M.I.A.
By: Tim Noakes
Tags: Politics, Music, War

M.I.A.

Hailed as a pop star but banned from YouTube, musical anarchist M.I.A. is back to wage war over the internet. We meet her to talk beats, bombs and babies.

Most pop stars strive for an easy life, but not Maya Arulpragasam. Since first emerging from Central St Martins as the fluro-clad digi-punk banshee M.I.A, she has championed musical and political underdogs across the third world, and created a sonic template that owes as much to didgeridoos and baile funk as it does dubstep and swaggadocious hip hop. In the process she’s tormented the Sri Lankan government, been banned from entering America and then forbidden to leave it, set up her own N.E.E.T recording label, and, most memorably, performed live at the Grammys with Jay-Z, Lil Wayne and pals on the eve of giving birth to her son, Ikhyd.

Next month the controversial 34-year-old returns with her third album, the claustrophobic, self titled /\/\/\Y/\. Recorded while she was locked down in LA by Homeland Security, it features beats from dubstep wobble master Rusko, Bmore club king Blaqstarr, Sleigh Bells’s Derek E Miller, Sepultura’s Igor Cavalera, and long term collaborators Diplo and Switch. Heaving with deeper social paranoia than both Kala and Arular, /\/\/\Y/\ focuses on the dark side of internet data collection and her experiences of “growing up in the digital ruckus”. It starts off with “The Message”, an update of the “Dry Bones” nursery rhyme — “Headphoneconnectstotheneckbone, neck bone connects to the armbone, armboneconnects to thehandbone, hand bone connects to the internet, connects to the Google, connects to the government…” It’s an apt beginning to an album whose typographic title renders it unrecognisable by Google search engines.

When Dazed met Maya to talk about her long-awaited follow up to “Paper Planes”, she was preparing for the premiere of Romain Gavras’s video for “Born Free”, the Suicide-sampling first single off /\/\/\Y/\. But she coyly refused to reveal anything about its plot, smirking, “You’ll have to wait and see…” A week later, all hell broke loose. Revolving around a gang of anarchic ginger kids who get rounded up by mercenaries and brutally slaughtered in a minefield, the clip was promptly banned from YouTube and sparked debates about censorship and artistic taste, with The Guardian calling it a “crude metaphor for the treatment of minorities”. When our paths crossed again a few days later, Maya and Ikhyd were preparing to fly back to America after being granted permission to re-enter the country after months of intense visa negotiations.

Do you think your immigration officer actually saw the “Born Free” video before they gave you the visa?

M.I.A: I think so. It was issued it on the 27th, the day after it went out. It was sooo funny that it was issued on that day. They hadn’t up to that point. So it was like they waited for it. It’s weird, but it’s art.

Do you feel intimidated by America?

M.I.A: No. I have issues with bureaucracy. The video was not directly American related or anything to do with the video, I just shot it there. I think you could take it on that level but it could be interpreted as whatever.

At any point did you think that you had gone too far?

M.I.A: No I don’t think people go far enough on things. It was really just more about keeping it pure and not censoring the art in any way. We’ve had to deal with a lot of censorship.

Do you find it ironic that Google caused this massive commotion about being censored in China, yet they censor your art?

M.I.A: Yeah, I think that is interesting. I have seen way more shocking and intense things on YouTube. We saw Saddam Hussein being hung on YouTube and during the end of the war in Sri Lanka, the army tortured and mutilated people and celebrated by putting up horrific videos on YouTube. Coming from that political place, there is some confusion about censorship. But when it comes from a creative place there seems to be more of a hoo-ha about it, which is really strange.

Do you think that people have become almost desensitised to images of death and destruction?

M.I.A: I think they want us to believe that we have become desensitised, but there is still a choice an individual should have. Our generation is the one after apathy. We’ve already had the apathetic ones in the 90s but it’s really hard for me to be like, ‘This is shit, no one gives a shit, what can we do?’ No. Every day something can change and every day some little trigger can change the way somebody thinks. People should be okay with discussing that shit. I was hearing just yesterday that the government

Did you want to cause an uproar?

M.I.A: I decided that I would have nothing to do with it. I handed it over to a lunatic French guy.

It sometimes seems like you strive to make things tough for yourself…

M.I.A: Nooo! Something was happening and I talked about it. Violence has affected my life and what has happened to me. I’ve grown up in England since I was ten years old and none of my friends had any connections to politics or wanted to talk about it. It’s not a subject I could bring up in the pub. But that is who I am. If you see something with your own eyes you’re not going to say that it didn’t happen. One day it will become impossible to get it through to people, it will become illegal to say it. Every day it’s either controversial or it’s illegal or it’s fucked up and it looks like I am making it hard for myself but it’s not, it’s just an experiment. I wonder how long I can tell the truth for?

“Whatever is a part of your life, it’s ok for you to puke it out and regurgitate some of it” — M.I.A

Last year the Sri Lankan Foreign Secretary said that you should stick to music and not politics. How did you respond to that?

M.I.A: I’m not doing it in a Bono way, like, ‘We must save Africa.’ I just saw something when I was eight and they didn’t kill me. I am alive to say this is what happened, and to not have that right just because I make music now is really shit. I am not coming out as a political preacher. I survived it and I’m going to tell you my account of it, just like Jewish people get to talk about the Holocaust and we embrace it. Whatever is a part of your life, it’s okay for you to puke it out and regurgitate some of it. I don’t really separate it in my brain.

Are you an anarchist?

M.I.A: Ben’s (Braff, M.I.A’s fiancé) family call me the agitator.

So you’re not an anarchist?

M.I.A: I don’t know. It’s a weird word. I’m the edge finder, that’s what I am. I like to find the edges on things, and that is what I have always tried to do because nowadays there are lots of things coming at us from many different angles, we are fed so much different propaganda. In one of Dazed’s issues, Gorillaz summed up the decade by saying that we are becoming a nation of ‘voyeurs and typists’. I think that is 100 per cent true. If we are voyeurs and typists, then the typists need to write history with some integrity and the voyeurs need to see things without the walls.