M.I.A. - I Fought The Pop (And The Pop Won)

In 2022 Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam turned 47. She's a striking woman, with an exotic, brazen charm, and she looks at least ten years younger than her age; known by her stage name M.I.A., she's a major popstar still famous today, even if her period of greatest visibility can now be considered behind her. Besides being a "pop" singer - and indeed one of the most influential of the last fifteen years - M.I.A. is also something else: a visual artist, a director of videos and documentaries, a fashion designer, a voice of dissent that often collides with the very show business she has at times shown she can coexist with quite comfortably. And it's only by considering all these things together, bearing in mind that she has from the very start followed a rather singular path inside and outside the wonderful, cruel world of pop music, that one can understand the difference between this artist and other peers and friends of hers, be they Madonna or Rihanna, Beyoncé or Nicki Minaj.

To try to frame M.I.A.'s modus operandi, it might help to borrow a definition applied to the Clash, one of her favorite bands. When they signed to Cbs in 1977, they were scornfully branded "corporate punks," a label meant to certify the betrayal of their "ideals" in the name of money. Aside from the fact that the band's career would go on to disprove such a clear-cut judgment, there remains nonetheless the romantic idea that a true protest singer should stay clear of the temptations and compromises tied to showbiz and the music industry. M.I.A., on the other hand, seems to have embraced that very contemptuous label, down to its most intimate contradictions: when it comes to music, she moves indifferently between mega-studios and glittering collaborations and work with obscure Anglo-Nigerian rappers or sessions in cockroach-infested recording studios; her idea of fashion is a flashy patchwork look pulled from every street in the world, chewed over and personalized with uncommon taste, yet she doesn't shy away from collaborations with Versace and Moschino or invitations to the most exclusive runway shows. Or again, what to make of her highly controversial stances against the internet and the media, paired with a relentless, massive use of Twitter-Facebook-Instagram-and so on?

So: faced with the usual either-or choices, M.I.A. seems unable, or unwilling, to pick a side. As a result, she ends up embodying a cross-section of the artistic, musical, even social themes of the new millennium - so intricate and fluid at once - which she has traced out through her music and her other forms of expression, finding the only way to tell that story is to take it all on fully, without leaving anything out. Being a popstar through and through, yet also a fierce advocate for social causes, even controversial ones, voiced fearlessly and with undimmed conviction over the years, it's no surprise that she's been attacked from many quarters as a poseur, a fake crusader, even as a supporter of terrorism. Nor is it surprising that, compared to the similar figures mentioned above - Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Madonna, or the new names of recent years - her popularity, even online, is decidedly lower, despite her constant presence; not unrelated to this is what happened between 2010 and 2012, which heavily cut into her audience, especially in the US. Yet these are, on the other hand, the very same things that confirm once again her depth and courage. In short, hers is certainly a story worth telling.

Mathangi Arulpragasam was born in England in 1975, to a family originally from Sri Lanka. A few months after her birth they returned there, staying for the following ten years. She is the daughter of a member of the Tamil Tigers, a revolutionary movement that tried to overthrow the existing government, deemed too harsh and repressive toward the Tamil population, who live in one part of the island as well as in India. During those years Mathangi, her mother and her two siblings moved around frequently because of the ongoing civil war, including stints in India, and had to deal with hardship - such as living in a house with no running water - and dangerous situations, like being caught in the middle of a shootout at school.

Around 1986 the family members, without the father, who had been on the run for years, finally managed, after five failed attempts, to return to Britain and obtain political refugee status. Maya (as she decided to call herself for convenience) attended school in London, learned English, which before she had only known through the handful of Western songs she'd heard in Sri Lanka, and grew up in an environment that was lively and full of stimulation, but also rife with creeping racism; despite the family's financial hardship, she managed to enroll in a prestigious art school, Central Saint Martins.

Her first artistic life began with pop- and street-inspired graphic work made using various media, from painting to graffiti to stencil art; these are pieces rich in acid, fluorescent colors in which she mixes everything together, from images of weapons and tanks to flags to elaborate lettering, to old-style digital graphics, alongside references to her culture of origin and the civil war raging in Sri Lanka. They draw a great deal of interest, so much so that in 2000 she manages to compete for the Alternative Turner Prize, an important competition for young artists. That's how she meets Justine Frischmann[1], leader of the band Elastica, who commissions her to create the artwork for her record The Menace, as well as to make a documentary that was later shelved, and then convinces her to write music of her own, teaching her the basics of the Roland MC-505 sequencer. Despite her uncertainties, her tracks begin to take shape, and a US tour supporting Peaches, the foul-mouthed, talented dance-electro singer (a genre she knew well from her time in London's lively clubs), gives her a chance to put what she's learned to the test. Her career takes a turn with an uncategorizable song as irresistible as it is simple in structure, "Galang". Released on a self-produced EP in a run of just 500 copies, it starts making the rounds in London clubs and gaining ever-growing success.

M.I.A., whose stage name initially stood for Missing In Acton, after the London neighborhood where she lived, before morphing into the more conventional Missing In Action, at that point teams up with a young DJ and producer of American origin, Diplo, who like her is combative and attentive to the world's rhythms bastardized with electronic dance music, and events start to speed up. In 2003 "Galang" becomes the next big thing: music magazines and the websites most attuned to trends start promoting her, and M.I.A.'s name gradually spreads to ever-wider audiences.

Having thus overcome her reticence and insecurity about her vocal abilities, Maya throws herself wholeheartedly into making her first album, while in the meantime putting together a mixtape in cahoots with Diplo. The mixtape's title (never officially released due to copyright issues), Piracy Funds Terrorism volume 1, and its cover, apparently a jumble of randomly chosen elements and colors[2], with M.I.A.'s proud, brazen pose in the foreground, are an effective calling card for its contents: free both from the constraints of conventional song structure and from the need to ask other artists' permission for samples, the tracks unfold without interruption, a rhythmic flow of varied tones in which, alongside pieces that would partly make their way onto the debut album, samples from LL Cool J, Bangles, Missy Elliott, Prince or Eurythmics follow one another. Over it all reigns the law of the dancefloor: rhythm is king, bleeps and voices serve the groove, and there's a constant stream of harmonic inventions and mash-ups between different songs; naturally, it's a mixtape conceived for the dancefloor, but it works wonderfully even on a simple, focused listen.

Refugee's rap education: Arular

Her debut album, Arular, produced among others with Frischmann and Diplo, arrives in 2005 on XL, one of the leading labels in the new frontiers of music between dancefloor, electronics and experimentation. The cover art is similar to Piracy Funds Terrorism, the title echoes the name of Arul, her father, as a proud reclaiming of her origins (and he will ask her in vain not to use it), and above all it features a dozen songs that redefine the very concepts of rap, pop, tribal music, grime and electronica. How? By mixing it all together with a verve and a gift for song construction that make people cry miracle.

Arular is a delightful debut, fresh and fragrant with apparently irreconcilable themes. There's something handcrafted about it, something like electronic scavenging, built as it mostly is on the dry, syncopated rhythms of the Roland, often doubled by a voice that snaps out the rhymes just as dryly (favorite subject: self-assertion, hammering home the point that a new boss has arrived on the dancefloor, along with references to her experience as a war refugee) - yet it works beautifully, thanks to rhythms indebted to the streets of Brazil, Africa, a Third World reduced to its essential vital pulse, over which towers a voice still a little unsure of itself, but ready to win you over with its vocal runs atop bright, ringing beds of sound ("Hombre", "Amazon"), its shrieks over Brazilian baile funk rhythms ("Bucky Done Gun"), bouncing Eighties keyboards ("10 Dollars"), unbroken rhythmic-vocal flows ("Bingo"), or again with brief fragments (skits) that introduce the record and punctuate the tracks. It's precisely from these skits that one realizes there's much more here than just the usual rising talent: "Banana (Skit)" and "Dash The Curry (Skit)", introduced by a biting "Refugee education number...", have a bitter, sarcastic lyric about those forced to seek refuge in another country to survive; both in "Banana" ("repeat the word Ba.na.na again and again" to learn English) and in "Dash The Curry", with its deliberately broken but also subtly menacing lyrics, the intent is clearly to portray such people as savages or inferiors, barely able to express themselves, rather than as human beings with a dramatic history and a dignity of their own. All things this young woman lived through firsthand, as she has reiterated in numerous interviews. Ten years later she would note with bitterness that nothing has changed, given the ongoing migrant crisis; but we'll come back to that.

Regardless, one can't help but admire the pure talent that a girl with such a varied cultural background and range of experiences manages to unleash, blending it all together with minimal means and apparent ease. Continuing with the most important songs on the album, besides pointing out the stunning single "Sunshowers" - a rhythm fit for jungle dancers, with its chorus lifted from the Dr. Buzzard Original Savannah Band song of the same name and a nod to the IRA as a call not to give up - there's still "Galang" to mention, the manifesto-song. Obsessively driven by the title word itself, a bit of London slang, it struts along, feisty and pointed, until at a certain moment it opens up into a Tamil chant that first disorients and then enchants. But the video made for the occasion is also worth noting: it shows Maya breaking into dance steps, in a miniskirt or leggings and oversized shirts; sensual, flirtatious but never vulgar, with a disarming freshness, the young M.I.A. (and here you have to do a double take, since she's already around thirty) dances and then multiplies herself amid silhouettes of bombs and tanks, tigers and Tamil flags, stencilled machine guns - in short, her whole graphic arsenal serving as backdrop and frame.

Song and video together are a bombshell, and they prove a few things: that even at this early stage M.I.A. has clear ideas and a strong awareness of her own means, and that for her the work with grainy digital graphics, painting, symbols and colours drawn from the pop imagery of recent decades and from freedom struggles - not to mention the active use of new media, with the Internet just entering its 2.0 phase[3] - forms a single whole with the songs.

In fact, her intense focus on music videos isn't merely a byproduct of her work as a visual artist, but a necessary and complementary extension, alongside the graphics, photos, and so on, that accompany the music. Since she handles nearly all these forms of expression herself, one could say that in certain respects M.I.A. has more in common with J. M. Basquiat, or with figures such as Palestinian artist Emily Jacir, African-American artist Kara Walker, or British artist Isaac Julien - all known for cross-disciplinary work that grapples with the issues tied to their origins - than with Nicki Minaj, despite the undeniable similarities with the latter.

Having addressed this aspect too, which complements her experience with London club culture and her Indian cultural heritage, it remains to place M.I.A.'s musical output, in light of this album, alongside her most important influence: hip-hop. Upon arriving in London, the shock discovery of groups like Public Enemy and N.W.A. meant a great deal to her, and not just on a purely sonic level, but on a cultural one: their expression of unease, anger and pride, delivered with rhythm, effectively mirrored the vision on which M.I.A. would go on to build her musical career. And while she can't be considered merely a rapper, often singing as much as rapping, other aspects of hip-hop have been absorbed completely and irrevocably. Such as street credibility, always maintained and asserted in practice, from the use of street sounds to the settings of her videos and the extras used, taken literally from the street itself[4]; such as the dress code, though personalised into a gaudy chaos tied to her Indian roots; such as the heavy use of other people's samples, almost as if reclaiming what was created by the most oppressed populations, stolen by the (white) entertainment industry, and recovered by those with more right to make use of it. Even though it's clear that she too draws from all over the world, from Australia to Africa to South America, all the way to her motherland India; the only difference is that she seems, to some extent, more entitled to do so, by virtue of her origins and the blend of styles she embodies.

What's certain is that we're looking at a new star, one who uses the term "pop" in the broadest sense possible: pop and danceable music to reach the masses, pop visual art as a model for the fluid times we're living through, reworked and upended in real time. The (always pop) sense of a glossy, attractive, recognisable surface, yet one that's constantly tied to deeper, darker meanings. Everything together, everything mixed up and offered all at once. Those indifferent to the context just listen, dance and enjoy it; the critics tear their hair out.

Later on M.I.A. would manage to match these heights again, but the sense of wild innocence and irresistible recklessness that runs through these songs would never be repeated.

A comeback with (more) power: Kala

The follow-up to Arular arrives two years later, again on XL. The chosen title, Kala, is her mother's name, another tribute to her roots. Compared to Arular, the step forward to a new level is evident: it's still pop, still political-sarcastic-engaged, still very rhythmic. But there's much more variety, many more influences, and the spontaneity and freshness have matured into new forms, at times harsh or stark, at other times wrapped in flashes of melody, thanks to the skilful production work, among whose architects are dj Switch, and later, alongside Diplo himself, the Major Lazer crew. Between stories of AK-47s sold in Africa for 20 dollars, children knocking on the door of your Hummer begging for change, traffickers of entry visas for criminals, and tales of children from a remote Australian village, everything gets thrown into the pot on Kala. Amid clucking hens, shouting, a constant rhythm cast in tribal or dance mode or somewhere in between, scenes of life from Brazilian favelas or African/Indian slums, but with a less immediate, more nervy edge, one is left unsettled by the sudden change of style with every track, and by how influences, direct or implied references to synth-pop, indie-rock, Indian-disco songs, resurface with all the hallmarks of originality.

"Bamboo Banga" opens the dance with a fierce, obsessive rhythm, and an urgent, cadenced voice that then gives way to a sample of traditional Tamil music; in its minimal harshness, it's a formidable opening track[5]. "Bird Flu" is clucking and trilling and voices bouncing between hen calls and rolling drums (the Indian urmi percussion, to be precise); "Jimmy" is an act of love towards "Jimmy Jimmy Ajaa Ajaa", a song from her youth taken from the 80s Indian film "Disco Dancer", superbly reinterpreted in eurodisco style, complete with pulsing bass and swooning backing vocals, accompanied by a video in which M.I.A. is dressed in a lavish Indian costume, but set against galaxies or 8-bit characters.

"Mango Pickle Down River" takes a hit from five years earlier by the Wilcannia Mob (kids from a remote Australian village rapping about their lives and dreams), and grafts onto it a vocal contribution from our heroine, as if she were their older sister. "20 Dollars" is one of the standout tracks, among those that take the boldest risks with its references: if the musical theme is drawn from New Order's austere synth-pop classic "Blue Monday", the lyrics of the refrain are taken from the extraordinary "Where Is My Mind", the masterpiece by American band Pixies. What do the two have to do with each other, and what do they have to do with the disenchanted, heavily effects-laden narration of the devastating effects of economic imbalances between the first and third worlds? Nothing, or rather, everything. In liquid society, the boundaries exist only in our heads, and all it takes is a stroke of genius to show that seemingly distant things are in fact perfectly compatible. It's M.I.A.'s refugee education no. 3, once a refugee herself, now a symbol of "World Town" (incidentally, another track featured on Kala).

The album was recorded in India, Australia, Jamaica, Africa, and indeed another great strike is "Hussle", featuring Anglo-Nigerian MC Afrikan Boy, and finally also in the US, in a studio where you could run into people like Will.i.am, Kanye West and Timbaland. The latter deigns to lend his touch to the closing "Come Around", which doesn't have much to do with the rest of the record, but which, precisely for that reason, works well as the seal on a truly international album. The album's promotion relied on the singles "Boys" and "Jimmy", which, while doing reasonably well, didn't quite make a splash; at that point the choice fell on a track put together at the last minute with Diplo, which tells, in a hazy, metaphorical way, of weed, of the illegal trafficking of entry visas into the US[6], and of just how dangerous the immigrants who manage to move around a country undetected in this way can be ("all I want to do is bang! bang! bang! and take your money").

And so "Paper Planes" starts off light, backed by a video in which a delightful M.I.A. shows herself pursuing her "criminal" career selling sandwiches on a New York street corner, ironically paid in cash, watches, necklaces, or dancing in supermarkets or on the street with other girls. Well: it may be the first time since the Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" that a sample has been used so brilliantly; built on the opening riff of the Clash's "Straight To Hell" (and echoing Wreckx-N-Effect's famous "Rumpshaker" in the chorus), "Paper Planes" is the perfect song that makes M.I.A. known the world over. Used in the films "Pineapple Express" and "Slumdog Millionaire", exploited by the wily Kanye West for T.I.'s "Swagga Like Us" featuring Jay-Z and Lil Wayne, nominated for a Grammy, it becomes one of the defining songs of the 2000s, the cherry on top of the masterpiece that is Kala.

Drills, thrills and flipping birds: ///Y/

In 2009 M.I.A. appears among Time magazine's most influential people of the year; with a new album on the horizon, the slow-building and then unstoppable success of "Paper Planes", complete with an astonishing performance at the Grammys (she's pregnant, just days from giving birth) alongside Jay-Z, Lil Wayne and Kanye West, and even an Oscar nomination for her contribution to the "Slumdog Millionaire" soundtrack with the song "O... Saya", which she co-wrote, 2010 seems to be starting under the best possible auspices. Instead, the fragile balance between uncomfortable stances and dazzling successes cracks dangerously. It all begins with an interview by journalist Lynn Hirschberg for the New York Times, which paints a portrait of Maya as a fake radical pontificating about grassroots revolution while eating truffle fries. Her response is scathing: she accuses the journalist of having taken entire passages of conversation out of context and distorted their meaning, publishes her phone number on Twitter and sets off a storm. She manages to be vindicated, complete with corrections from the newspaper, but the damage is done, and her reputation is harmed, perhaps irreversibly.

Honestly, it's hard to believe there's no truth at all behind those accusations. The fact is that, beyond the proven journalistic distortion, Maya's game is a very risky one, and lends itself all too easily to fierce criticism. Ever since the days of Arular, her agit-pop has meant that every move she makes is scrutinised far more closely than usual. Not being your typical pop star, but having experienced firsthand the lopsided relationship between a cynical, well-fed West and exploited, marginalised emerging countries, she carries a weight of suffering similar to, yet at the same time deeper than, that of certain ghetto rappers, and in her lyrics this comes through none too subtly; but beyond that, she always pays the price for being foreign, as if it were a mark of shame. Her being fully Western, while never forgetting her origins, and her constant denunciation of the hypocrisies and injustices still perpetrated around the world, and particularly in her homeland, Sri Lanka, make her an all-too-visible target for the barbs of hypocrites, racists, or simply the ignorant. Add to this her status as a proud, sensual woman who refuses to bow to sordid sexist stereotypes, helped also by an impeccable control over her physical image[7], and the meaning of her new work becomes much clearer.

At the end of 2010 comes ///Y/, her third album, released on XL as well as on her own label N.E.E.T. and through the US giant Interscope. Deliberately titled this way, to make it impossible to search for on Google (which doesn't accept those symbols), ///Y/ is more than just the difficult third album: it's a record with dark, obsessive tones, alternating occasional pop songs with tracks of sharp, saturated sound that at times push all the way to industrial shrieking. Once again, several themes converge in this rather forbidding record, given the kind of music usually associated with her; they can be summed up in a few words: chaos, rejection, refusal. Within the space of a few years, Maya has gone from anonymity, with all the freedom that condition allows, to being under the spotlight of the entire world. She partly adapted (and even felt at ease with it), but in the end the pressure must have become too much for her, and the compromises demanded clearly unacceptable. Reading the lyrics, the common thread seems to be a harsh self-analysis, a questioning of her own condition as a public figure misrepresented or distorted by the falsehoods of the web or the press, a two-dimensional figure onto which people project their own needs, physical ones included, a foreigner to be regarded with suspicion regardless. The Maya of the title is thus broken down into twelve different fragments, and the music necessarily follows this hidden thread.

Starting with the indictment of new media and Google in particular (the opening "The Message"), for the use they make of data gathered from unwitting users, and at the same time for the disinformation lurking behind the apparent ease of finding data and news, the record moves through sonic assaults like the drilling noises raging through "Steppin Up" or the drunken electronoise of "Teqkilla", the wavering rhythms of "Lovalot" and the fractured ones of "It Iz What It Iz", the cover of an old synth-pop hit by Spectral Display turned into underwater reggae ("It Takes A Muscle"), another sharp assault on the ears ("Meds And Feds"), or the vibrant Beyoncé-style R'n'B of "Tell Me Why". The latter, with its ghostly backing vocals, is one of the few genuinely pop interludes on the album, alongside the single "XXXO", the catchiest track, one whose vocal delivery and song structure even recall Britney Spears.

But it's another single that defines ///Y/, for better or worse, and we're talking about "Born Free". Built on the foundation of "Ghost Rider" by Suicide, with its punk rhythm and filtered vocals, "Born Free" is a solid jolt, but it pales next to the video that accompanies it. Directed by Romain Gavras, son of Costantin "Costa" Gavras, it shows the brutal round-up operations of a military force bearing US insignia against anyone with red hair. Modeled on a documentary of the time exposing the extermination of the Tamil population by the Sri Lankan government (or alternatively the repressions in Northern Ireland, sources disagree), the "Born Free" video was temporarily banned from YouTube and buried under criticism, clearly striking a raw nerve[8].

All in all, ///Y/ bears the marks of the crisis it was born into, and feels immersed in a chaos impossible to untangle, as is also evident from the booklet accompanying the CD, an explosion of manic digital graphics with concentric computer windows, glittery, garish fonts, badly cropped photos, and lyrics drowned in the mess. Despite these consonances/dissonances — proof of a clear underlying concept in M.I.A.'s mind, and of her will to treat each work as the sum of inseparable parts — the album ultimately doesn't feel fully focused as it leaps between conspiracy theories, fierce self-awareness and occasional moments of calm (again, the dreamy "Gravity" that closes the album); there's simply too much going on, and the underlying schizophrenia, admitted by its own author in the first place, means it's met by critics with mixed reactions, ranging from harsh pans to enthusiastic praise. Even so, it enjoys solid initial success, if not a lasting one. The Deluxe edition includes four additional tracks following the same path; among these, "Believer", featuring rapper Blaqstarr, deserves a mention.

In 2011 M.I.A. appears on Madonna's new single, "Gimme All Your Luvin", alongside Nicki Minaj. The high-energy song moves within Madonna's coordinates of that period, and isn't exactly one of her finest; what's genuinely amusing is the video, in which the two rappers back up Ciccone dressed as cheerleaders: while Minaj smiles her way through the callipygian-doll routine, M.I.A. can't hide her proud, steady gaze, marking a distance that is first and foremost one of approach. In February of the following year the song is released and the trio performs at what is, religiously speaking, the most important secular event in the US, the Super Bowl final, which inspired the video mentioned above. And it's here that M.I.A. truly makes herself known: during the performance of "Gimme All Your Luvin", the Tamil tigress flashes the middle finger at the camera in front of more than 110 million viewers[9]. All hell breaks loose: such a blasphemy sets off an insane uproar, given the event's terrifying economic stakes. The NFL launches a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against M.I.A., compounded by the disapproval of the other two singers present (Madonna especially, who as an old fox knows exactly how scandal mechanics work and is perfectly aware that her scene was stolen by her protégée); the case will only be settled privately in 2015. It's perhaps the final nail in the coffin for her chances of success in the United States (where she has meanwhile settled in Los Angeles, and where she continues to have entry visa issues), and another video of hers, also from 2012, certainly won't help matters.

Preach like a priest, sing like a whore: Matangi

The contract with Interscope means, among other things, that M.I.A. has to fall into line, because artistic independence, advocacy for oppressed Tamils and all the rest are fine, but records need to sell. This translates into fights, mutual threats and delay after delay. In fact, M.I.A.'s last sign of musical life had been another mixtape, Viki Leekx, available as a free download from her website on December 31, 2010. A clear homage to the WikiLeaks earthquake and its mastermind Julian Assange, who had become her pen pal, Viki Leekx is another taste of M.I.A.'s ability to make you move your ass, with the conviction that your head would follow. Among its tracks is also the first version of "Bad Girls", an interesting mix of dancehall and bhangra, dating all the way back to 2007 and credited to Danja, M.I.A. and Marcella Araica; a track that will come to matter a great deal in the future.

In 2013 the fourth official album, Matangi, finally arrives. The title isn't just the usual self-reference, but also a tribute to the Hindu goddess of the same name, patroness of music and the arts, who dwells among the untouchables, the lowest caste in the Indian social scale: an image that fully matches how she feels deep down.

Matangi, worked on among others by PartySquad, Switch, her brother Sugu and Hit-Boy, formally appears as an evolution in M.I.A.'s syncretic style, a return to more danceable moods far from the wreckage of ///Y/. The problem is that its excessive polish and finish make it look like a normalization of the music she's made up to that point; its predecessor, flaws and all, still showed an unruly vitality. Matangi, by contrast, feels like a tiger with its claws filed down; the songs here, lovely as they are, some of them truly special, rarely give off that sense of wild exuberance, beyond the aggressive electro sound. Sure, the reggae flavor of "Double Bubble Trouble" (a nod to Shampoo's hit "Trouble") is infectious, the constant Indian references (from the intro "Karmageddon" to the cybernetic "Warriors") are well woven into the context, "Come Walk With Me" with its melodic echo of Blur's "Charmless Man" works, the pompous, Lady Gaga-esque rhythmic obsession of "Y.A.L.A."[10] is perfect for the dancefloor, and the sarcastic "Boom Skit" brings a smile in recalling the Super Bowl performance.

Something important seems to have been lost, though, in the exhausting battle against the system; or maybe times have simply changed, and the sonic innovation she embodied so well has become an integral part of today's music, making the popstar look like one among many[11]. That said, Matangi can still be considered a positive work, in the broadest sense of the term[12], thanks to its underlying cohesion and a handful of standout songs that elevate it. Like "Bring the Noize", electro rap with machine-gun rhymes, as colorful as her fuchsia wig in the video; or "Exodus" (revisited as "Sexodus" at the end of the album), a dreamy track echoing The Weeknd's "Lonely Star". Or, above all, the already mentioned "Bad Girls".

Released as a single back in 2012, a classic killer track, "Bad Girls" is built like a textbook perfect pop song: a magical interlocking of rhythm and verse, a vaguely Indian backing track with a hypnotic refrain and a mesmerizing flow. But what makes "Bad Girls" essential to M.I.A.'s career is once again the video that accompanies it, again directed by Romain Gavras. Picture a large group of young men and women admiring the car stunts of reckless drivers or extreme tuning jobs pushed to the outer limits of trashiness, ending in a glorious finale where everyone dances to the song. A plot we've seen a thousand times in rap videos, one might say. Well: the video was shot in Morocco, but conceived with Saudi Arabia in mind; the stunts are performed by women dressed in brightly colored niqabs[13], watched by men in Arab robes, at first puzzled, then thrilled; and directing it all is M.I.A. herself, balancing a BMW on two wheels, or leading a menacing caravan of Arabs and dance warriors armed with Kalashnikovs.

In these four minutes we witness a spectacular overturning of stereotypes and decontextualizations, from the dualism between masculine and feminine to that between East and West, from carefree pop to militant commitment, striking enough to be hailed as a masterpiece. Or to spark real outrage, especially in the United States, where the scars of September 11 and the resulting fear of Islamic terrorism are still present. And here she is showing that they are actually exactly the same as us, in their desire and expression of dancing and having fun. Conceptually, "Bad Girls", song and video together, is one of the most striking achievements obtainable without resorting to cheap sex-shock-gore effects, and remains an expression of pop art of a kind truly rarely seen. The video earns numerous nominations for prestigious awards, and even though it ultimately wins only the MTV award for direction, there's no doubt it can be considered a landmark of the genre.

The inverted borders of M.I.A.: A.I.M.

After the Matangi world tour, M.I.A. stays silent until 2015. Then, little by little, she begins to let slip some signs of her new steps: it starts with the streaming of "Can See Can Do", a hypnotic, pounding dance track that adds nothing new to her output. After the collaboration with Gener8ion on the song "The New International Sound Pt II" (with a phantasmagoric video featuring 36,000 Chinese athletes filmed between locker rooms and incredible choreographies), there follows the release of a mysterious "Matahdatah Scroll 1: Broader Than A Border", which combines into a single video the new "Swords" (hip-hop+machete+bhangra dance) and the old "Warriors", from Matangi. While the first shows young Indian women dancing with blades or sticks, interspersed with glimpses of today's evocative India, caught between crumbling streets and deep religiosity, when the second track kicks in it's the turn of a tarantella-like African dancer. There should have been another video, shot in Africa, tied to the song "Platforms", but it was pulled for cultural appropriation[14]; which, coming from M.I.A., does in fact feel like a twist of irony or poetic justice.

In November of that same year, though, the newly-turned-forty artist plays her ace. And with "Borders", once again, the spotlight and the controversy flare up blindingly. Released through Apple's music service, and only later made available on the artist's VEVO channel, "Borders" updates the M.I.A. sound with more minimal, solemn, mournful tones, with the ever-present Eastern sample running through the track, dry trap rhythms with frenetic spikes, and a video — directed by M.I.A. herself, like her most recent releases — where the message is clearer and sharper, for once without the need for layers or metaphors. Dedicated to the plight of refugees, Syrians above all, fleeing theaters of war, the true socio-political leitmotif of 2015, the "Borders" clip shows them as a choreographed mass of figures filling small boats, arranging themselves into the shape of a ship on the beach like dominoes, struggling to scale hideous metal barriers, forming endless self-moving lines between sand and sea. Among them, like them, the only woman, M.I.A. relentlessly answers with a curt "WhatsUpWithThat?" to an entire litany of clichés or now-hollow terms being debated in the West, from the "breaking the internet" of Kardashian's backside to exhausted slogans like "Freedom", "Love wins" and so on, as if to say: talk, talk away, meanwhile at your borders a crowd of people is pressing in who just want to live.

A grotesque coda to the uproar over "Borders" comes when M.I.A. posts on her Twitter profile a scan of a letter from the lawyers of the PSG football club, furious that in the video she wears one of their jerseys, but with the Fly Emirates sponsor logo distorted into Fly Pirates. A pseudo-outrage that deflates quickly, and only serves to provide free publicity for the singer.

2016 opens with more songs going online: a Baauer track featuring G-DRAGON, "Temple", then "Ola (Foreign Friend)", a song blending Brazil and tablas with a sample of "Circle Of Life" from "The Lion King", later dropped due to rights issues with Disney. Further controversies follow, tied to the track "Rewear It" which she licenses to fast-fashion giant H&M, to raise public awareness about recycling clothes; the association with a brand accused of globalized exploitation leads to accusations of selling out for money. As if that weren't enough, in April another controversy flares up, linked to the Black Lives Matter issue (the protests stemming from the killing of African Americans in the US by police without real, serious cause), the awareness campaign spearheaded first and foremost by Beyoncé, who is incidentally a friend of hers. Maya limits herself to saying (though, um, maybe not limiting herself to just this) that "every live matters" referring to refugees fleeing wars, Syrians above all, and for this she is accused of racism (!), ultimately ending up not taking part in the important Afropunk festival dedicated to Black culture and music.

In May M.I.A. lets fans, via live video on Periscope, listen to snippets of the new album; initially it was supposed to be called "Matadatah", a clever pun between metadata and some Hindu religious text ("Mahabharata"?), but by the end of May she provides further details. The album will be called AIM, and it will be her last; certainly her last with Interscope, but perhaps also the last of her musical career.

After the release of the official first single, "Go Off", followed in August by "Bird Song", AIM finally arrives on September 9th. The cover is oddly minimal, with orange and black colors once again evoking a flag, that of the Refugee Nation (created by Syrian artist Yara Said, who fled the war), AIM consists of twelve songs, plus another five on the Deluxe edition.

What can we say? It wouldn't be fair to expect a masterpiece every time from M.I.A., after four albums that were all significant to varying degrees, at least two of which were fundamental to the evolution of pop music in a global direction. AIM, partly by virtue of its status as an apparent farewell to music, or to put it in English, a valedictory album, is fortunately a good example of M.I.A.'s ability to work with pop material, welding Indian suggestions and harmonies onto typically club-ready synthetic beats and vocals that alternate with rapping. Overall it has a pop, lightweight air that hasn't really been heard since Arular, and it's more focused on the personal, mostly leaving references to the outside world to the issue of refugees. With the significant difference, compared to that first record, that the quality of the tracks here is uneven; at times they sound genuinely tossed off ("Go Off", despite the contribution of Skrillex, "Jump In", "Fly Pirate"), flattened as they are in both backing track and vocals, only to then flow wonderfully, as in the case of the following, superpop "Freedun", with the warm, full backing vocals of ex-One Direction member Zayn Malik. Speaking of whom, before crying outrage, it's worth remembering that cases of indie washing (read: reclaiming artistic credibility) are now common even among the standard-bearers of the most degraded teen pop, from Miley Cyrus making records with Flaming Lips, to the notorious Justin Bieber letting himself be put through the meat grinder by people like, wouldn't you know it, Diplo and Skrillex. In this specific case, good old Anglo-Pakistani Zayn doesn't do much harm, and in fact gives the track, one of the album's best, an allure as light and warm as a summer breeze.

How well the double "Bird Song" works, built on a melodic sample of... a kazoo?, imitating a bird's melancholy call; double, as mentioned, because it's offered on the deluxe edition both in Blaqstarr's mix, marked by a gorgeous guitar twang in the background, and in the mix by the now-resurrected Diplo, back on good terms with M.I.A. after years of frost, who colors the rhythm more heavily, true to his style. Not to mention "Borders", placed here as the opener, which still shines tragic like a dance on ruins, sadly unchanged a year later in spirit and message. Or the pointed "Visa", that is, the previously released "Ola (Foreign Friend)", a leap back into our artist's past, with precise callbacks to all her previous albums, both lyrical and musical, the sample from The Lion King replaced by the "Ya Ya Yeeei" from "Galang" and a voice as biting as in her best moments. Of the slew of songs already fed to the public before the release and mentioned earlier, only "Rewear It" and "Can See Can Do" were left out.

AIM grants itself a double ending: in the standard edition, it closes with "Survivor", programmatic in asserting the state of freedom M.I.A. feels today, who alongside her fellow travelers, whether friends or refugees, survives and flies high despite the cruel G.O.D. (Gold, Oil and Dollar). For those with the deluxe edition, instead, the record closes with the aforementioned "Platforms", from the video that was later censored. A hazy melancholy wraps around "Platforms"; in this ballad the vocals float around melodic spirals and beats that grow like grass in a clean field, and the whole thing tastes like a goodbye that is sweet and aching at once. A fitting epilogue to a coherent, sincere, and ultimately positive album.

Controversy! From pandemic to MATA

After the release of AIM, there's a period of relative silence, but it's only temporary. Starting in 2017, M.I.A. resumes releasing music, albeit only digitally, with the single "P.O.W.A.", deep bass and self-referential proclamations over a hyper-percussive backing. Several collaborations follow, one of which, a feature with Young Thug on Franchise by Travis Scott, manages to reach No. 1 on the official US chart, a first for our artist.

That's certainly not the end of it: after four years in the making, 2018 sees the release of the documentary-autobiography about her life, directed by Steve Loveridge, titled "Matangi/Maya/M.I.A." (released in Italy as "M.I.A. – La cattiva ragazza della musica"), in which she tells her own story in all its facets, aided by a series of her own private videos used in the film. The result is a portrait that is admittedly hagiographic but that effectively captures the many sides of her personality.

As if that weren't enough, in 2020 she receives the honor of Member of the British Empire (MBE) for cultural achievement, which she dedicates to her mother for a lifetime of effort. She also launches her own Patreon profile to fund her projects, begins selling some of her digital artwork using NFT certification, and launches the website Ohmni.com, where she wants to show her more spiritual side, between mystical environmentalism and lysergic videos. But 2020 is the year of the most disruptive global event for the West since September 11th, namely the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic. The forced lockdowns and greater uncertainty about one's own future must have represented, for Maya as for millions of other people, an emotional stress difficult to withstand without consequences; she claims to have had, during that period, an encounter with the figure of Jesus Christ, and to have grown closer to the Christian religion.

If this condition will be the starting point for her new long-form work, certain genuinely troubling tweets of hers against vaccines and in support of the notorious Alex Jones on the occasion of his conviction would end up becoming an ideological dead weight on the promotion of her new album. Which is a shame, because MATA, released in October 2022, is not so much a new beginning for M.I.A. as an injection of freshness, an element that had been somewhat lost in her previous releases. Released on Island Records in a currently digital-only format, with a highly colorful cover showing her wearing a fake crown of thorns, a title that forms a cross, and a running time of 33 minutes, everything seems to suggest an M.I.A. transformed by her encounter with Jesus... and yet no, since the songs are exactly what you'd expect from her: bangers to go off to on the dancefloor like the pairing of "Beep"-"Energy Freq", a successful lift from traditional Indonesian Ratoh Jaroe dance, "100% Sustainable", perhaps the album's peak, or the statement of intent "F.I.A.S.O.M." parts 1 and 2, pulsing with relentless rhythms and vocals. Granted, the record has plenty that sounds familiar, but it's worth stressing how the freshness and inspiration make those tracks enjoyable and free of dead spots: the tribal or reggaeton–moombahton rhythms are meticulously crafted and make your feet move of their own accord. There's no shortage of a track showing off one of M.I.A.'s great strengths: pairing a song with a video that deepens its themes. That's the case with "Popular", the apotheosis of the reggaeton tresillo, whose video depicts the commodification of the self in the age of TikTok: an unsettling simulacrum of the artist clumsily mimics dance moves and twerking in a room, controlled by the original, who at a certain point decides to matar that botched lookalike.

This new spiritual awareness surfaces in tracks like "The One", and more fully in the closing "Marigold", a ballad as sweet as it is deathly, in which humanity's only hope lies in the need for a miracle. MATA manages to keep M.I.A.'s most controversial positions at bay, but in the end gets smothered by them anyway, since nowadays one of her tweets makes more news than the listening of new songs. A shame, as I said, because however much this music stays largely within the groove of what she's already done, it's a definitely positive sign of life. But this is what she has chosen to be, for better or worse, and ultimately that's fine: take what you want and pay the price, as the saying goes. So be it.

Announced as a surprise, the seventh album by Mathangi Arulpragasam, titled simply and with little imagination M.I.7 (2026), arrives at a politically degrading moment on the international stage, much like the one we are currently living through. A detail that is far from irrelevant for a rapper like the English musician of Tamil origin, who has always positioned herself against so-called Western imperialism, starting with her status as a former refugee due to the escalation of the war in Sri Lanka when she was just a girl.

Structured like the Book of Revelation (!), M.I.7 presents itself, starting from the cover depicting seven symbols, each corresponding to an interlude on the album, as a fundamentally "messianic" record. The number seven, which echoes practically everywhere, is obviously a nod to John's own "Revelation", the twenty-seventh and final book of the New Testament, and the last book of the Christian Bible, and it recurs deliberately several times to indicate in turn the seven churches, the seven seals, the seven trumpets and the seven bowls of wrath. M.I.A., then, aims to go big, at least on a strictly thematic level.

Recorded in seven different locations such as Ethiopia, Egypt, India, London, Australia and Los Angeles, and over as many seven days spent, moreover, with each of the seven producers brought in for the occasion, M.I.7 makes use of the seven evangelical trumpet blasts to draw attention and stage a ceremony through which M.I.A. voices her moral discontent and, depending on the occasion, puts forward her own spiritual creed, even positioning herself as a "spell-breaker". Well, setting aside all the numerology and especially the religiously evocative trappings of the album, musically M.I.A. abandons the turbulence of the past to embrace a kind of urban mass free of hip hop blasts and electro flashes, within which she lays out, track by track, her own solution to the ills of our time, amid undercover angels wielding swords of fire ("PRAYER 777"), rulers of darkness ("JESUS") and armor to be lowered once the battle is over ("Sacred Heart").

In this back-and-forth of trumpet blasts (called, of all things, "TRUMPET") and biblical proclamations, what's missing, however, is the spark of old; in short, everything flows by without leaving any mark, save for very rare moments of Tamil tribalism, as for instance in "MONEY", while this spiritual approach reigns, mostly almost gospel-like, as in the emblematic "CALLING", the song best suited to defining the new path taken by Arulpragasam. There's also no shortage of purely pop moments like the radio-friendly "EVERYTHING", ahead of the thirty-three (a coincidence?) minutes of religious silence placed at the end, with which M.I.A. evokes earthly peace, thus recalling the silence in heaven described in Revelation after the opening of the seventh seal, just before the trumpets sound again.

It's the provocative close of an album that is hugely ambitious on the narrative level but decidedly poor on the musical one. From a musician who has so often been inspired and uncompromising, like the fifty-year-old M.I.A., one certainly expected more. The hope, then, is that this spiritual direction is not the beginning of the end. But merely an isolated artistic stumble.

Contributions by Giuliano Delli Paoli (M.I.7)

Sources and acknowledgements

All the information on M.I.A. was gathered online; since there are too many sites consulted, reviewed and cross-checked for fact-checking, I thank them collectively. I'll mention only the Guardian's website, for the wealth of features and interviews it offers, the forum M.I.A. Boards Net, rich with anecdotes and valuable info, Genius.com for the sometimes unexpected references picked up in the songs, and then... but the list would really be too long, so I'll stop here.

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[1] It's certainly a coincidence, but it's curious that Justine Frischmann herself, once her music career was over, moved to the US and became an abstract painter, following a path that is partly identical to and partly the mirror image of M.I.A.'s.

[2] But obviously that's not the case: for example, the black, red and green of the background and the red, green and gold of the title evoke the Pan-African colors, the ones shared by flags across the entire African continent.

[3] M.I.A.'s early success owed a great deal to her conscious use of file sharing and sites like Myspace, making her the first pop star to climb the charts through these means.

[4] Two examples above all: "Boyz" (from Kala) was shot in Jamaica using 100 local dancers; "Double Bubble Trouble" is set in some housing block on the outskirts of London. The extras featured there have nothing glossy about them, but rather a physicality of faces and bodies that speaks the same language as reality.

[5] One of the devices M.I.A. uses most is détournement, that is, taking a source and placing it in a different context so as to change its meaning. The quote from "Roadrunner" by the Modern Lovers, a band she happens to love, is placed amid the scene of throngs of starving children knocking on the door of the big Hummer begging for money; this turns the idea of the car ride as an expression of freedom into a symbol of ravenous exploitation.

[6] M.I.A. was supposed to travel to the US to collaborate with Timbaland on the whole record, but her visa was denied for a long time due to her alleged involvement with the civil war in Sri Lanka because of her father's activities, or perhaps also because of the reference to the PLO in "Sunshowers". This was certainly an inspiration for what is recounted in "Paper Planes".

[7] The lyrics of "20 Dollars" state: "People judge me so hard 'cause I don't floss my titty set". As for her private life, only two major relationships are known, Diplo and the wealthy Benjamin Bronfman, who gave her a son and against whom she waged a tough legal battle for custody of little Ikhyd Edgar when they split up. M.I.A. doesn't appear in gossip magazines except in relation to what happens on stage or in exploits like the ones described here.

[8] Many red-haired social media commentators were worried about the racism shown towards them, clearly missing the point of the story. As for "Born Free", it's worth mentioning the formidable performance on the David Letterman Show, with Martin Rev on keyboards, complete with a dance troupe made up of M.I.A. look-alikes and backing singers decked out in brightly colored burqas.

[9] An always ironic M.I.A. gave a different interpretation of the gesture in interviews (in slang, flipping the bird): it wasn't, she said, an attempt at cheap scandal, but rather a ritual gesture from Hindu religious tradition called a mudra. The explanation itself is a genuine artistic statement worthy of her, as it prompts reflection on the cultural differences that sometimes lead to real clashes of interpretation.

[10] Maybe it's just a coincidence, but M.I.A. seems to enjoy this ability of hers for mimicry. "Y.A.L.A." really does seem to ape Lady Gaga, not only in its blunt rhythms, but also in the vocal delivery, high and almost shrill. Just as, to this writer's ear, "XXXO" sounded exactly like Britney Spears, or "Tell Me Why" like a classic Beyoncé, both taken from the previous "///y/".

[11] Among the artists she's befriended or collaborated with, one can mention, as connections built up over time, the names of Rye Rye, Iggy Azalea and Santigold, all of whom drew more or less directly on her influence.

[12] Presenting the work to the press, Maya called it her spiritual album, not only because of the reference to the Hindu goddess of the same name, but precisely because it was meant to reflect the rapper's renewed interest in the religious as well as cultural roots of her homeland. Incidentally, Maya's parents are Catholic, and the name given to her was essentially chosen at random. One could truly say nomen omen.

[13] Among other things, the video stands as a statement of support for the movement for women's right to drive in Saudi Arabia, which is why it had to be shot in Morocco.

[14] The typo is intentional, and quotes verbatim the content of the tweet with which M.I.A. called out the incident.

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

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