“Unless you have a PHD in politics then don’t step into it. But I stepped into it because I have life experience – I was born into that bullshit.”
MIA is in full swing. The rapper, producer and multicultural mascot is talking sense at the rate of the machine-gun-fire she was forced to grow up with.
For an artist now lauded at the frontline of culture clash and representing the globally disenfranchised – though MIA has an interesting disgust for politics – yet once you wander into her world there’s no camouflaging why.
Even before Maya Arulpragasam had learnt to talk she was embroiled in the political and violent furnace of her Tamil father struggling against the Sinhalese majority rule and aiming to bring his people’s plight in Sri Lanka to an international stage.
I already feel that I am making a political statement by sticking around in music, when I am doing it so differently to everyone else.
Growing up in the marginalised territory south of India, being shelled and shot at until she became an 11-year-old toothless refugee has burnt deep a determination which has forged one of the most refreshing and revolutionary figures in modern music.
“You can’t choose where you are born,” she gripes, “nor who you are born into. But if I have to dig out my experience to explain that you can’t nuke every person with a beard, then I have stand up and say that. No one else will.”
Her back-story makes a mockery of nearly every band’s twee biog. It’s a story well documented at length elsewhere and one we recommend you investigate further. We only have time here for her next epic leap – but for a brief recap sit tight.
Her shadowy father figure gave up his family to try to broker an erstwhile intelligent revolution by founding the E.R.O.S. cell of the Tamil Tigers before his profile made his female family targets. Fleeing with her pregnant mother and sister to India to live in a derelict house, her sister nearly died, thus her mother, sister and newborn brother then fled to London as refugees to be met by council estate poverty, racist attacks and crack heads stealing their few meagre possessions.
Several years later, her growing artistic talents saw Maya blag a St Martin’ College of Art degree, which led to Jude Law becoming her patron, Justine Frischmann her professional saviour and Peaches her fucked-up yet inspirational musical mentor.
This was only the start of her becoming the global figure that is MIA, a persona that’s completely unique on a global level as she makes bold statements denouncing greed, violence and the dark side of westernisation. She has a neat habit as well of making the world seem like a village.
After her crunk, ragga, electro-bastard-dancehall debut ‘Aruler’ shattered the boundaries between several genres in 2002, many expected her to trot off with her Mercury nomination into the melodic arms of Timbaland who was to produce her second LP and into the plush cash and pampering that any R+B star would bitch hell for.
It very nearly happened. Yet complications thankfully forced her hand to independence.
“I didn’t get the US Visa for eight or nine months,” explains Maya. “So I just went off in the opposite direction and just made my album everywhere else. It had already gone too far. I was like this independent entity going around the planet living in dives and bringing back a sound. Whereas Timbaland was the total opposite and a flip side situation to that, in an amazing set-up with a million dollar studio but still getting inspired by the things that I could bring to the table.”
Her new LP named ‘Kala’, out in August on XL, was recorded in Trinidad, India, Australia and Liberia as well as Baltimore and is perhaps one of the most organic albums you’ll ever hear. In Maya’s own words: “I was hanging about listening to people’s CD collections: from the waiter in the restaurant in India to the kid I met on the road. I just got to hang out in different people’s places and speak to them about their favourite songs.”
“It kind of really felt that I was making a big layered marble cake then I sliced it into songs. Then I took these round the world and kept adding to them in lots of different places. I never got the chance to finish any of them when I was in that place because time would run out or there was no electricity.”
One of her album highlights was ‘Boyz’, which came about kinda like this. Having broken up with her man she had come from India to the US where they refused her entry (whether this was on the grounds of her lyrics referring to the PLO, her father’s profile or just plain yank wank whimsy – she didn’t know). Having always lied at school when asked if she was from Trinidad, preferring its allure over the embarrassment of being a refugee, she had developed a burning itch to visit and so said ‘Fuck It!’ and headed off south to the sunshine.
She elaborates further: “Although it sounds like a Brazilian marching band it came out of a real Soca sound. It was like a mash-up of me being in Trinidad with Indian drums because we had just come from India and it was the most representative of what was going on at the time – where I was, how the girls danced and what the boys looked like. I felt like I had done it. After that night I couldn’t work on the song; it was all about those two hours.”
If I have to dig out my experience to explain that you can’t nuke every person with a beard, then I have stand up and say that.
This spontaneous intercontinental cross-pollination and migration sums up perfectly how ‘Kala’ has been constructed and why, not only is MIA breaking down cultural barriers, but also causing positive friction as she clashes continental sounds together to a backdrop of issues comprised of gender, gunshots and genocide.
‘Aruler’ was named after her revolutionary father’s political moniker. At the time she had never properly met her Dad. Instead their relationship was substituted for stolen midnight meetings with him pretending to be her uncle. She named her first LP after him in an attempt to outgun his own name in global fame and make him come to her.
In sharp contrast her second album is named after her Mum. Its sound and shape is much more of a mongrel since it’s comprised of Bollywood disco, Indian drums, Soca, Aboriginal didgeridoo, African chanting, Reggaeton beats and some Baltimore crunk.
Maya the magpie has borrowed much to adorn her musical nest with everything that has shined over the last two years in her travels round the ghettos. Geeks who fear that MIA’s debut was all Diplo and Hollertronix magic you can relax – ‘Kala’ has as much dirty edge as its predecessor as co-producers Switch, Morganics and Blak Starr have retained the filthy lo-fi edge in full effect.
Its homage to Maya’s mother is a crucial pivot in her own development as she tries to move from her father’s shadow, as she explains: “My Mum was just as important. Initially I was going to make an album that was less… political and masculine sounding. My father was obsessed about growing into this world leader and he was into politics and revolution and I felt that I was following in his footsteps and it was a real diss to my mum because it had crippled us so much when we were growing up.”
“And as I got older I started realising this and wanted to turn it around. You know you can start good stuff on your doorstep and be a catalyst for change by affecting just three people that are around you and your kids. Treating your women better. Shit like that.”
As Maya grew up in Sri Lanka, times were hard and the family took pleasure in simple things. Her next single will be called ‘Jimmy’, a part of her history she was keen to bring it to the world. “‘Jimmy’ used to be my song when I was six years old,” she confesses sweetly. “My mum used to hire me out to birthday parties – I used to be a professional dancer. I used to get paid in food, which during the war was a really big deal to have biscuits or eggs, which would cost £10 for one egg! It was really backward like in WWII, so I used to go and dance to ‘Jimmy’ at weddings with a cardboard guitar and do this dance routine and people would give me food and I would take it home.”
Fast-forward 20 years and the young dancer has definitely taken the harder route through the music industry. But then everything is relative. When she first came to the UK she was spat at and kicked and called a Paki. Yet she longed to be from Pakistan as it would have meant her life would have been a lot easier.
This thick skin has allowed her to remain grounded, gave her the appetite to slum it and hang with the people on a street level from Jamaica’s Kingston to Liberia’s Freetown. Her relative experience growing up in a war torn country also makes a mockery of the phrase ‘difficult’ second LP as everything latterly is done without the pedantic nonsense of showbiz.
“It’s real life experiences over shine. Not having any of my equipment or having access to any of my clothes or my ANYTHING. I haven’t been able to stay in my house for a year. Like, I have been sleeping on couches and being in that environment on your second record means I am not saying: ‘Here’s me on a drug binge or living out the rock and roll lifestyle’. I prefer to be frontline and actually being on the ground. Get some power back into it.”
“One of the reasons why this album isn’t as political as it once was going to be is that I already feel that I am making a political statement by sticking around in music, when I am doing it so differently to everyone else. I get everything the wrong way round and I get opportunities to have whatever I want and I reject it and go and do what I am going to do. I don’t know what I am supposed to be doing… It’s still really hard for someone like me to break through.”
So does this mean she’ll be rallying the legions of dispossessed whilst sparking debate through her music in melodic rebellion? Interestingly her approach is quieter. She’ll speak but she won’t scream her frustrations and she hopes her path is calm away from the guns of the past: “I am trying to find something and one day I will get it. Meanwhile it’s about the process and the journey to find these things and try to do something. I don’t have solutions or answers or anything but the process of someone like me even being in the music game is important enough for me to just accept. I have to make stories like mine more familiar and if that’s the case then I need to keep talking about who I am and what I have been through and what I do.”
Asked the final question – if her music could make her listeners do anything what would it be – her response is immediate: “Dance. Just make them feel good. Make them more confident. If they dance then they will feel good and confident when they stop.”
And with this you can almost see the young shy Maya with her cardboard guitar making people jig and cry with joy – a growing star who cares far more about people with nothing than the people with everything, and a girl who’s adamant that when she dances, everything gets better.
