What were the two titles M.I.A.'s official Myspace used for the album?
The album was originally set to be released on 29 June 2010, but in May M.I.A.'s record label announced a new release date of 13 July. In late April, the artist posted a twitpic of the track listing for the new album. She also commented that at the time she was "open to suggestions" regarding the album's title. Two weeks later, a blog posting on her record label's official website revealed that the album would be entitled /\/\/\Y/\, the punctuation marks spelling Maya, M.I.A.'s own forename. The title follows on from previous albums named after her father (2005's Arular) and mother (2007's Kala). Some reviewers used the stylised title while others did not. M.I.A.'s official Myspace page uses both titles. The album was released in conventional physical and digital formats and as an iTunes LP.The album's cover features the singer's face almost completely hidden by YouTube player bars. MTV's Kyle Anderson described the cover, which was previewed in June 2010, as "a typically busy, trippy, disorienting piece of art" and speculated that it might be "a statement about 21st century privacy". Additional art direction for the album was provided by Aaron Parsons. M.I.A. used her mother's Tamil phonebook to find a wedding photographer to provide images for the album. Photographers for the album were Ravi Thiagaraja, M.I.A. and Jamie Martinez. Elements of the artwork had previously been used in one of a series of billboard images, all designed by musicians, which were projected onto landmarks in London by a guerrilla project called BillBored during the 2010 British general election. The deluxe edition of the album features a lenticular slipcase. Music website Prefix listed it as one of the 10 worst album covers of 2010, likening it to a "child's first computer-class-assignment".When questioned about the difficulty of finding her album title on search engines such as Google, she noted that she chose to use forward slashes and backward slashes due to their ease at being typed and because she liked the way the album title looked on music players such as iTunes. She also suggested that it was a deliberate attempt to avoid detection by internet search engines. The Guardian's Sian Rowe commented that M.I.A.'s deliberate "shrinking away from a mainstream audience" by the use of difficult, unsearchable symbols was part of a growing new underground scene perhaps trying to create a "generation gap", where only "the youngest and the most enthusiastic" would seek out such band names by reading the right online sources.
/\/\/\Y/\ Maya