulpragasam, better known as M.I.A. She is the newest of a new kind of art star, one that exists outside the triumvirate of Clear Channel, MTV, and the Billboard Charts, and has only a glancing relationship with the mainstream, if any relationship at all. Like DJ Shadow, U.N.K.L.E., FischerSpooner, Fanny-Pack, the Streets, and Dizzee Rascal before her, she didn’t bubble up from the streets, but was handed down by a network of global tastemakers and MP3 bloggers.

Her debut album, “Arular,” won’t be out until February 22, but the Knitting Factory show had sold out weeks before. The Fader magazine proclaimed M.I.A. “Music’s Now Thing!” on the evidence of a single song, and placed her on its cover. That’s print media’s only hope of staying in sight of the curve.

As the wait for the main event dragged out to almost two hours, the temperature in the tiny performance space rose steadily. Four black girls – two slim, two fat – danced on stage, executing provocative dancehall moves. The feeling in the room wasn’t the ho-hum anticipation of seeing a hot new band, but something rarer: the feeling of experiencing the “now thing” in the now, as it happens.

Just after midnight, M.I.A. finally dance-stepped across the stage in a loose-fitted blue pant-and-blouse ensemble with gold sequined lightning bolts running all across that contrast with her coco skin. It made her look a little like a Bollywood star. She had a gold assault-rifle necklace hanging at her throat. She performed beneath a riot of projected imagery, her own. Her work has a graffiti stencil aesthetic that is all the rage. The iconography tends toward the militant: stencil bombs, stencil tanks, stencil soldiers, stencil protesters, but also stencil tigers and birds.

M.I.A. is a child of culture clash, as well as its ambassador. She was born in London to Sri Lankan parents, but soon moved to her family’s homeland. Her childhood was disrupted by a violent civil war most of her admirers know nothing about, but find glamorous and exotic just the same. Her father was a well-known figure in the Tamil independence movement in Sri Lanka. As the conflict grew increasingly violent, her mother took M.I.A. and her siblings to India and then London, where they lived as refugees.

The sounds and influences on “Arular” are no easier to disentangle than the mix of cultures that produced them. It’s just as she intends. “From the Congo/to Colombo/don’t stereotype my thing yo,” she raps in a song called “Sunshowers.” The lyrics mash Sri Lankan, cockney, and American slang. The songs are something like hip hop, but also dancey and chanty. There are groaning bass notes, skittering beats, and a random sampling of sounds from a globalized world: steel drums, vintage Nintendo video-game sounds, the tinkle of traditional South American instruments, samples from the disco group Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, and Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It.”

The songs are flecked with political references to George Bush and the PLO, but it’s hard to know just what role politics are supposed to play. They give the project an air of seriousness, but you aren’t meant to think seriously about them. A seemingly socially minded song called “Pull Up the People” treats politics as a fashion accessory: “slang tang / that’s the M.I.A. thang / I got the bombs to make you blow / I got the beats to make you bang bang bang,” she raps. On “Amazon,” a song in which she’s supposedly kidnapped in Brazil, she takes time to observe “palm trees in the wet smell amazing.”

The paper-thin handclaps that open “Gulang,” the irrepressible first single to which M.I.A. owes her meteoric rise, brought cheers of recognition and enthusiastic arm waving from the Knitting Factory. The song is a bit of double-dutch chant built over heavy splintering downbeats and R2D2 bleeps. “Blaze to blaze, galang a lang alanga/purple haze, galang a lang a langlang,” M.I.A. rapped with joyful abandon.

She’s inventing her own nonsense dialect: “London calling / speak the slang now/boys say whan gwan / girls say what what” she demands. It’s the language of the future, stripped of meaning and loaded with it, and the crowd already knows it well enough to sing along.