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mathangigram-blog · 7 years

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Interview (2005): M.I.A.'s been on the move. The sounds she's encountered have become her own.

It's hard to say which is more interesting: M.I.A.'s background or her music. Beginning as a youth on the run from authorities, continuing as a teen refugee in London and now as an artist with what is likely to be one of the most written-about albums of 2005, the 27-year-old daughter of a Sri Lankan rebel has lived a tragic yet extraordinary life. Already, M.I.A.'s electro-Bollywood-hip-hop has generated gargantuan interest among pop tastemakers, all of it based on a single song. "Galang," named one of last year's 10 best singles in Rolling Stone's critics' poll, is an intensely rhythmic culture clash that draws heavily on American gangsta rap and Hindi film, Jamaican dancehall, Europop and multiculti gibberish. The song exploded in the U.K. a little more than a year ago. It began washing up on American dance floors last summer and is now bubbling up to radio. M.I.A.'s debut album, "Arular," out next month on XL Recordings, is a more in-depth exploration of the singer's refugee eclecticism. From start to finish, it is an unstoppable riot of sound, weaving London street slang with Sri Lankan nursery rhymes, world politics and personal experience. Vacillating between attitude and innocence, her songs are tough- talking raps, but they're softened by a Hindi vocal style that ends lines of lyrics with curlicue upswings. M.I.A.'s recent sold-out performance at the Knitting Factory Hollywood was equally iconoclastic. Waving her hands in the air and self-consciously pacing the stage before a DJ, swirling lights and background videos, she was half hip-hop bravado and half "how did I get here?" "It kind of shocked me that there were so many people that knew the songs," M.I.A. says the next day. "My album's not out." Singing along is no easy feat, laden as the songs are with Cockney slang. Perhaps some in the audience were working off the lyric sheet one enterprising fan was selling at the club. Seeking out a sliver of sunlight in the dark Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel dining room, M.I.A. seems oblivious to the buzz surrounding her and her music. Feminine and model beautiful but entirely down to earth, it's clear she hasn't bought into her impending fame and is taking it all in stride. Stardom, after all, is just the next stop in a life that has, quite literally, been all over the map. Few Western pop singers have lived as chaotically as M.I.A. and who would have wanted to? Her formative years were a steady progression from bad to worse, going from poverty to persecution to war and alienation before she was able to turn it around. A father's influence Born in London, Maya Arulpragasam, as she was then known, moved to Sri Lanka with her family when she was 6 months old. It was 1978, and tensions between the country's two ethnic groups were growing. M.I.A. and her family were among the minority Tamil population in a country dominated by Sinhalese; her father was part of a militant group seeking independence. Rebel activities kept her father separated from the family and her family on the run for the next decade. When civil war broke out, they relocated to India, living for a year and a half "in a room surrounded by five miles of empty land," she says. "When it rained, it flooded. You'd have to basically swim through with snakes going past. My father's idea of safety was sticking us in the middle of nowhere where the army couldn't get us but without water, food, medication and money." With her family close to starvation and her sister sick from typhoid, an uncle helped move M.I.A.'s family back to Sri Lanka. In their native country, they at least had a support system, even if the war was in full swing. The area where they lived was regularly bombed, including the convent where M.I.A. went to school. Several failed attempts to flee the country ended with M.I.A. and her family moving to India, then London. Her father stayed behind. It's this core experience that drives much of the lyrical content in "Arular," which is her father's name. "For years when I moved to England, I was so embarrassed about being Sri Lankan and never talked about it," says M.I.A., an acronym for "missing in action." "The reason I started talking about my life is because I'd gone out thinking I was British for so long, I felt I owed it to inform myself on what was happening to the people I left behind. On a personal level, I feel guilty that I got away and so many kids didn't." M.I.A. returned to Sri Lanka in 2001. She was hoping to make "a random film about Tamil youth" and, in the process, sort out her feelings over the ongoing conflict in her parents' country. She returned to London more confused than ever. Much of the Tamil population today is starving and restricted to refugee camps, she says. The rebel group her father helped form is now considered a terrorist organization. "In the '70s, these people set out with ideas to be revolutionaries and fight for independence and struggle for freedom. All these real romantic notions," she explains. "Those terms don't exist anymore. Who would you call a terrorist? Who would you call a revolutionary today? I don't know." It's a timely question, and you can hear her trying to sort out the answer throughout the record in songs exploding with bombs, where glitchy electronics mimic machine-gun fire. By the end of the album, she turns the question to listeners: "You can be a follower, but who's your leader?" It's clear she's uncomfortable with those who blindly follow. Her entire life has been a struggle against the prevailing culture, and her personality and musical taste have formed accordingly. M.I.A. was 10 when her family settled in a housing project in London. Until then, her only contact with music was Bollywood films, television theme songs and bootleg tapes of Michael Jackson and Boney M. In England, she had a radio and a lot of cultural catching up to do. Madonna and Bananarama were her guides. Then her radio was stolen. Her ear turned to the hip-hop booming next door. "I looked through the window, and it was a 19-year-old kid and his mates would roll up in a car. It just seemed so cool, like a secret club," she says. In 1988, rap still held a sort of outsider appeal that immediately connected with the young South Asian transplant. M.I.A. didn't understand English, but she connected with the rhythm and look of Public Enemy, N.W.A and other artists she would later appreciate for their politics. M.I.A. never intended to be a rapper, or even a musician. She wanted to be an artist. As a student at St. Martin's Art School in London, she began exploring film. But when an art gallery asked her to contribute work to a show, she branched out to painting, channeling her Sri Lankan experience into candy-colored stencils of tigers, palm trees, hand grenades and warplanes. "I always grew up on the border of everything and not quite being let in," she says. "I was concerned about what I wanted to say but didn't really care how it came out." It was her paintings that brought M.I.A. into contact with Justine Frischmann, former leader of the rock band Elastica, who commissioned her to create the cover art for its 2000 album, "Menace," and a video for the single "Mad Dog God Dam." Frischmann also asked M.I.A. to accompany the group on its U.S. tour, videotaping their shows. Electro pioneer Peaches was touring with the band and encouraged M.I.A. to begin experimenting with the primitive sequencing machine that had become her stock in trade � a Roland MC-505. She predicted M.I.A. would be singing along to the beats she was building one year later, but M.I.A. resisted. Tone deaf and lacking the self-confidence to front her own band, she recruited four singers for the job. None of them worked out. "All of them were doing R&B. All of them wanted to be like Beyonc�," she says. "I thought that I did what I did because I couldn't sing � that when other people did it, they were going to do it better, but my stuff had a certain thing to it. They couldn't even understand what I was doing." Read more: http://mia.boards.net/thread/54/interviews-2005#ixzz4eBx6Zk2l

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Interview (2005): Reggae Riddims and the Sound of London Grit (What Music Do I Listen To?)

By M.I.A.

IN 1986, 10-year-old Maya Arulpragasam and her family fled the civil

war in Sri Lanka and settled in England. She learned English about

the time she discovered another language: hip-hop, the perfect

vernacular for describing life as a refugee in a squalid housing

estate in South London. Now 28, she performs as M.I.A., for “Missing

in Acton,” a nod both to her London borough, Acton, and to the

guerrilla spirit of her lyrics. After releasing two singles, the

dancehall-inflected “Galang” and “Sunshowers,” last year, XL Records

will release M.I.A.’s much-anticipated first album, “Arular,” in

February. This week, she will play benefit shows at the Knitting

Factory’s Los Angeles (Feb. 3) and New York (Feb. 5) locations to

raise money for tsunami relief in Sri Lanka. Joel Topcik recently

spoke to Ms. Arulpragasam about what she’s listening to right now

and why.

‘Bad Gal Riddim’

“Dancehall producers come up with a new 'riddim,’ or beat track,

every week or so, and send it to different artists. Everybody does

their own version of the new beat, and it becomes a

compilation. 'Bad Gal Riddim’ (Madhouse Records) is the newest to

come out. It has a little bounce to it. 'Right There,’ by Spice and

Toi, is the most fun song I’ve heard all week. When dancehall got

big a couple years back, a lot of girls got pushed out. Now they’re

getting back into it. I’m not even sure it’s out yet - I heard it on

pirate radio, which is where I get most of my music. The pirate

D.J.’s are always six months ahead of everyone else.”

Ivy Queen

“I’m a big fan of Ivy Queen. She’s probably the biggest reggaeton

star. Reggaeton is the sound coming out of Puerto Rico that’s really

huge in America now. Dancehall is much more stripped down, but

reggaeton has a Caribbean sound - steel drums and different tempos.

Ivy Queen and the dancehall rapper Sasha did a Spanish reggaeton

remix of 'Dat Sexy Body’ (VP Records) that represents a kind of

unity between dancehall and reggaeton.”

Baile Funk

“This is where my mind has been recently. 'Baile funk’ ('funk ball’)

is basically Brazilian kids in the favelas (ghettos) going crazy,

screaming the dirtiest lyrics over Clash songs and electronic music

that sounds like Kraftwerk. They take Miami bass beats, really basic

drum loops, heavy bass - I can only describe it as 'booty music’ -

and produce something so fierce and angry that reflects the absolute

chaos around them. Diplo (half of the Philadelphia D.J.-duo

Hollertronix) put out 'Favela on Blast: Rio Baile Funk '04’

(available at , a compilation of the best ones

he found when he went to Brazil.”

Jim Jones, the Diplomats

“Jim Jones has so much charisma and more attitude than most rappers

put together. 'Crunk Muzik’ (from 'Diplomatic Immunity 2’ on Koch

Records), with Cam'ron and Juelz Santana, is the best song to come

out of the Diplomats crew. Such a powerful beat - and you can’t tell

what the chorus is, it’s like 32 bars long. Rappers are like Rod

Stewart now; they’re like a bunch of Liberaces with their gold rims.

The Diplomats are just a little bit off key from what others are

doing. They seem to be experimenting the most, and they have a real

fight mentality. It’s the guerilla side of hip-hop.”

Lethal Bizzle

“I love Lethal Bizzle’s 'Forward Riddim Remix’ of 'Pow!’

(Relentless). It’s a grime record that reflects the London streets

in the most aggressive way possible. People call grime the new punk -

electronic, minimal beats and mad bass lines. The remix makes

the 'pow!’ lyric from the original into the hook of the song, and it

has so much energy. There are like 20 M.C.’s from around London on

this track. It’s just wicked. I live in a place with Somali

refugees, Polish people, a lot of Arabic people, and this song is

blaring out of every single car. It’s what’s empowering them now.

It’s like when you first hear Public Enemy’s 'Fight the Power.’ It

makes you feel so good when you walk down the street listening to

it.”

Ce'Cile

“Ce'Cile hasn’t had a really big hit yet. But she’s strong and

consistent, and she’s not afraid to experiment. I thought it was

brave for her to work with the producer Jacques Lu Cont on 'Na Na Na

Na,’ from the 'Two Culture Clash’ CD (Wall of Sound). It most

reflects what I like in a sound. It’s minimal - just vocal and beat -

with a synth-y drum loop. There are almost no changes at all - when

the chorus comes in, Lu Cont just brings in an extra snare and

pitches it up and then back down again. It’s brilliant. It came out

after my first single, 'Galang,’ and it was good to know there was

something else out there for the kind of music I want to do. If

something like this could get on mainstream radio, it would be so

great.”

Are you lesbian?’ 'No, I’m making music.’

Here’s a little tip for the kids. If you’re going to be interviewing

Miss M.I.A., be sure to tell your editor you’re going to need at

least a half dozen pages to squeeze in all the good stuff. If your

editor finds this unreasonable, get a blog and just reprint

everything there. That way, everybody wins.

So. Today we talked to the delightful Maya Arulpragasam. The 800

word version of our encounter appears in tomorrow’s National Post.

If you’d rather just read a couple thousand of her words without

ours getting in the way, this post is for you. Laughs have been

edited out. But they were frequent. And wonderful.

This will be far too long. And, for the uninterested, boring.

Apologies.

On handling the hype:

Hopefully, you know, it’s not going to last forever. I must be the

only person who’s like, thank god this is going to end soon… When I

went to Germany I felt that. I went to Puerto Rico to do a show and

then I went to Philly and then New York. And I did that in about two

days. And then I had to fly to Hamburg and then Berlin. And it all

happened in about five days. Then I was like, `I physically can’t

handle it.’ I thought, I’m just going to disintegrate.

On the audience in Germany:

It’s not even like English. [But] Germans get it. And they’re really

into it and stuff. I was thinking, `Do they even know what my lyrics

are?’ But they kinda do. They just feel like it doesn’t even matter.

I get that impression from them. As long as it’s real. When I do

music I want to make sure that there’s [something] there for anyone

and everyone. So that’s fine that they only pick up on that. The

journalists pick up on the lyrics and stuff, but my cousins in

Germany call me up and they go, `You video’s on in Burger King.’ And

I know that whoever’s playing it is not really into the lyrics.

On the controversy with MTV:

I’m thinking still. I have to do it by today or tomorrow. It’s just,

I don’t know, I’m going to wait until they get bored of asking me.

Then I’ll tell them something. They’re going to play the video. And

they said that they’ll let everything slide as long as they have a

statement. Otherwise, they’ll have to cut sentences out of the song.

But I feel like I shouldn’t have to compromise at all. And they

should know that.

On her shoutout to the PLO:

I was thinking, the Wu-Tang Clan said it all the time � I’ve heard

it in Method Man songs. And no one even bats an eyelid. So why is it

more heavy when it comes from me? It’s kinda interesting. Because I

think the image � what I am and the body that I’m in � is totally

different to what Method Man looks like. And it’s probably more

scary coming from him than me. But, it’s amazing innit? Which is

what I want to show � I am the scary thing right now. It’s really

mad. It’s just kinda like, I wouldn’t really say it too much, but I

just kinda want to be there � offer myself to be there as whatever

it is, so people can learn it as it happens.

On her political lyrics:

Really, that’s not what I’m about. The things that I started

speaking up for weren’t necessarily, like, huge political subjects,

which is what it’s turned into it because my lyrics are taken at

such face value. But underneath I use political references or words

to reflect everything � whether you’re poor, whether you’re from the

street, whether you can’t pay the bills, whether you’re just the

underdog all the time. And I think those lyrics can be applied to

any of those things.

What I try to do is that it could appeal on any level. Sunshowers is

obviously about it. But why wouldn’t I write something like that?

You know what I mean? This acts like as an evil dividing the world

into good and evil, makes me fall into the evil � so, excuse me,

I’ve just spent 30 grand on my education, living in England and I’m

paying rent and surviving everyday like everybody else, I don’t need

the extra stigma attached to my bloody head. So of course I’m going

to write about it. It’s like becoming the new gangsta culture. You

know what I mean? We’ve heard rappers go on about it for so long and

they’re not stigmatized anymore � in fact they’re driving around in

Bentley’s. And, you know, my brother living in Wimbledon right now

gets his photo taken around to all the shops by the police,

going, `Do you know what this kid is up to? Because we seem him

everyday and he looks really dodgy.’ And my brother’s just some

random kid, totally exactly the same interests as any other average

23-year-old � into cars and girls and trying to survive and he’s got

a job. But because he looks slightly Muslim � because, you know, he

walks around wanting to make a statement too, I guess � the police

take his photo around the cornershops. And you just think, `That’s

amazing.’ That shit just never would have happened. When it’s

affecting a Sri Lankan family, then you think, `Man, imagine if

you’re an Islamic teenager growing up.’ That must be really intense.

The state of the world cont’d:

As soon as you start segragating people and making them into this

other, then they’ll feel it and then they’ll respond and become it.

Because human beings do pick up stuff like that. The general

atmosphere on the planet right now is this unknown bunch of people

are brewing and making bombs in the basement and it’s all going to

kick off. And we’re sort of creating it with the hysteria. So then

you have to get the other person’s opinions out there to balance

things out so they don’t feel shat on. You know what I mean?

That’s kind of what I was thinking at the time. I really felt like I

needed to know what I wanted to tell my kids � if being good was

striking twice as hard…

I was like, shit, I’m giving up on my life. I dunno what to tell

myself anymore. I’m so confused. So I was like, when I have a kid

I’m going to lay down some laws and teach it some stuff. My mum

brought me up going, `Ah Ghandi, he’s such a non-violent man. You

turn the other cheek, huh. If somebody hits you, you just turn the

other cheek, like Jesus Christ.’ So when people treat you bad, you

just think, that’s cool, that’s fine. That’s their judgment, that’s

their call. And you get on with it. And then now it seems like what

President Bush is teaching us is if somebody steps to you, you just

kill him. Don’t even ask any questions. Just take him out. He’s the

biggest bloody 50 Cent he is.

On where her music fits:

You know, I’ve never been one to… all my life, everything I’ve

been to or whatever I’ve done, it’s always been like that. I just

don’t think it will change for me. The journalists and the critics

are really good, but I’m still not accepted in a lot of genres

musically. And that’s kind of what really, really is the battle.

Getting people that understand it, is one thing. But getting people

within it to get it is really, really difficult. Music became really

segraegated and boxed and dutta, dutta, da… Then people started

creating within those boxes and they’ve found formulas that work and

they’re sticking to it like hell because it’s the livelihood for so

many people. And when you come up and when you question all that,

you’re not going to be seen as something great. I know that’s going

to be the battle for me. I don’t know, we’ll see. Cos I feel like my

career has just been upside down � like I’ve started at the top and

I have to trickle down to the chicken shop. Whereas most people

start selling at the chicken shop and work their way up to getting

recognized. Everything’s just been so weird that I don’t really know

what’s going on � where the hell my battle is, but I’m assuming it’s

down on the chicken shop because it’s the last place for me to get

to.

On her first stumbles into music:

I’m learning as I go along. When I started it was more like… I was

tone deaf, everybody knew it, even when mates sit around and sing-

along to songs, they’d get me to sit out of those games because they

were like, `We don’t recognize anything you hum.’ When Peaches and

Gonzales on tour and they said, `Have a go on the casio’… I used

to be really shy and stuff. It wasn’t like, `Yeah, let me have a go’

it was like, `No please, no don’t do this to me.’ And they were

like, `No, give me your finger and just press that button.’ And it

was so wrong… and I don’t know how it happened, it’s really weird

and it’s really freaky… but, yeah, I’m doing it. And I didn’t

really think. The first thing I thought is, `Oh my god, you make

noise and all you have to do is make come out at the right time over

the beat.’ Like, it was that simple for me.

Now I’m just getting to know the pitch and the melody, but before

when people used to go, `One, two, free, four’… I used to

go, `What are they counting?’ And I couldn’t even get my head around

the concept of a count-in and a bar. But that’s as far as I thought

about music. And the rest is just me trying to make sense of,

like…. me.

No. I just think I can’t really sing. And there’s a part of me that

will never aspire to be a proper singer doing record gymnastics. I

just hate that. And then, you know, sometimes I think I can rap,

sometimes I think I can’t. But however it comes out, it’s just, you

know… I don’t know… it’s really weird… I just can’t believe

that people like what I do. I can’t. So I don’t know what to say

about it.

I started learning that every kid I met who wanted to be a singer

and who wanted to be a musician � this is a huge generalized

statement, but… when I started writing the songs… I wrote M.I.A.

first and then I wrote Galang and I just had the lyrics and the

melody and then I wrote it over a beat… Initially I was like Look,

I’ve written these songs. I don’t have the confidence and I’ll never

do this because I have a real short attention span and I can’t

remember my lyrics and stuff. So I was like, `Is there anyway we

could find someone to sing these?’ So then for like two months that

was the journey that I had. My first step into music was finding

someone else to do it. And every girl I came across, if she was a

black girl she wanted to sound like Aretha Franklin and Beyonce. And

all the white girls they either wanted to sing proper indie stuff or

sing like, well, you know… And it’s kind of finding somebody that

was them in it was so difficult that in the end I just thought,

maybe there’s something in this. Maybe it’s just the act of being

confident with what you are. And that was quite an important thing

just for people to see. Because we’re losing it in music because

everything is becoming so generic. And even the kids that I know

that strive not to make generic music, in a mad way, make it.

On getting yourself an education:

Education is just so important. I think especially if you are the

other, then it’s always good for you to know what people think about

you. So you have to kind of learn the language. That’s what it is. I

think ultimately that’s kind of what made me end up in this position

is that because nobody really cared what I was, I got to learn what

they were. No matter what genre or community or whatever I went

through. When I was doing all the artwork for Elastica and hanging

out, I got to learn what their thing was. But they wouldn’t let me

play dancehall and hip-hop in their dressing room or anything like

that. Because it seemed like those kinda kids were really narrow-

minded, musically, they had their own encylcopedia of what you

should know if you’re in an indie band. But it didn’t go outside the

manual. And that’s what makes the stale music. Because everybody’s

got that manual. It’s that guerilla book of filmmaking, you know

what I mean? And 80 million people have it, it’s the number one best

seller � well, you’re not a guerilla anymore, are you? That’s kinda

the thing that I was thinking. Them being narrow-minded about what I

had to bring, made me learn. In terms of education, I went to an

institute. But you can get it anywhere. The point is, it’s just

important.

On that chicken shop thing:

Before it was the chicken shop, it used to be the nursing home for

your grandma. That’s what I told XL when I signed to them. `I want

to be played in the nursing home’… It’s not going to happen.

On boxes:

I don’t have to go in a box. And besides, I haven’t been boxed yet

and I got to like it. So they can’t box me now. I found my thing and

I’ve started the battle. And I have had people giving me a hard time

about it and the fact that at the time radio stations and record

shops � the fact that they even questioned what I was doing, I just

hope that they realize that they’re stomping out creativity and they

are totally part of that weird machinery. And I’m going to fight for

it now.

At every point there has been something that could have made me

compromise. But because � this is the only reason and the only thing

that my life has been good for is priming me against things like

that. I wouldn’t wish some of the shit upon anyone, but then you

just go, `Actually, why the hell am I going to back down to blah-

blah and blah-blah notion?’ It just doesn’t matter. Because none of

this shit really, really, really matters. Like all these boxes that

people put themselves in and how much they beat themselves up about

stuff and dutta, dutta, da � it doesn’t really matter to me. And

it’s like, in the beginning in England, the Indian radio stations

wouldn’t put Galang on because I didn’t have an Indian intro. And

they wanted me to re-record it and put a Hindi intro to it. And I

was like, `No, I’m not going to do that. Why would you even get me

to do that when the whole point is that I want to be someone on the

inside. It’s obvious why I am. It’s obvious I care about where I

came from. It’s obvious I’m fucking brown. I don’t have to say it

again and again, underline it and talk to the people within the

circle when it is about getting it out there. None of them are doing

anything that actually gets out and is confident. If they’re really

confident about what they’re doing, why don’t they go out? But they

don’t. And when you do, they just go, `Oh my gosh, she thinks it’s

white.’ That internal racism thing is bullshit because everybody

suffers by that kind of thinking. Which is why education is

important, it opens you up and makes you open minded. I want to be

part of that. If I’m going to be the one who’s going to be burnt at

the stake, I want to do it. I want to do it in public so everybody

can see exactly what our values on this planet today is. It just

needed someone brave. And I was just in a point in my life where I

had nothing. So I had nothing to lose. That’s kind of where I got my

confidence from. It wasn’t like I was going to lose my face, I

didn’t have one. It wasn’t like I was going to lose my money, I

didn’t have any.

On her visit to Toronto with Peaches:

It was really positive. Everybody was so encouraging. And I just

never felt that anywhere else. It felt like there was some new thing

happening, new blood that was just like `Fuck it! Everything

goes!’… It was interesting. It just seemed like things were

getting ripped to sheds and put back together in Canada more than

any other cities I went to.

And, finally, on her mum:

My mum was still getting me applications from the bank. `Mia, you’ve

got to get a job. This is too much. No one’s going to marry you.’

And then last month the Sri Lankan newspapers wrote about it and

they did like two big pages and they really embraced it and put, `We

have to support this girl.’ And then when my mum read that she rang

me and was like, `Oh, you’re actually doing something.’

Every year my mum learns one new English word and it opens up a

whole world. So last year she learnt the word, `lesbian.’ Because I

didn’t have a job and I wasn’t married, she got a phone call

saying, `Maybe your daughter’s a lesbian.’ So she learnt the word

and then she used it on me. And she was like, `Are you lesbian?’ And

I was like, `No, I’m making music. And things are really intense for

me right now. I just don’t want to take time out to marry this like

fat guy in Sri Lanka with a moustache just right about now.’ And

then this year, it’s been `underground.’ But she didn’t

know `underground,’ she thought it was `underworld.’ So she rang me

up and she was like, `My friends in church think you’re underworld,

now what is this?’ I was like, this is what happens when you sign to

XL.

Read more: http://mia.boards.net/thread/54/interviews-2005#ixzz4eBvmz5gL

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Interview (2005): In a class of her own

The freshest voice to hit underground music belongs to a woman who spent her childhood in Sri Lanka and teen years in London, and has experienced war, poverty and racism After weeks of waiting, and five straight days of phone calls, much back and forth, "just checking in" (me), and "things are really tight" (them), I finally get M.I.A. on the phone. Who? You won't be asking that question for long. Not if there is any justice. Not if there is an ounce of dignity in the music biz. Straight out of London, with her formative years spent in war-torn Sri Lanka, teen years as a refugee in London's public housing, and early 20s in art school, comes the freshest voice to hit underground dance music and, potentially, overground pop in recent memory. She might not be tearing up the sales charts yet (released in March, her debut album Arular, rose to No. 58 on HMV's top 75 this week), but M.I.A. - real name Maya Arulpragasam - has people in a tizzy. Garnering write-ups in pretty much every music (and many non-music) publication(s) out there - including Rolling Stone, Spin, Vibe, the New York Times, the New Yorker and the Village Voice - and with ear-to-the-ground music fans everywhere speaking her name in excited whispers, M.I.A. is on a roll. "Something's going on,"she muses, as she picks up the phone. "You got ahold of me, but there are still four people waiting - we've lost some along the way." She laughs. "Things are OK. So far so good." Did she see this coming? "No, never." She didn't see it coming when she was 6 months old and her family moved to Sri Lanka, where she, her mom and siblings lived in fear for their lives as her father fought as a member of guerrilla group the Tamil Tigers. She didn't see it back in England, amid poverty and racism in Mitcham, Surrey. She didn't see it when she put on her first art show at London's Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. She didn't even see it when she had a real record label behind her (London's XL Recordings) and real producers in front of her, ready to work. "I always felt apologetic about making music," she explains. "When I went into the studio, my first words were always, 'Hi, I'm Maya. I'm really sorry.' And we'd work from there. "It's really strange. It just kind of happened." Her bashfulness is believable when she speaks of it, with unaffected candour and a chuckle. It's a stretch when hearing her spout sassy, schoolyard-style rhymes on record. Arular is catchy as heck. It's M.I.A.'s grand entrance as the most original, creative and charismatic vocal talent since Missy Elliott. Yet people don't know what to do with her. Her music is a video-game electro-clash of distorted dancehall and hip-hop rhythms, while her lyrics reference pop culture and revolution in the same breath. Hefty U.S. label Interscope (home to Eminem, Gwen Stefani, Black Eyed Peas), which has picked up Arular for distribution in the States, will have to figure out how to package such a huge, prickly talent for U.S. consumption. "I met Jimmy (Iovine, Interscope co-founder)," M.I.A. recounts. "I went to his house. They're curious - it's really cute - they're looking at me going, 'What are you?' I'm going, 'What are you going to do with me?' "They stare at me a lot. But they help me out. "They surprise me every time. ... They're giving me a lot of control. I just go, 'Uh, I'm Sri Lankan, I'm not a rapper, I'm not Gwen Stefani.' We'll see what happens." Elsewhere in the confusion department, MTV is reportedly holding back her Sunshowers video until she takes out the PLO reference ("You wanna go? / You wanna winna war? / Like PLO I don't surrendo") and until she explains what exactly it means to "salt and pepper my mango." "In Sri Lanka, Mexico and the Caribbean," she explains, "they put salt and pepper on green mangos. When it's warm, they put chili peppers and salt. It's amazing. I used to eat them on the way to school in Sri Lanka." Those looking for a sexual subtext won't find it. "The other meaning would be that I present an alternative to what already exists in your everyday stereotypical convention." As M.I.A. sings about power to the people - as she baits Bush and calls to youth to "break that cycle" of consumerism and status quo adherence - she emphasizes that her presence, her access to the platform, is itself the message. "The act of me making music now," she says, "and not doing it like other people, is more important for people to learn from than what I'm saying in my songs. "For every kid who died in Sri Lanka or the tsunami, how many of them, if they had access to a 505 (Roland drum machine), might have been amazing? We don't know. "You can grow up in a mud hut in Sri Lanka, be a refugee with no money living in (public housing), and get to a point where people listen to you. It's a big journey to make. And along the way, if I can say, 'Look, just stop bombing people; call it a day,' then, great." But let's get back to the music. Between her looks, her lyrical subject matter and her life story, M.I.A. sometimes gets short shrift when it comes to her abilities. Her vocal delivery is a wonder to hear. With mesmerizing fluidity, she evokes both coy girlishness and stoic defiance, not to mention superfly rhythmic timing and melodic instincts. She surprises at every turn with her word associations, positing herself as a righteous, tireless trickster. Set against stagger-shot rhythms and sonic collage backdrops, it is nothing short of heroic. M.I.A. manages to incorporate the disparate - at times diametrically opposed - facets of her life into a masterful work of populist pop art. She takes her absent father's life-and-death struggle and London club-culture cool and makes something personal, political and provocative. It all started - the music, that is - with Peaches. Touring as a videographer for British group Elastica, M.I.A. became fascinated by the brash, sex-talking, Toronto-bred electro star, who performed nightly in the opening slot. "I realized you can make a loud noise all by yourself," she says. Peaches taught her the ins and outs of her Roland MC-505 and M.I.A. was on her way. She started making music in her bedroom and, the story goes, got her break by walking into the office of neighbourhood label XL with the line, "I heard you've been looking for me." She hooked up with producers Steve Mackay (of Pulp) and Rob Orton, with whom she fine-tuned her introductory hits Galang and Sunshowers. Seeking further production help led her to Philadelphia DJ Diplo, in whom she found a kindred spirit. Diplo produced just one track on Arular - the Theme from Rocky-sampling Bucky Done Gun. More importantly, he produced the underground-rattling bootleg mix Piracy Funds Terrorism, on which M.I.A.'s vocals are laid over and among a globetrotting throwdown of southern crunk hip-hop, dancehall reggae, '80s pop and Brazilian baile funk. "We wanted to put together something that reflected the sounds I've come through, and that I listened to in the making of the album. And to show that I wasn't completely crazy, that my stuff was relatable to different styles." The two are now an item and Diplo is accompanying M.I.A. as her tour DJ. But she denies rumours that they are engaged. In terms of where she's at, and where to go from here, M.I.A. leaves things open. "(Arular) is a yardstick," she says. "You could have nothing, get a four-track recorder for 100 pounds, two tapes for 50P each and borrow a drum machine that costs 600 pounds, and see how far you can get with it. "In terms of the creative, there's so much more I need to explore. This first album is really about discovery, finding out about music, starting from scratch. Now I've got to a point where every other thing I'm going to do will count." Read more: http://mia.boards.net/thread/54/interviews-2005#ixzz4eBtUM0jN

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Article (2005): M.I.A. drops dance bomb

Sri Lanka-born singer shakes things up M.I.A. is the Anglo-friendly pseudonym of Sri Lanka-born Londoner Maya Arulpragasam. Her music is a stunning mix of hip-hop, ragga, dance and electronica. The mix, with the young woman's unrelentingly political lyrics, bears more than a passing influence from no-wave bands like Gang of Four; the beats are erratic, spitting and shifting in ways that should keep potential dancers jumping, jerking and losing their balance. Lyrically, M.I.A. could be mistaken for a rabble-rouser, a potential threat to national security. While she chants such liberal mantra as "Pull up the people/Pull up the poor," almost every song includes references to shooting guns, setting off bombs, making things go pop, pop, boom. She sings, "I'm a fighter, nice nice fighter," but it isn't exactly obvious whose side she's "fighting" for. She suggests that "Every gun in battle is a son and daughter too," and there are several references to ways in which physical conflict is absurd, so we might assume that she is a soldier for peace � but with all these beats going off all around, it's more obvious that she is a warrior for funky dancin', more like one of those crazy gun fighters in the old Western movies taking potshots at the ground around your feet. She isn't trying to hurt anybody. She just wants to shake it all up. And that she does, very effectively, on "Arular." Read more: http://mia.boards.net/thread/54/interviews-2005#ixzz4eBsl2d00

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Interview (2005): MIA Myself and I

As a child, Sri Lankan singer MIA arrived in London minus her teeth, her dad (a Tamil tiger) and a secure future. All fuel for her first album, which has been met with universal acclaim and a Mercury nomination. Emma Forrest meets the new queen of hip-hop

—- Sunday 4 September 2005 07.05 EDTFirst published on Sunday 4 September 2005 07.05 EDT —— MIA arrives, half an hour late, with multicoloured Snoopys on her baggy T-shirt. A short pink ra-ra skirt. Rasta theme flats. Immaculate Bollywood-groomed eyebrows. Long wrapped nails, Streisand style. Dishevelled black hair - the side-swept bun has the orange-blonde hue of a dye job aborted. There is metallic peach on her lids, lilac on her lush lips. And in her tiny hand, a giant bag of Taco Bell, preferred snack of the great American stoner, several of whom - Mos Def, Gang Starr - have their pictures hanging from the wall of Cornerstone management in New York. MIA’s (as in Missing In Action) huge dark eyes do appear glazed but that could be from one too many photo shoots. The 28-year-old, aka Maya Arulpragasam, fresh from a heavily publicised show at Central Park Summerstage, is making a concerted effort to crack America. As she sits down, a gold-plated antlered deer swings from her neck, a winged horse hanging to her shoulders from her little ears.

The home-made dance album Arular has been nominated for the Mercury music prize, and the singles ‘Galang’ and 'Sunshowers’ are receiving heavy MTV rotation. But it’s her back story that people know before they know her music itself: Sri Lankan refugee, raised on Hounslow council estate, abandoned daughter of one of the leaders of the Tamil terrorist uprising. After Sociology A level, MIA lives in LA and then St Vincent. Goes to Central Saint Martins College of Art, becomes known for acid-pink graffiti stencils and is hired by Justine Frischmann to design Elastica album cover. Moves in with the post-comedown Britpop star. Encouraged by Justine’s friend, DIY electro-clash star Peaches, MIA makes music in her bedroom on a shitty old Casio. Becomes the next big thing. On both sides of the Atlantic.

Arular is minimalist, well-produced garage and deeply layered basement beats stripped to their bare electro tones. Since the music is completely synthetic - no live instruments - it allows her voice (which is reminiscent of hips shaking) to provide all the soul. Because her delivery is percussive it adds another layer to the beats. There aren’t a whole lot of melodies, but there is endless dancing to be done. You can see why Nine Inch Nails founder Trent Reznor wants to work with her and why Timbaland will be producing her next record.

It’s not that she’s brilliant live - not yet. She’s still feeling her way as a performer. On stage at New York hip-hop club SOB’s, she seems at her most comfortable talking to the audience between songs. So it follows that the tape recorder is barely placed on the conference room table of her management at Cornerstone before she’s talking a mile a minute. And, like a street politician, there’s not one superfluous sentence. Her vision and vocabulary (emotional and otherwise) are where she really lives up to the hype.

'I was a refugee because of war and now I have a voice in a time when war is the most invested thing on the planet. What I thought I should do with this record is make every refugee kid that came over after me have something to feel good about. Take everybody’s bad bits and say, “Actually, they’re good bits. Now whatcha gonna do?”’

When she, her mother and sister first arrived on the west London estate in the early Eighties, malnutrition had left Maya without most of her teeth. One of her last childhood memories of Sri Lanka is having her gums cut open with rice grain.

'They don’t even do it fast, it took 45 minutes. But I wanted teeth so bad … you don’t understand.’

She came to Britain waiting for them to grow in and would hold her lips over her gums, staring long hours at herself in the mirror. Her mother, who recently became a born-again Christian, told her the more she looked in the mirror the uglier she would become. She already felt pretty ugly, fleeing Sri Lanka for England just in time to get spat at in the streets.

'I came at the end of punk. It had trickled down, like culture eventually does, from the inner cities. Spitting on the street was normal and acceptable and I took the brunt of it. My friends in Britpop talk about how important their first punk album was. But beer spat in my face aged seven: that’s how I got introduced to punk. They came up with a lot of aggressive shit that I got to experience.’

She was also the smallest kid in the whole school, let alone her year. 'I had short hair and everyone thought I was a boy until I was 16. My sister was gorgeous, she looked like Neneh Cherry. Light-skinned, red lipstick, corkscrew curls. West Londoners, east Londoners, they’d hang outside school to look at her. She’d be like, “Maya, can you just go and hide?”’

The girls were raised as if their father were dead. The founder of Eros (Eelam Revolutionary Organisation), he trained with the PLO in Lebanon, and was in one of four different factions set up in the Seventies to try to achieve an independent Tamil state for the tear-shaped island in the Indian Ocean. The Tigers were the largest group, but every time Sri Lanka got close to peace the four would fight over who would become leader of the Tamil nation. Thousands of boys died at the hands of the Tigers.

'The Tigers killed two groups off, leaders and kid soldiers included. When it came to my dad’s group he said, “I don’t want to kill off all these boys for the sake of an ideal.” He gave up and walked away, and Eros eventually disintegrated.’

Though she remembers the soldiers in their house, bouncing her on their knee, saying: “Tell me where your dad is,” she remembers little of her father himself. He has been in contact recently but, says Maya, 'I don’t want to start that relationship and then have to go on tour. I’ve read about what he did and people come out at Tamil conventions to tell me how great he was. But because I was raised by my mum, I got to see behind the scenes of a person like him.’ Far from falling in love with an activist, her mother met her father through an arranged marriage, having been told he was an engineer. 'Ever since she was a baby she was raised to be the housewife that all Sri Lankan women are meant to be. She couldn’t play out the fantasy 'cos she didn’t have a husband. Him going away was worse for her. All the women were like, “He didn’t even die? He just left you with two children, what’s wrong with you? Fuck him starting a revolution, he isn’t at home!”’ When Maya reached womanhood herself, she decided, like Marianne Faithfull reading William Burroughs and deciding to become a drug addict, that, having fallen in love with hip-hop, she was going to move to South Central LA and become a gangsta’s bitch. It was a move both rebellious and reactionary.

'I’m glad I went that far into it. I was the best hoochie on the West Coast at the time. I had the best clothes 'cos I was coming from England and really good at shoplifting. I had Versace on before Lil’ Kim started rapping about it 'cos the only place I could steal at was Harvey Nicks, where it was sooo easy. So I studied, like, the whole thing out in Compton: how the best you could do is be there for your man, be really good at sex, throw barbecues in the park, have babies and keep that unit together with the money that you get.’

Her exoticism rested on the fact that she was the same colour as her neighbours but she had 'European’ hair. People would tug on it when she was in line at McDonald’s. The girl with no teeth liked being princess of the hood. And having achieved princess-dom, she quit it all to head back to Sri Lanka for the first time. If LA was all sex, all about upping the ante, here was a place where the telepathic romantic signals on buses were so strong she felt she could cut them with a knife.

'There are no clubs or bars, no places for young people to meet, flirt, get together. A Bollywood love song comes on the bus radio and every girl and boy is secretly saying, “This is about you!”. It’s so powerful. It’s not how I learned to do it in England but I respect it. To serve your sexuality up as a dish or to completely hide it? I liked making sense of that, having both co-existing within me.’

It seems to confuse the audience at SOB’s, who aren’t used to hearing such sexy music sung by one so physically demure. She thanks them for all black music has given her: 'It was in the Caribbean that I smoked my first spliff and it was there I decided to do music!’

But the audience - all black - are unimpressed with her story of 2002’s musical awakening.

At Central Park she had been paired with DJ Rekha, a Bhangra pioneer in the city. At SOB’s she is one of five new artists playing for Hot 97, the urban radio station famous as much for music as for the gun battle outside its office between Lil’ Kim and Foxy Brown. This audience don’t understand why she’s covered head to toe in a baggy Sri Lankan print blouse and billowy trousers with its flashes of green in the print, which turn out, on closer inspection, to be the Incredible Hulk’s fist. It could be that a more viable market for her is through mainstream pop.

'Could be. Maybe. Listen, last time Britain sent over anything that really worked in America it was a transsexual dude singing reggae.’

Still, she tells me at Cornerstone, she feels at home in New York. 'All the good cheap food?’ I joke. Her eyes widen.

'That’s seriously important. In Britain no one can afford to live. You know how miserable bad food makes you? I found that out in Notting Hill when I discovered the secret of how rich people feed organic chicken to their cats. I was like, “Your cat has got better skin than me 'cos I eat fucking trash chicken from the petrol station.”’

By 'Notting Hill’ she is referring to her time on the sofa as roommate of Justine Frischmann. Her relationship with Frischmann appears complex. She has her own place in Bermondsey, still talks to 'Jus’ once a month and is grateful they wound up together, if only so they could wind each other up.

'She used to be like, “Maya, you’re so desperate. I can’t help you because you’re too desperate.” I couldn’t stand up to Jus when she said that 'cos obviously she comes from a really privileged place. But one thing Britpop always banged on about was the Sex Pistols and they came out of desperation, so don’t gimme that shit.’

And yet Frischmann was the motivating factor in Maya going to her bedroom with her Casio, collecting the lyrics and melodies she had written in her four-month trip to the Caribbean island of St Vincent, and daring to make music for the first time - and more importantly, to find out if she could even sing. Meanwhile, she was working in a call centre selling computer software to people in Ohio. She’d once worked the same job in LA.

'At least when I go to my shift there the work environment could be fun. At least Yolanda and Tricia and Kevin are telling you what they did last night. There’s life and interaction.’

I ask if she feels, as an artist, more Sri Lankan than British. Perhaps, even, more American?

'No.’ She crumples her Taco Bell wrapper.

'Not at all. As an artist I am definitely British. So British, I hate it.’

She slurps unhappily at her jumbo drink.

'The first thing you learn growing up in Britain is how to bitch about yourself. That’s the nation’s concentrated psyche. You want to bust out of there 'cos it’s terrible. Am I really shit enough? No, I can’t be any shitter than I already am - I’ve been a refugee, I’ve been spat at, they’ve called me every name under the sun; what more do you want?’

I ask her to name something joyful about living in Britain and she furrows her brow so hard, a wave of metallic eye shadow dances on to her nose.

'In England, when I see an old black woman on the bus singing out loud, who doesn’t care about holding herself in, you just wanna hug her and give her a kiss and say, “Thank you so much for giving me that. In 24 hours in Britain today that’s gonna be the best thing that happened to me.”’

With Arular, she has recreated that woman singing out loud in public. And sung loud enough, and long enough, Britain has come round to it big time. On the walk from the offices to her hotel, sequinned bag swinging from her Snoopys, I ask if, spending time away from London, she cares about winning the Mercury prize. She stops in her tracks.

'What happens to an artist if they are relevant, if they do bridge the gap between England and America and the rest of the world, if they do explore new music? What happens to that artist? Put it out there on a plate among all the rest of them and then we’ll see which one England chooses. Then we’ll know where we stand and at least we can start being honest.’ Her Pegasus earrings catch a tiny heatwave breeze. 'We’ll take it from there.’

· MIA’s new single, 'Galang’, is released in October

Source: https://www.google.com.ph/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/music/2005/sep/04/mercuryprize2005.popandrock

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M.I.A. talking about “Born Free” video.

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(Review) 2005: Stylus Magazine

M.I.A. could well be an ideal case study for examining the impact of the internet on the ways we listen to and, more importantly, are exposed to music. It�s difficult not to dip into Marshall McLuhan-esque �our-ever-shrinking-world� clich�s when discussing the impact of the web on the way we live, but the truth of the matter is simply that it�s becoming�if it�s not already�the central mode of communication in the 21st Century. Just over a year ago word began to spread, largely via the net, about an artist called M.I.A. who had a song called �Galang.� The first time I heard �Galang� was about an hour before the fifteenth time I heard �Galang.� That was roughly a year ago, and I�ve played the damn thing practically every day since. It really was that good. A few months later came �Sunshowers,� a song that managed to sound like honey even while M.I.A. rapped (as much as Mike Skinner or Nellie McKay �rap�) about a man being gunned down for associating with Muslims. Together these two tracks ranked among the most exciting singles of last year, but you certainly weren�t going to see them on MTV or hear them on most radio stations, and unless you were lucky enough to have them magically appear in your mailbox, you were unlikely to track down tangible copies. On the other hand, anyone with a modem could easily find these songs through file-sharing networks, web boards, or mp3 blogs. (Folks, if this isn�t the utopian democratization of music, it�s about as close as we�re likely to get.) After �Galang,� �Sunshowers� and the similarly superb �Fire Fire,� M.I.A.�s debut album couldn�t come out (or at least leak) soon enough, but the date kept being pushed back. First we were told September, then December. September passed, then December. Sample-clearance problems were mentioned. February was mentioned. Luckily in the meantime we got something of a teaser in the form of the mash-up mixtape Piracy Funds Terrorism, produced in collaboration with Diplo. And it wasn�t just any old teaser either, but rather a classic of sorts itself, and arguably the most successfully realized product to date of a musical form that�s flourished outside the bounds of touchy legality in the web era. If you�ve already heard Piracy Funds Terrorism, Arular may prove to be a postmodern headfuck for a while, presenting as it does a unique listening challenge by recontextualising songs that we�re already intimately familiar with in genetically altered forms. It�s hard to comprehend that the versions presented here are the originals, that the likes of Ciara and Jay-Z should be rhyming over �Goodies� and �Big Pimpin�� instead of our favourite forthright and beautiful Sri Lankan MC. Hearing "Amazon" and "Bingo" backed by something else would probably take more than just a few listens to get your head around if that something else didn�t work even better than Diplo�s inspired pairings. Arular seems like a perfect pop record, pure and simple, and one that�gushy fanboy hyperbole or not�I wouldn�t hesitate to mention in the same breath as Off the Wall and Dirty Mind. Like the initial hit of �Galang� it is, again, that good. M.I.A., in her way, is as musically (if possibly not personally) idiosyncratic and captivating as Michael Jackson or Prince. Whether she strikes a fraction of the pay dirt that they have is yet to be seen, but she deserves to be huge, and her best weapon against marginalization is her music. On �Pull up the People,� the first full track on Arular, M.I.A. informs you that she�s got both �the bombs to make you blow� and �the beats to make you bang,� and it behooves you to take her at her word because the sonic impact reveals that she�s not kidding; within a few moments she will have compared herself to Rocky, and we shan�t have doubted her for a second. As Sasha Frere-Jones noted in his piece on M.I.A. in The New Yorker, ��world music� is a category that does nobody any favors�. Despite the hard-to-resist tendency among journalists to wax exotic about the details of M.I.A.�s back-story (given name: Maya Arulpragasm; revolutionary father, whom the album is named for; moved from London to Sri Lanka to India to Sri Lanka to India to London�hell, if you don�t know the specifics by heart by now, just pick up the current issue of Spin), her sensibility is far more in tune with, say, Missy Elliot (who she namedrops) than Youssou N�dour (who she doesn�t). Produced by a diverse cast including Steve Mackey, Ross Orton from Fat Truckers, Dave Taylor (AKA Solid Groove) and M.I.A. herself, Arular is a record that seeks to defy genre and nationality while at the same time reveling in both those things, being born directly of its heritage at the same time as it breaks free from it. It�s a swaggering, spitting, utterly contemporary album of politically dissident, sexually forthright Anglo-Sri Lankan dubstep bhangra hip-pop IDM in which M.I.A. stars as protagonist, antagonist, chanteuse, MC, exotic schoolgirl tease, graphic artist, chastiser of the immoral, and fun-loving London-living party girl. And all in under 40 minutes, too. It�s special. We�ve not heard it�s like before. But something feels at stake here. M.I.A. is, in a sense, the first web-born (potential) pop star. The response to her music from a wider public not made up primarily of critics and music junkies could signify a changing of the guard, an expansion of the horizons of pop as we know it. Or, like Howard Dean�s much-hyped net-based presidential campaign, it could mean jack shit and four more years of Maroon 5. But I�m starting to regain some of my pre-election optimism. M.I.A. may be a critical darling, but she�s not so esoteric in the grand scheme of things. This is music that everyone can relate to, dance to, salt and pepper their mangoes to. M.I.A.�s done what we�ve asked of her, and the press appear to be on board. Now it�s up to the voters consumers to go the extra mile or not. I mean, who actually buys CDs anymore (that aren�t blank)? Annie�s recent hype-and-fail-trajectory sets a dangerous precedent for web-friendly artists labeled as �pop� by critics because of textural or theoretical tropes, but who exist outside of the continuum of consumability as far as people who actually buy records and put them on the radio are concerned. The fact remains that, at the moment, few people beyond of the sphere of influence that the internet exerts have heard of M.I.A. Read more: http://mia.boards.net/thread/54/#ixzz4e8lT7mri

#stylus magazine #review #music review #2005 #2005 interview #2005 rap #2005 music #2005 rapper #mathangi arulpragasam #maya arulpragasam #m.i a.#central saint martins #genreless music #sri lanka #lk #hollywood #celeb

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Interview (2005): M.I.A.: Rebel Muse

Maya Arulpragasam grew up dodging political bullets. As M.I.A., she shoots back, armed with peppery raps and Diplo-matic beats. Racists and fascists beware.

The day before the tsunami hit Sri Lanka, Maya Arulpragasam, a.k.a. M.I.A, received a message from her estranged father. “He emailed me like, �Just read about you in the paper,’” she says, altering her London accent to affect a heavy Sri Lankan tone. “�Very proud. Change the title of your album. Dad.’

"That’s all he had to say to me after years. Many, many years!” she laughs. Her album title, Arular, is actually her father’s name�an idea she took indirectly from her mother. “She was like, �That man!’” says Maya, again switching to her Sri Lankan voice. “�The only thing he ever gives you is his name, huh? Pew! No use.’ So I was like, �Fuck it, if that’s the only thing he gave me, I’m going to use it.’”

Maya smiles as she tells the story, as though it were nothing more than a tiff between two bickering divorc�es. But the situation is worlds more complicated. Maya grew up in Sri Lanka as part of the Tamil minority, but was forced to flee at the age of 10 when a bloody civil war between the Tamil and the Sinhalese majority broke out. Her father was a member of the Tamil Tigers, a guerilla group some label as freedom fighters; others as terrorists. She simply knows the Tigers as cousin or classmate or, of course, Dad. As a child in Sri Lanka, Maya had little contact with her father (rebels rarely make good family men), and after her family escaped to London, he all but disappeared from their lives. “The simplified version of my life is that I survived the civil war, and there were bombs, and my school got burned down. I’d seen people die and get killed before I was eight,” Maya says. “And the complicated one is just a mad journey. I thought we were all in [the conflict] together. And then towards the end, it started becoming, �No, no, no, we’re not in it. You’re in it, and you’re fucking bringing it to us, so you should leave.’”

Except for a golden AK-47 pendant hanging from her neck, there is little clue of Maya’s rebel roots in her sunny disposition. It would be impossible to guess at the hell she has been through, from terrorist bombings in Sri Lanka to the racism, poverty and crime that greeted her in London. Arular camouflages politics, cobbling the didactic with the danceable, letting listeners figure it out for themselves. “A lot of my music works on different levels,” Maya says. “My lyrics can be applied to politics, and they can be applied to something else. I think, when you go to a club, it’s okay to just want to dance and have a good time, and just be somewhere and feel the music. But when you’re at home and want to listen to something, then it’s there. I don’t want to be too preachy and shit, �cause I know what I’m like. I can only put up with so much consciousness.”

The music is a stew of dancehall rhythms and nyabinghi chants, hip-hop beats and rhymes, sprinklings of Tamil melodies and anything else that happens onto her path. “Anyone has access to anything,” she says. “You get up in the morning and you walk down the street and within one 24-hour span, you have heard and been introduced to 20 different genres of music. And it all goes in, and it manifests, and then it comes out, and you regurgitate this mish-mash thing.” Arular sounds like someone turning on a sonic vacuum in reverse, spewing everything from ragga to ringtones. The sound is raw and immediate; one part rap, one part revolution and two parts rumpshaker.

Maya has been turning heads in all the right circles, for instance, a billing on MTV World and a meeting with Jay-Z, but her climb up the rungs of pop culture wouldn’t have been possible had she not rebelled against expectations. “I was sick of growing up and people constantly telling me, �You’re shit, you don’t have a dad, you’re going to get into drugs, crime, get married at 21, have eight kids, and stack shelves at Tesco’s,” Maya says. On the contrary, she was awarded a scholarship to Central St. Martins College Of Art And Design, where she majored in film. But for a jawn brought up on a Council Estate and in a war-torn country, the “art for art’s sake” mantra of her professors was a little hard to swallow, and she found herself defying expectations once again. “I felt like I was a part of real life and nobody else was. One hundred foot of film costs 30 pounds, and I wasn’t going to film a fucking blank screen ‘cause I was poor. And it was like �Maya, why are you fighting the institution? You just have to understand the depth of the blue screen.’ Excuse me, if I’m not going to fucking eat my lunch to fucking afford this film, I need to put something up there. That’s what it taught me, if you’re going to rebel against something, rebel against boring shit,” she says, dissolving into laughter.

It is precisely this sense of humor that has allowed Maya to go from political refugee to musical revolutionary. More than her ability to battle adversity, it’s been her ability to laugh in its face that has saved her time and again. “It’s not like I said, �Dad, you know what? You should get a job� as a terrorist!’ Oh my god, we’d just be so fucking rich!” Maya jokes. “That’s just something that’s a part of my life that I have to learn to use because I can’t let it be in my brain as something negative.” She pauses and smiles. “But, yeah, I wish my dad had a better fucking job."

Read more: http://mia.boards.net/thread/54/#ixzz4e8jNMf7c

#interviews #mia #m.i.a.#maya arulpragasam #mathangi arulpragasam #2005 #2005 interviews #2005 music #best songs #2005 songs #2005 rap #galang

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mathangigram-blog · 7 years

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Review (2005):

By Tiny Mix Tapes Oh M.I.A., where do I begin? By now almost all of you have heard the name (hell, she was in my sister's Teen Vogue) and heard her story recounted ad nauseam. You've heard about how she moved from Sri Lanka to India due to the Tamil rebellion (that her father was a prominent figure of) and how she moved back to Sri Lanka before finally ending up in London to attend Middlesex University and Central Saint Marie's School of Art. You've heard about how one of the best singles of the new millennium, "Galang," was only the second song she ever wrote, and about how hard her sound is to classify. You've heard about all of that because just in the past few months Ms. Maya Arulpragasam has been the recipient of more media attention than most artists receive their entire careers. She's been built up on a foundation largely laid by the burgeoning blog scene, and now it's time to see if more mainstream media will solidify that foundation or tear it to the ground. Following in the blazing path torn through the music world by Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol.1 comes Mya's debut long player, Arular. To say that this record was "anticipated" is an understatement; in fact, reports state that there was a notable surge in the number of overactive saliva glands that doctors had to treat (my appointment is tomorrow, 3-ish). But it wasn't even just the music that people were holding their breaths for; it was the curiosity of what was going to happen once the record came out. But we'll get to that in a bit. For now, let's focus on the sounds. And what glorious sounds they are. Arular is filled with banging beats that reverberate in your skull, as well as M.I.A.'s double-dubbed vocals that send your head spinning into a stereo frenzy. When in "Bucky Done Gun," M.I.A. shouts "New York/ quiet down/ I need to make a sound" before the furious horns kick in, she succeeds in making the city that never sleeps shut the fuck up, just so she can do her thing. I can't think of a single person in recent memory who comes off with so much attitude and swagger and is actually believable; like if you don't pay attention she just might smack you across the face. From the English lesson of opener "Ba-na-na" and the day-glo "Sunshowers" to the bombast of "Galang" and the hostage scenario played out in "Amazon," M.I.A. creates one of the most singular artistic statements of the past five years, deftly combing elements of pop, reggae, hip-hop, dancehall, and whatever the fuck else she feels like throwing into a track. The only problem with this album is the difficulty you're going to have explaining what the hell it sounds like to your friends after they hear you raving about it. It's this combination of styles that may be Arular's downfall. It's still to be seen whether people outside of Criticville and Blogland are ready for such a forward-thinking mishmash of genres and sounds. It'd be nice to think that we might one day see an M.I.A. track sandwiched on the charts between Missy and Outkast, but it's still too early to tell what the final fate of this little slice of brilliance will be. If she never crosses that bridge to pop success though, we'll always have a home for her on this side. Read more: http://mia.boards.net/thread/54/#ixzz4e8hXipPx

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mathangigram-blog · 7 years

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Review (2005):Dusted Magazine

By now, the word about M.I.A. has reached a fever pitch. Every major magazine has signed on for a feature, the blogosphere is aflame, industry insiders are agape and hot DJs from Miami to Seattle have been caning her beats for months. All that is left, it seems, is to sit back and watch if M.I.A. is accepted or rejected by the mainstream American public. If this is your first encounter with M.I.A., let's have a summary. She's a Tamil (a Sri Lankan minority), and her father is an outlaw freedom fighter (named "Arular"). She's a gifted visual artist but was versed in music via N.W.A. (as a child), then Peaches (on tour in 2002), and now producers like Richard X and Pulp's Steve Mackey. Her real name is Maya Arulpragasam, her lyrics can be incendiary, and she's pretty fine looking, too. What's more remarkable than her fascinating biography is her bold music. Like her life story, there's hardly anything like it. Roughed out on a Roland MC 505, it's basic and bombastic and bomb-tastic. When polished by producers, it burns clubs down. It's a blaring, drum-machine driven mish-mash of, well, all sorts of shit: dancehall, Asian beat, old school hip hop, baile funk and grime. It's music from the Gulf of Mexico, the Bay of Bengal and the North Sea. Or, better, it's Ragga meets Ghettotech meets Bollywood Breaks. It's the kind of cultural cornucopia that could be, and should be, the defining sound of 2005. But will it? (Honestly, it is becoming hard to wait.) Arular is framed by three strong singles. The No. 1 best being "Sunshowers,� which contains her best lyrics, as in the oft-referenced line "Like PLO we don't surrendo!" The chorus is taken from the candydelic disco of Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band (brilliant stroke, that), so it has a real pop flavor that has crossover written in calligraphy. The beat, minimal like Missy and Lumidee, serves to spotlight her wordplay. The brutal and bounding �Galang� was the official 12" and the track that raised the eyebrows of Europe, all dip this and dip that. It's hot but the coda might be the defining sound of M.I.A., a truly transporting yell from the streets of Sri Lanka. And then the garish "Bucky Done Gun� � with a horn break seemingly straight from the mind of Gonzales � drops a tight (Richard X?) electro-funk beat any group of women would find hard to resist. The sick vocal edits near the end make you wonder "Why didn't they do that more often?" Remove the three skits (which are really intimate demos) from the track listing and that leaves you with 7 more songs. As a result of MIA's singular composing computer, each entry generally keeps the same beat and tempo. It's forgivable to a degree because M.I.A.'s neophyte approach gives her music a novelty not unlike Madonna. M.I.A. shares some of Ciccone's same lyrical attitude and timing too � like the way "Like A Virgin" was as radical then as "I Bongo With My Lingo" might be today. Madonna's eponymous debut also had strong singles, a confrontational attitude and the best producers of its time. And also like Madonna, M.I.A. has timed her debut not just to the cycle of sound, but to the clock of fashion as well. Her commitment to a conscience chic, both lyrical (particularly on "Sunshowers,� when she calls out sweatshops) and in her own look, is bound to bring imitators. M.I.A.'s femininity updates Madonna's distinct independence with a defined strength. "Hombre,� the one song dedicated entirely to seduction, is emblematic of her impudence: she pursues a man, dares him to come on to her, defies him to take her number � and when the magnificent shouting break/chorus takes hold, it's nearly impossible not to imagine the rally call of an army. With regards to sequencing of the album, it seems to be chronological, with the two big singles ("Sunshowers" "Galang") at the end, as if to say there's more to M.I.A. than "Galang.� It's also worth noting the eponymous "M.I.A." is buried as a hidden track at the end. Perhaps because it's filled with polemics like the first verse: "You can watch TV and watch the media / President Bush doing takeovah" and later: "The trendsetters make things better / Don't sell out to be product pushers." Words to live by, really. Concerning her success in the States, the reality is there�s little chance M.I.A. will crack a chart. Her music is too diverse to fit within any genre. Jessica Simpson wears a cross, M.I.A. wears an M16. Mrs. Federline is quick to put on a latex bodysuit, Ms. Arulpragasam has a proclivity to wear friend-made fashion. And I'd love to see Kelly Clarkson tackle a 505. Point is, M.I.A. is a singular personality. The producers enlisted on her debut, and on Diplo's much-heralded Piracy Funds Terrorism mix, make her music better, but it's still designed by a refugee. The themes are broad, not boring. Her references are valid, not vapid. In a land where morning show DJs harass South Asian operators as "rat-eaters,� can M.I.A. break through? Can a chorus that speaks as a kidnap victim ("Amazon") speak to a cheerleader in Wichita, Kansas? Alternately, there is hope in M.I.A.'s culture-striding themes, that sound and attitude could collect a considerable audience. And while the album is not as strong as to initiate a paradigm shift, Arulpragasam�s will might be. Even her strident lyrics could be mistaken as gibberish by corporate music directors and make it past the cultural censors. Although "it's a bomb yo / so run, yo / put away your stupid gun, yo" is pretty obvious. In fact, after listening to Arular in it's entirety, impressionable types nationwide could get a little radical: imagine halftime pep squads kicking over trash cans at center court. Could happen. Read more: http://mia.boards.net/thread/54/#ixzz4e8fAAHeM

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mathangigram-blog · 7 years

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Article (2005): Rebel rapper is raw and ready to party

2005- The walls of Amoeba Music on Haight Street may be plastered with the faces of dead souls like Johnny Cash, Kurt Cobain and Sid Vicious, but on Saturday, the store’s small corner stage was all about the face of the future. And at the moment that belongs to a Maya Arulpragasam, a.k.a. M.I.A., a 28- year-old rapper whose family narrowly escaped civil war in Sri Lanka only so she could grow up in one of south London’s racially fractured housing projects.

With a father who was a member of the notorious Tamil Tiger rebels and a debut album, “Arular,” that prominently features images of rifles and bombs on the sleeve, M.I.A.’s street credibility is about eight notches above 50 Cent’s. But it’s her music – a crude collision of primitive keyboards, cracked dancehall rhythms and deep slang – that really makes her hardcore. “I’m bongo with my lingo/ Beat it like a wing you/ Can’t stereotype my thing yo,” she sings in “Sunshowers” before delivering the sober kicker: “Like PLO/ We don’t surrender.”

The Amoeba appearance – part of the music store’s Magnificent Seven concert series, in which club-level acts are playing free, all-ages shows through the summer to celebrate the location’s seventh anniversary – offered a taste of M.I.A.’s gig with LCD Soundsystem later that evening at the Fillmore. But to the 900 people who crammed the aisles and pressed up against the racks of CDs and LPs, it was enough.

Backed by Philadelphia-based DJ Diplo, who co-produced her album, and a dynamic sidekick named Cherry, it was almost like watching an old Salt-N-Pepa video come to life. M.I.A., wearing a gaudy sequin-covered sweater, dipped her shoulders and swerved her hips around in old school hip-hop moves, while her enormous smile betrayed the land mines in her songs. “I’ve got the bombs to make you blow/ I’ve got the beats to make you bang,” she sang on “Pull Up the People.”

Even the songs that traded politics for off-the-wall poetics sounded volatile: “Blaze to blaze, galang galang galanga/ Purple haze, galang galang galanga,” M.I.A. barked on her signature hit, “Galang,” over a sinister but jarring playground beat as the crowd leaped up and down.

The music was so bare, the melodies so minimal, M.I.A.’s voice so blatantly limited, it was hard to believe the 40-minute set actually came together as well as it did. Then again, those are the very elements all those tattered faces on the wall used to change the world. She was in good company.

Read more: http://mia.boards.net/thread/54/#ixzz4e8eCwgGy

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mathangigram-blog · 7 years

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Interview (2005): London calling -for Congo, Colombo, Sri Lanka

- By pop matters :

In 1976, Cory Daye recorded a song called “Sunshower” with Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band. She was 24. The band were well outside a recording deadline from RCA; when the album was eventually released, the label failed to notify the band.

“Sunshower” has been sampled for almost 20 years now; there’s a snatch of its warped Hawaiian guitars and splintered percussion towards the end of A Tribe Called Quest’s “Can I Kick It?”, but like attempts by De La Soul and Doug E. Fresh, it’s just dressing. The appropriations always seem piecemeal and placeless: Busta Rhymes’ “Take It Off” is slick, but not convincing. Ghostface Killah’s “Ghost Showers” attempts to wholly inhabit the song; it swallows him whole. There’s simply too much in the original: swooping Hawaiian guitars, child-like chants, ambient noise, guitar barely recognizable in a flood of in reverb. The percussion is so richly syncopated, so densely layered, that it leaves Daye’s vocal somehow isolated, exposed, as if shimmering in a cloud of dust. The melody itself sounds free and ungrounded, and takes on an almost atonal quality. The groove is woodlike, organic, pulmonary. Nobody has done anything as remotely convincing, assured, or unique with the same materials. Until M.I.A.’s “Sunshowers”.

The difference between the original and M.I.A.’s second single, produced last year by Steve Mackey and Ross Orton, is more than one of genre or period; it is a difference in aesthetics, a difference in the place given to popular culture. The original material itself is gutted. The slightly adrenaline bliss of Davy’s chorus sounds highly phased, over-exposed, washed-out at the edges. A percussive bass glissandi, which in the original gracefully eases the song into a final elaboration of the chorus, is ripped out and looped throughout the piece. The groove is a relentless throb that hammers its way throughout the entire song, rattling and lurching between violence and grace. “Sunshowers” erases the spirit of the original as it goes along.

Where Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band brought a wispy lyricism to disco, a feeling of dreamy nostalgia wrapped in their elaborate big band arrangements, M.I.A.’s use of the song is – like the rest of her material – a blend of hard unsentimentally and poplike glee. It’s a striking contrast: strident political stances sit alongside made-for-ringtone hooks. There’s no middle ground on Arular, her debut album. Even the wordplay is taken to a level of abstraction, with playground chants in place of intimacy and wit. There is very little that deals with the minutiae of personal relationships; even “URAQT”, a song about betrayal, revolves more around the exchange of postures than of emotions. Relationships are almost transactions. There is no trust in this music.

It’s a stance that echoes the details of her life: M.I.A. witnessed at first hand the violence of Sri Lanka’s civil war, followed by an abrupt relocation to a neglected council estate on the outskirts of London.

London shapes much of her music. The touch of gleeful – almost naive – joy in her sound recalls early British experiments with hip-hop. It is the sound of the Wild Bunch, of Fresh Four’s “Wishing on a Star”, of Carlton’s forgotten The Call Is Strong, where the sing-song lilt of Lovers Rock met the swallowed aggression of dub, where the structure and confidence of American hip-hop met the residual brashness of punk and ska. Though those influences have been replaced in the contemporary sound of London by dancehall, crunk, grime, and American R&B, the aesthetic is the same – and one unique to London. “The thing that I’m a part of,” M.I.A. agrees, “is that I listen to everything. And so do the grime kids. There are grime tunes where Lethal B could rap over a Kylie Minogue backing, because he knows it – he hears it: he’s on a bus, he’s in a cab, he’s in a Chinese takeaway.”

The vocal cadence that is a part of her singing voice – the rise in intonation at the end of almost every line – is now near-ubiquitous among Londoners of a certain age. It is not, curiously, part of her speaking voice, which is a fairly cool and unremarkable London accent. “Everybody has access to all kinds of genres of music every day when you wake up. So why not reflect that? It’s way more realistic than me saying ‘I only hear dancehall when I walk down the street. I only hear dancehall for eight years of my life walking around in this city.’ That’s wrong. Because that’s not the case. Every day I wake up in this city, the cosmopolitan Westernized fast first-world amazing foreign land that’s got amazing technology, amazing information access, speedway, highway – let’s not kid ourselves: we do hear everything at once, so whether it’s through television, on the radio, on people’s CDs, people’s cars going past you – so why not reflect that in what you do?”

While race relations over the last two decades in London have hardly been exemplary – something M.I.A. knows about at first hand – the capital’s density and diversity have made possible a mixture of cultures that sets it apart from most other Western cities. Even so, M.I.A. sees this process as increasingly under threat. “I knew someone like me could never come out of America, and I knew that I couldn’t come out of Sri Lanka either. It was really important to be in Britain to come out the way I did. But at the same time, I just think it’s really, really sad that I’m the only person here, when there could be a damn lot more. There could be more people making a crossbreed sound and referencing each other’s communities. But there isn’t. The Asians do stick to the Asians. The Somalians stick to the Somalians. The Palestinians stick to the Palestianians. The Moroccans stick to the Moroccans. The white kids stick to the white kids. The black kids stick to the black kids. And that’s only a new thing that’s happening.”

Since the late '90s, concerns have been voiced that “economic migrants” are using the UK’s asylum system as a backdoor. This argument has increasingly come to drive British political debate (not to mention newspaper sales), intensifying around election cycles despite a fall in the number of people seeking asylum. Since 2001, the debate has taken on an additional overtone of paranoia and “racial profiling” amid fears about international terrorism. Local community workers admit to noticing a correlation between incidents of racial harassment and the intensity of the national debate. Steve Griffin, Deputy Director of Groundwork Merton, a local regeneration agency covering the area in which M.I.A. grew up, notes that, “You get Islamophobia going. There’s been more attacks on Asians and more problems for Asians since 9/11 in this country.”

M.I.A. is outraged by this situation – and the smothering effect it is having on cultural interaction in London. “I’ve followed British culture, the underground culture, and musically I feel like I’ve been a part of different movements that have happened. But for the first time, everything is kinda just quiet, you know? Back when I was sort of walking around there seemed to be more of an identity amongst young people, and there was just stuff happening, and it was real sort of energetic and colorful. And then, it seems like everybody’s bogged down by all this immigration stuff, and newspapers are like 'Immigrants go back home!’, and for the first time they can say it on the front page without it being politically incorrect. And then with all this terrorism stuff where they’re like 'Muslim kids are bad’. There’s some weird atmosphere going on. Girls have started wearing yashmacs, and there’s divides amongst communities and stuff. And that’s when I decided to go, 'Look: the only thing that Britain always ever goes on about, and is proud of going on about, is that it’s a cosmopolitan city, and it’s multicultural.’ So unless everybody starts waking up in England and starts shouting about it, and saying that’s a really great thing, you’re not even doing what you said you’re good at doing in the first place.”

Maya Arulpragasam was born in London in 1976. Her father moved to London in 1971 after graduating in Moscow with a master’s degree in engineering. His name is sometimes rendered A.R. Arudpragasam, sometimes Arul Pragasam; his nom de guerre is Arular. In January 1975, he was instrumental in founding the Eelam Revolutionary Organization of Students (EROS) in Wandsworth. In June of that year, EROS staged demonstrations at the inaugural cricket World Cup, prompting clashes between Sri Lanka’s Tamil and Sinhalese supporters, and bringing the conflict in Sri Lanka to international attention for the first time. In March 1976 he was one of three EROS members selected to train for six months in Lebanon with Palestinian militants associated with the Fatah wing of the PLO. He left after three months of training, returning to Sri Lanka with his family. Maya was six months old.

By 1976, Sri Lanka was well on its way to the internecine ethnic violence that would erupt in full a few years later. Following the withdrawal of the British in 1948, and the electoral triumph of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism in 1956, the island’s Tamil minority was gradually coerced into a position of second-class status; economic discrimination went hand-in-hand with a gradual displacement of Tamils from the education and administrative institutions. A handful of bloody incidents – on both sides – eventually tipped the balance in favor of militancy: land grabs, armed attacks, mob violence, and the destruction of symbolic and cultural treasures, sometimes with official connivance. By the early 1980s, more than thirty Tamil militant groups had emerged, of which EROS was one.

In Sri Lanka, Maya and her siblings rarely saw their father. He was introduced to them as an uncle. They temporarily relocated to the outskirts of Chennai (then Madras), where they lived in a derelict house. Her sister contracted typhoid. They returned to Sri Lanka, and remained constantly on the move. She remembers a childhood “inundated with violence”: the convent at which she attended school was destroyed during one of the government’s aerial bombing campaigns. She watched as some of her friends died. Family members were incarcerated.

In 1986, they fled. Her father remained in Sri Lanka; the rest of the family made it to London. Maya was 11.

They were allocated an apartment in Phipps Bridge Housing Estate, a development in the borough of Merton, which sits the middle of the vast band of conurban sprawl that constitutes outer London. At the time Phipps Bridge consisted of five high-rise tower blocks and ten low-rise buildings. Of the 4,000 residents, about 65 percent were on income support. It was built in 1976, when institutional inertia and hamstrung development budgets continued to license the building of high-rise estates, despite mounting evidence that they anchored social deprivation and institutional neglect.

By the mid-1980s, life on Phipps Bridge was an experience in misery. Sue Johns, a local resident, wrote in a poem of “the piss-filled lift” and “the shells of wrecked cars”, of “Fifties design faults holding on / By the skin of their teeth in the eighties”. She pictured residents waiting for a long-promised redevelopment “Behind Chubb locks and net curtains”. Television cop shows used the estate to film scenes depicting the most run-down, graffiti-stained dead-end estates in the country. It was hardly the perfect environment for an refugee family; Donna Neblett, a longtime resident and now a manager in the community center, remembers: “Police would not come onto the estate; they’d never come by themselves. They’d always be in cars, they’d never get out and walk. It was a very notorious estate. Everything: drug dealers, needles on the floor. Worse things than you can imagine was Phipps Bridge twenty years ago.” Maya was placed in special needs education to improve her English. Her mother worked from home as a seamstress. Maya remembers watching as their home was burgled. When her radio was stolen by crack-addicted neighbors, Maya listened to hip-hop from the teenage boy who lived next door.

Maya’s family was one of only two Asian families on Phipps Bridge in 1986. The mid-1980s were hardly a golden period in British race relations. Steve Shanley, until recently a housing officer for the estate, insists that despite Phipps Bridge’s reputation as a “a fairly tough estate”, there were not “any racial tensions or any great problems.” The local council records a relatively low number of reported racist incidents. By contrast, Donna Neblett remembers an estate rife with racist sentiment “There were people [living on the estate] that were the leaders of the National Front, so this is where they had their offices and their meetings, in the houses on the estate.” The statistics may reflect the tiny proportion of black and ethnic minority residents at the time. “People knew not to come on Phipps if you were from the [black and ethnic minority] community”.

Racial tensions – conditions in general – have eased considerably on Phipps Bridge over the last few years. But the obvious question is how an Asian family might have been placed – in near-isolation – in such an environment in the fist place. Local authorities are adamant that they are not in the business of social engineering. According to Steve Shanley, individual requests for location tend to be accommodated, but “one thing that councils make sure of is that they don’t proactively put people together. It wouldn’t be seen as 'equal opportunities’ to find out people’s nationalities and think, 'Right, well we’ll put them there.’”

One resident guardedly confided a suspicion that “I think basically what they tend to do – in my experience – is that’s where they’ll put [black and ethnic minority residents] anyway. It’s normally run-down, notorious, them sort of estates. That’s how it used to be. I’m not going to say it’s like that now, but I know back then it was. And that’s when you… That’s all I’m going to say on that.”

Maya used the aesthetic template of hip-hop to pull together her range of influences and interests – at first in the field of visual art. She graduated from Central St. Martins College of Art and Design, and a book of her graffiti-influenced artwork was published by independent label Pocko. It caught the eye of Nick Hackworth, who in 2002 established the Alternative Turner Prize to critique the narrow criteria of Britain’s leading art prize. Maya was among the six artists shortlisted. Hackworth – Arts Editor of Dazed and Confused – was immediately impressed by “the combination of the political content from her Sri Lankan background through the Tamil Tigers, with the kind of street aesthetic.” He remembers a boldness of vision that fused well with the improvisational nature of her technique: “She was just spray painting on bits of board, so it was pretty DIY kind of stuff with the actual media, tying in with the spraycan-type aesthetic. So it’s kind of rough, ready, and graphically quite powerful, because she doesn’t use too many elements; she repeats some of the elements; she keeps it visually quite clean, she doesn’t overload the images … It’s about graphic boldness. That was the best thing about it.” The work attracted the attention of Justine Frischmann of Elastica, who commissioned an album cover and a tour documentary. It was on tour that she met electro-revivalist Peaches, who first showed her around a Roland 505.

Her visual style is on display on the video for “Galang”, her first single. The video was directed by Ruben Fleischer, who notes that “using her artwork as a way to define her and inform people is very important. I mean how many other beautiful singers are performing in front of tanks, burning palm trees, bombs, Molotov cocktails, and helicopters? All of the stencils we made were completely based on her aesthetic, and were meant to be an extension of her. Many of them she either helped us make or made herself.”

The video’s imagery – alongside the lyrical content of “Sunshowers” – has attracted some criticism of her political stance. There are the brightly-colored burning trees, bombs, tanks, Molotov cocktails, London housing estates, and cell phones – and the video is punctuated by images of a racing tiger, a motif that recurs in her concert visuals and designs. A portrait of a Tamil militant leader appears at one moment.

For some critics, this is simply revolutionary chic: an attempt to commercialize the color and exoticism of distant struggles while safely draining it of any real-world political context. Nick Hackworth is aware of that tendency. “I think it was that unusual combination which I hadn’t really seen before in too much stuff. And also – I suppose it sounds potentially pejorative – it was slightly exotic, seeing something that dealt with non-English or non-European political problems in that kind of way, visually.” There are long-standing European traditions of seeing the “orient” as repository of color, creativity, and vibrancy – as a nest of cultures alien enough not to have to be inspected for political markers. Other critics are more troubled, arguing from her father’s biography and a handful of details (for instance, for a brief period after the December 26 tsunami, her website carried links to an aid organization closely associated with Tamil militants) that she is a closet supporter of terrorism – in particular, of the Tamil Tigers.

From the early-1980s, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) quickly became the dominant body in Tamil militancy, and Tamil nationalism in general, not least because of the viciousness with which they dispatched rival groups. In April 1986, for example, hundreds of members of rivals TELO (the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation) were killed in a sequence of attacks, despite their being armed, trained, and supported by the Indian government. From 1987 the “Black Tigers” developed suicide bombing as a tactic, their victims including former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandi. UNICEF and Amnsety International have censured them for the forced conscription of child soldiers, including 40 since the December 26 tsunami. They have been accused of murdering civilians in border areas to induce population displacement. The Sri Lankan government, meanwhile, has continued a series of depredations, including extensive – and sometimes apparently indiscriminate – aerial bombing campaigns. Over 65,000 people have died; at one point up to 30 percent of the Tamil population was estimated to have fled the island, with over a million people – from all ethnic groups – temporarily or permanently displaced. A 1991 report estimated that perhaps ten percent of the population had been displaced. Sri Lanka is one of the most heavily landmined countries in the world.

This is a far cry from the revolutionary panache suggested by M.I.A.’s work. Some of the associative imagery of “Galang” and “Sunshowers” implies a connection to the Palestinian Intifada, the Zapatistas, the Black Panthers, and the anti-Apartheid movement. Some see these as a valid comparisons; Dr. Dagmar Hellmann-Rajanayagam notes, “The LTTE also fights against linguistic, ethnic and class/caste discrimination and oppression. The methods might be open to question, the aim is certainly not.” M.R. Narayan Swamy, author of Inside an Elusive Mind, the first biography of LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, disagrees, citing the LTTE’s murderous reputation. “This does not mean that LTTE has no support; on the contrary it does. It controls vast areas in Sri Lanka’s north and rules a de facto Tamil Eelam. But it will be very difficult to say how much of the support it enjoys comes out of genuine respect or genuine fear. The support is real, and so is the fear.”

M.I.A.’s stance, inevitably, is more complicated – and conflicted – than critics suggest, not least because of family involvement. Her father’s group, EROS, reached a working arrangement with the LTTE as the other groups were being eliminated. When Arular returned to Sri Lanka in 1976, he was apparently in close contact with Prabhakaran; according to some sources, EROS established a training camp at a farm in Kannady which was used by the LTTE. Arular and Prabhakaran are reported to have shared bomb-making knowledge, equipment, and chemicals. According to M.R. Narayan Swamy, “Arular was never in LTTE. Yes, he was with EROS in the early stages, but he left it but kept in touch with most of the actors in the militancy scene.” Arular’s official biography – which is to say, the one that appears on the jackets of his books – insists that he now writes history, and has mediated between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE. In any event, relations between M.I.A. and her father, whom she has referred to as “insane”, are not close. She has not seen him since 1995. Arular is titled in an apparent attempt to bait him, citing her mother’s complaint that “the only thing he ever gave you was your name”. She has doggedly refused his request to change it.

What’s more, if tiger imagery does predominate M.I.A.’s vision of the world, it’s not necessarily advocacy. The overdominant LTTE imagery – if indeed it is that – does accurately reflect the totalitarian hegemony that the LTTE and Prabhakaran exercise over the northern part of the island, and Tamil nationalism as a whole. The tiger, as a symbol, has been associated with Tamil nationalism for centuries; her use of it does not necessarily signal support for LTTE, though the gesture may be somewhat naive.

But it’s an issue that goes to the heart of her identity as an artist. She sees herself not as a individual, but a spokesperson. “In the beginning they told me [in England] that being an artist was about being an individual and reflecting society. And in Sri Lanka I was brought up with a different value system, which was that you talk for other people, and it’s always 'we’. It’s never 'me’. You never think selfishly. Nobody cares, nobody wants to hear what your particular opinion is. It’s the opinions of thousands that count.” Hence the urgency: “It’s too soon for me to get censored before people know what I’m talking about. There’s so much confusion about what I stand for and what I’m saying that that’s the whole point: there have to be discussions; there has to be people talking, and there has to be young people talking about politics if they want. They have to have a chance to hear different opinions. And that’s really what it’s about.”

There’s a personal edge to this, of course: Maya was personally caught up in Sri Lanka’s violence, and she’s aware of the impetus that experience gave her. But the instinct is deeply intertwined with an instinct to represent others. “I feel the reason why I’m really like outspoken and stuff is because all of these things were inflicted upon me, and I never went and caused any trouble, you know? I just feel like I was kind of skipping along in some country and somebody decides to drop a bomb and shake up my life and then it’s all been survival from then on. And that’s the reality for thousands – and millions – of people today. Why should I get censored for talking about a life that half the time I didn’t choose to live?”

Given the extent to which her viewpoint is grounded in personal experience, what is impressive about the maturity of her songwriting is her ability to write convincingly in the third person. “Sunshowers”, for instance, outlines – with some economy – the fate of a victim of racial profiling who is not a clear stand-in for either herself or her father.

There’s a sense, too, that western critics (such as they are) are simply missing the point when they object to the sense of indiscriminate violence in her music. Violence is not often represented in Western popular music; where it is it tends to be – as in gangsta rap, say, or death metal – ritualized at source and translated into a marketable commodity. Violence in the western popular imagination is abstract, organized, refined. In much of the developing world, Sri Lanka in particular, the experience of the last few decades has been one of arbitrary, unannounced, and spectacular slaughter. M.I.A.’s music and politics might sound like an assault without coherence or strategy; that doesn’t necessarily mean they lack realism.

Ruben Fleischer, who directed “Galang”, thinks “the principle idea behind M.I.A.’s artwork is to have pretty heavy/political ideas, but to present them in a poppy candy-coated wrapper. So someone might buy her painting because it is pretty to the eye, and not necessarily consider that it is a rebellious image that she is presenting. However, after they’ve had it for a while, they might start to think – why do I have a pink tank on my wall? � I think that ["Galang”] is a very successful video in that we have true images of revolution playing on MTV. However, because there’s lots of pretty colors and a pretty girl dancing, no one blinks an eye. Hopefully we have succeeded in subconsciously starting the revolution.“

The superficiality of M.I.A.’s chosen media – graffiti stencil art and popular music – makes politics a risky business. Her approach is the opposite of that of radical artists like Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino, who followed Franz Fanon in calling for an art that documented resistance while breaking down the barriers between spectator and artist. They called for artistic processes – and exhibition – that involved the audience directly, making them reexamine their role and forge a new, collective, identity. M.I.A.’s art and music, by contrast, are all spectacle. The two-dimensional stencils and the catchy hooks can only subvert the audience’s role after their immediate appeal has worn off, and they lack the breadth to contain a full alternative program. What’s more, the distance that comes from rendering real-world political conflicts in such a stylized, vibrant medium feels very much like the distance afforded by nostalgia, hero-worship, and romanticism. Graffiti – like hip-hop – is a superficial, ephemeral medium, with its own set of artistic risks.

But the realm of the image is what M.I.A. is most determined to contest: the media role models, the conformity of mainstream popular culture. "When [XL] first signed me, they sat me down and they were like, 'You know we only sign artists that are like "fuck you.”’ I was like, 'Hmm. What part of “fuck you” don’t you get about me? Me being on MTV is way more “fuck you” than me not being on MTV.’ Because of where I come from. I haven’t seen anyone like me on there before. And that’s what would be really fun to do.“

The narrow range of images presented by "the commercial media” appalls her. “There’s only so much controlled generic brainwashing you can do. And the thing is it would be fine if the audience weren’t reduced to being so dumb. I feel like they constantly think that we’re just stupid and that all we can handle is more songs about champagne and Bentleys … We don’t all have access to millions of pounds and Bentleys and �50,000 diamond necklaces. Where do those people go to be content with how they live, if constantly we’re being fed images of 'this is what you need to aspire to be; this is what you need to aspire to be?’”

There’s a common thread that runs from her concern with racism to the assumptions made about audiences. It’s prejudice, the ugly side of London’s cosmopolitan mosaic, and the DNA of Sri Lanka’s remorseless conflict. “What I want to say is, just be careful how you judge people, because you never know. And I’m a living proof of that. Every step of the way, people thought I was shittier than I actually was, or people thought I was worse than I was, or people thought I exist as something bad on the planet. Politics shaped that in the beginning for me. But right now it’s just a messy situation. All I want to do is exist as a voice for the other people that you don’t get to hear from. That’s all.”

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