M.I.A. Takes on the World

Watch M.I.A.‘s video “Galang”

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“Galang,” the first single by M.I.A., doesn’t sound like anything you’ve heard before. It has a beat that sounds like it was made in a garbage can. It has a nonsense chorus that won’t leave your head for days. Is it hip-hop? Is it dancehall? Are those Indian bhangra beats? Who made this? Why can’t I stop dancing? Can I hear that again?

M.I.A., otherwise known as 27-year-old Maya Arulpragasam, is Sri Lankan, born in London. After six months in the United Kingdom, her mother and father returned her family to Sri Lanka, where Maya spent the next ten years of her life. During that time, a longstanding conflict between the majority Sinhalese and the insurgent Tamil separatists intensified, breaking out in war in 1983, beginning a two-decade-long conflict that has killed 65,000 people. Her father was one of the founders of the Tamil Tigers, a rebel group that has been classified as terrorists by the U.S. government. Her mother fled Sri Lanka, first taking refuge in India, and later returning to London, where she worked as a minimum-wage seamstress.

In London, Maya went to school, learned English, and found herself drawn into the nascent hip-hop scene. She studied film at St. Martin’s College and was shortlisted for the Alternative Turner Prize for her artwork, which included graffiti-style images inspired by the Tamil uprising. This exposure brokered contacts in Britain’s music scene; a collaboration with Elastica’s Justine Frischmann led to her first songs after Frischmann introduced her to a Roland 505, the ultra-basic beat-making machine she used to start making her own music.

Growing up Brewing up / Guerilla getting trained up / Look out look out / From over the roof top / Competition coming up now / Load up, aim, fire fire, pop – “Fire Fire”

M.I.A.’s first album is titled Arular, from her father’s Tamil Tiger nickname – she has insinuated that it’s not a tribute he’s entirely happy about. Her music is steeped in politics, though she doesn’t have a specific political agenda. She doesn’t advocate terrorism, and seems reluctant to mention specific political views. But neither does she hide her roots.

The smell of the Sri Lankan jungle, the hustle of London streets, and the devastating impact of a car bomb all seamlessly slip into her flow. Her sound feels rootless though it draws equally from an urban, London landscape and the third world. Her sound is like a stew made from bits of her biography. Pull out a lyric and you’re as likely to get a thudding “My finger tips and the lips / do the work yeah / My hips do the flicks / as I walk yeah” as you are to hear her call out “Semi-9 and snipered him / On that wall they posted him / they cornered him / and then just murdered him.” The sound is half-seductive and half-violent, like something we’re used to hearing from 50 Cent, but here coming from the mouth of a girl whose father has been called a terrorist. She reports the violence of her youth with precision and distance, and she wants you to listen.

From Congo to Colombo / Can’t stereotype my thing yo – “Sunshowers”

So far, people have been only too happy to comply. After “Galang” blew up in clubs in London and America, it began threading its way from one mp3 blog to the next, and soon M.I.A. developed a cultish online following. Soon she hooked up with Philadelphia DJ Diplo, and the two partnered to put out a mixtape, Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1 which mixed tracks from Arular with baile funk, dub, dancehall, and American pop stars, including Missy Elliott, Salt ‘n’ Pepa, the Eurythmics, Jay-Z and the Bangles. People who heard it went appropriately crazy.

M.I.A.’s music displays talent of a rare sort—not for a particular sound, but of suggestion—it’s music that wants you smack in the middle of the dance floor, with no room for arguments or pretensions, and then, when you’re shaking it in ways you didn’t know you could, her music slides up behind you and sticks its forked tongue in your ear, whispering its life story, terrible and wonderful.

CP: Can you explain briefly the political situation in Sri Lanka when you grew up?

MIA: I can only tell it from my perspective. I just remember coming to Sri Lanka, going to school and there was a lot of talk of stuff happening at the time but we were kind of kept away from it. But I remember the minute things changed and politics kind of overtook everybody’s life. The village I used to live in, we were hearing bombs go off and windows would shake and rattle. We used to come outside the house and just lay by the moonlight all night. Soon it was like a full-on war between the Tamils and the Sinhalese. Before then it was just little outbreaks and riots going on. I remember sitting and watching a truck go by, full of those Tamil boys and you knew that if they clapped and sang on the way home at, like, two in the morning, you knew we were all right. But if we didn’t hear anything when they went by, or you didn’t hear them go by, then we knew we had to basically pack our stuff and go. That’s probably when things changed and it became real. It affected your school life, your relatives, your whole structure, basically.

CP: It has become, and partly because of your exposure, a little bit more widely known, but you have a unique perspective, not to mention a soapbox.

MIA: But I can only talk about it from my point of view, so I know from that moment what it was like to try and get out and try and go to school and try and do stuff. The cost of food shot up through the roof and everything became on budget or hard to get.

CP: Something that comes across in your songs is the sense of not wanting to speak for a lot of people or put across an iconic character. Most rap tends to be all about the rapper: you hear a lot of hip-hop where somebody is trying to lift an entire community onto their back or elevate themselves above it.

MIA: I think ultimately what I’m interested in is how complex life is for one person given whatever environment or whatever set of [circumstances] you have to survive in. And I think I just want to point out how complex things can be. How drastic my experience was living and going to school in Sri Lanka. We used to have training at school to avoid bullets. The army used to still come around my school because I went to a Tamil convent so it was one of the main targets. And having something like that to experience and then coming to England and you get something totally opposite. But they both make up my identity. Then, where do you stand at this moment in time when the world is all about dividing this and that and making life really simple when who you are isn’t really simple? It just seems that if you’re not down with the system and you’re not down with that way of thinking, then you’re the other and you’re just a reject. I really want to point out that it’s more complicated than that. You’re constantly torn between your views and just having to survive.

CP: When did you first hear hip-hop? Do you remember the experience?

MIA: I think it was pretty soon after I came to England. When I came to England I was like, OK, I’m going to find out what all the kids are into and what’s going on and everything just seemed so beyond me. I really couldn’t relate to pop music in any way at the time. But I tried. Then somebody stole my radio: that was the first time I heard hip-hop. I would look out the window at the neighbors and all the boys hanging out. They were really cool; I wondered what was going on with them. And basically it was hip-hop that was going on. It was a brand new language. It was new for England, too. It really felt like we were all in it together and just learning it for the first time. It just felt like I was on the right side.

Before I started listening to hip-hop, I was just getting on the tube or the bus and people would look at me and be, like, “Paki.” After I started wearing baggy jeans and stuff, they started being prejudiced against hip-hop. It felt like the same sort of thing, but one was about what I was into at the time and the other was based on race.

CP: But the racial discrimination must have been much harder to take?

MIA: The discrimination around hip-hop was really fun at the time because as a teenager it was about having a secret club. Hip-hop was still underground, something new to England, so it felt like we had a really amazing new club and didn’t care how we got treated. We got so much pleasure out of it.

CP: How would you describe your music?

MIA: I don’t know; it’s really difficult. I just try to put it down to I’m trying to express myself with respect to all the things that I’ve been through. And taking into account all the sounds that accompanied all those experiences. The things that happened to me have all left their own engraving on my life. And each one had a soundtrack. That’s how I see it. And then I put the whole soundtrack together and came up with another soundtrack. You need to make sure that you have power over your life at all times. I need to use whatever happened in my life and make sense out of it, and turn it into something positive.

People started telling me that the experiences I have had along the way should be a negative thing in your life. That they will fuck you up for the rest of your life. And I really didn’t want it to be like that. I wanted to find a way to make all those things a positive thing, and if it means using it as fuel for my creativity, then that’s a brilliant thing to learn for myself. And that way, I can deal with pretty much anything that happens.

CP: My impression of your record is—I don’t want to say that it’s faceless, it seems to have come from somewhere uniquely underground. Like it could have floated in from anyplace or no place.

MIA: I wanted my music to not have a face. Because I don’t. I could fall into any one of the brackets that people put up. I don’t know why a lot of people fly the flag for compartmentalizing and tying you to a certain box. Because it’s not realistic. And if we do that I think we’re going to shoot ourselves in the foot because life is evolving way too fast for that. Information, technology, spending so much money on our safety, all leads to us opening up and being global or whatever. I don’t know why everybody wants me to be just grime or just dancehall or just hip-hop when it doesn’t reflect reality at all. On a very simple level, you wake up in the morning and go into a Moroccan café and then a Chinese restaurant and then you listen to hip-hop on the bus and then you get off and meet someone else who is in a different kind of band. You come across so many different people; there are so many ethnic cultures where I’m living. Especially in the West we draw from so many cultures. So why in music do we strive to do the opposite, which is separate rather than reflect how things are really going?

CP: So how do you move toward that ideal without sacrificing your personal perspective? It seems like it might be easy to get lost in that mix. Do you worry that people won’t listen because your music is so hard to pin down?

MIA: If I made it easy for [people to decide] where to put me in a record store, then I wouldn’t have been real as an artist. If you’re going to put a floor and a ceiling to people’s creativity, and their freedom of speech or the way they express themselves, [all] based on money and marketing, then we should talk about that. Because how real is the rest of the shit you’re listening to, I want to know. Whatever comes out of my mouth is what comes out and I just have to be true to that. Whatever sounds I get stimulated by is whatever sounds I get stimulated by. I’m open-minded and I judge things not based on how cool something is that year or what category it belongs in at a shop. It’s not right. I am talking to you from London on a telephone and all around me are different people with different backgrounds. I think it’s ironic that I’m actually 100% Sri Lankan but a lot of people I know are a mixture of so many different cultures but I’m the one coming up talking about it. Coming from lots of different cultures—we have to make that an easy thing for people to live by. That’s the future, really.

Videos from the CD Arular (XL/Beggars). Any reproduction, publication, or further distribution or public exhibition of this video in whole or in part is strictly prohibited.

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