M.I.A.

M.I.A., real name: Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam, (born 1978 in Hounslow, London) is a Sri Lanka-raised singer and artist.

Childhood

Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam, the daughter of Tamil Tigers leader Arul Pragasam, was born in Hounslow, London. When she was six months old, her family moved back to their native Sri Lanka. Motivated by her father's wish to support the Tamil efforts to win independence from the majoirty Sinhalese population, her father became politically known as Arular and was a founder member of The Eelam Revolutionary Organisation Of Students (EROS), a militant Tamil group.

When residing in Sri Lanka, Maya lived with her family on her grandparent’s remote farm; a collection of huts without electricity or running water. After a year, as her fathers involvement in militant activities increased, Maya, her older sister Kali and their mother moved to Jaffna in the far North of the country, where Maya's younger brother Sugu was born. Contact with her father was strictly limited as he was in hiding from the army. He occasionally visited in secret, slipping through the window at night and being introduced to the children as "an uncle" so that his identity and whereabouts wouldn't be given it away to the army when they regularly came to question the family.

Eventually, as the Civil War escalated, it became unsafe for the family to stay in Sri Lanka, so they were forced to relocate to Madras, India. They moved into an almost derelict house, three miles from the nearest road or neighbour. They survived here for a while, with sporadic visits from Arular, and the girls attended the local school, excelling as students. However, visits from friends and family grew less frequent and money grew very tight. The children became ill; Kali caught Typhoid and they struggled to survive on a limited amount of food and water. A visiting uncle took concern and moved them back to Sri Lanka, where they settled back in Jaffna.

By now, the violence of the Civil war was at its peak and the family tried to flee the country. The army regularly shot Tamils seeking to move across border areas and bombed roads and escape routes. After several failed attempts to leave, Maya’s mother successfully made it out with the three children, onto India before finally returning to Maya's birthplace in London, where they were housed as refugees.

It was 1986 and on a notoriously racist council estate in Mitcham, Surrey, that an eleven-year-old Arulpragasam began to learn the English language. Here she was exposed to Western radio for the first time by the noise resonating from her neighbours. Her affinity with hip-hop and rap began from there – the uncompromising attitudes of Public Enemy, Big Daddy Kane, Roxanne Shante and N.W.A. clicked with a frustrated, energetic war-child trying to relate to grey and foreign surroundings. "Those records were rhythmic, so whether you understood the language or not, you could understand the music," she now says.

Early Art Career

As a teenager, Arulpragasam was a talented and creative student, eventually winning a place at London's Central Saint Martins Art School, where she studied fine art, film and video. Here, for the first time, she began to piece together some of the different strands of her life experience. In an early incarnation of what was later to become "M.I.A.", she learnt how to play off her different cultural personae against each other; layering rap iconography with the warfare pictures from her youth, Asian Britain with American new wave film-making style and St. Martin's fashion sense with refugee outlooks.

A successful art career beckoned and, for a while, seemed to be Arulpragasam's destined path. Her first public exhibition of paintings featured candy coloured spray-paint and stencil pictures of the Tamil terrorist movement; graffitied tigers and palm trees mixed with orange, green and pink camouflage, bombs, guns and freedom fighters on chip board off-cuts and canvases. The show was nominated for the alternative Turner prize, every painting sold and a monograph book of the collection was published by Pocko, simply entitled "M.I.A.", an acronym for Missing In Acton, in reference to the gritty section of London she lived in.

Music Beginnings

A commission from Elastica's Justine Frischmann to provide the artwork and cover image for the band's second album, The Menace, led to Arulpragasam following the band on tour around forty American states, video-documenting the event. The support act on the tour was electro-clash artist Peaches, who introduced Arulpragasam to the Roland MC-505 sequencing machine and gave her the courage to take on the one artform she felt least confident in, music. Back home in London, Arulpragasam and Frischmann got hold of their own 505 and, working with the simplest of set-ups [a second-hand 4-track, the 505 and a radio microphone], Arulpragasam worked-up a series of six songs onto a demo tape which became her calling card to the industry. This tape included the first track she had ever composed, "M.I.A", the second track she had ever composed, "Galang", and "Lady Killer". The tape found its way into the hands of Steve Mackey and Ross Orton who then re-worked the track “Galang” into the monstrous meld of influences that would eventually propel M.I.A. into the limelight.

An addictive mashed-up recipe of dancehall, electro, grime and world music, Showbiz Records only pressed 500 copies of the independant vinyl single “Galang”, but that was enough for her to win the instant support of DJs and the media seemingly everywhere.

Numerous major record labels caught onto the underground success of "Galang" and M.I.A. eventually signed to XL Recordings [home to Dizzee Rascal, Basement Jaxx and the White Stripes, embracing them as they were the only label to offer her complete creative control. She also chose them because it was the closest to her house, telling the label, "Trust me, you've been looking for me", before dropping off the "Galang" tape. They called her back 20 minutes later.

"Galang" was rereleased. The accompanying music video for “Galang”, featuring multiple M.I.A.’s amid a backdrop of her graffiti artwork animated and brought to life, was directed by Ruben Fleischer and art directed by M.I.A. herself. Scenes of urban Britain and the ongoing Sri Lankan civil war are depicted and delivered with a wry sense of humour.

For her next single release, “Sunshowers,” Arulpragasam again hooked up with Ross Orton and Steve Mackey who had furnished her so successfully with the insane electro-squelch and mangled beats on “Galang.” Together they pushed boundaries even further with hyper-minimalist production and a reworked chorus from Dr. Buzzards Original Savannah Band’s track of the same name to create a hypnotic template for her to fire out her young-girl bravado, this time about guerilla warfare and the Tamil-Sinhalese civil war. A lush video was made for the track, which she filmed in the jungles of South India with acclaimed director Rajesh Touchriver. To this day, MTV refuses to play the video until the references to the Palestine Liberation Organization are removed from the song. Maya refuses to comply with their requests.

Meeting Diplo & "Piracy Funds Terrorism, Volume 1"

After hearing his single, "News Flash", and loving it, Arulpragasam tracked down and met with Diplo, the Mississippi-born DJ originally named Wesley Pentz, to work on some material. She says of his song now: "It had that same homelessness about it. It didn't have a particular genre, which is what people always say to me: Your song doesn't fit anywhere. So I went on a mad mission to find other people like that, because then we could make a home."

Maya approached Diplo when he was DJing one night at the Fabric Club, London. "Besides me being a white dude from Florida and her being a Sri Lankan girl in England, everything else was the same: [We were both] film graduates, [listened to] all the same music when we were kids, were going in the same direction right now in music, it was amazing." he said of their meeting. Funnily enough, Diplo was playing Galang as she entered the club.

The next month, Maya left for Philadelphia to work on the production of her first composition and the hidden track on her album, "M.I.A.", with Diplo, and to also collaborate on new material. Nothing worthwhile came of it, until Diplo began experimenting with a capellas of the tracks on Arular, remixing, sampling and mashing them up with already famous rappers and musicians, eventually using the material created during the sessions to build the mixtape Piracy Funds Terrorism.

Piracy Funds Terrorism was initially only given to the press and handed out at early live shows, but because of the album's huge underground success, Turntablelab.com began releasing the mixtape exclusively through their website around December, 2004. The mixtape added to the already building hype of Maya's debut album and also forced people to awknowledge the mixtape subculture in general. It also established M.I.A.'s growing fanbase within the music and mp3-sharing blogosphere.

The albums was later re-issued with the correct tracklisting. Later re-issues of the mixtape replaced the third track, "LL Cool J/Cavemen – Two Bit Rhythm [M.I.A.'s Mix]", with the album cut of "Pull Up The People" due to legal issues regarding samples. For unexplained reasons [probably also due to the samples used], "Fire Bam [Diplo's MIx]" was shortened and "M.I.A./Cutty Ranks" was completely reworked as a mash-up of a Cutty Ranks acapella and Snoop Dogg's "Drop It Like It's Hot".

Diplo later produced the third track on Arular, "Bucky Done Gun," which mixes the raucous baile funk sound from Rio de Janeiro with a sample from the "Theme From Rocky."

The two are currently romantically involved and touring together.

"Arular"

Her debut album, Arular, was released in America on March 2005. Titled in acknowledgment of her father's past, it follows the same philosophy that unites all strands of the M.I.A. project – cut and paste. The mix of production credits on the album all feature forays into new territory for the collaborators, with ex-Pulp member Steve Mackey doing dancehall and pop-maestro Richard X working with Sri Lankan nursery rhymes; and from her hand-sprayed artwork on the record sleeves, lyrics that mix Tamil, Cockney and American slang to her tracksuits and hoodies specially sewn from the brightest, boldest African print fabrics, or Mowgli dance moves for ragga beats – M.I.A. creates culture clashes that work; "a unique voice unafraid to mix big issues with cool sounds".

Shortly before the album's release, Maya's father e-mailed her asking her to not to use his name as the album title. She refused.

Controversial Politics

Discography

• "Galang", single, 2004
• "Sunshowers", single, 2004
• Piracy Funds Terrorism, album, 2004
• Arular, album, 2005
• "Hombre", single, 2005

External Links

• M.I.A. Official Site