M.I.A. - back in action

second take

The artiste known as M.I.A. — Mathangi Maya Arulpragasam — has a new album out after nearly three years. It’s the most Indian thing she’s done, and it’s called ‘Matangi’, the fruit of living in India for the past few years.

She has now moved back to London with her little boy, Ikhyd. One of the tracks, Come Walk With Me has really cool graphics, kitsch Hindu calendar art, and lyrics and melody that hook you at a first listen. Most of us have heard of M.I.A. for the first time on A R Rahman’s Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack, which also included her hit single, Paper Planes.

Soon after I heard her on that album, I asked a friend in London to bring as much of her music as he could find. Her 2005 album, ‘Arular’, named after her father, was listed by most critics as the best album of the year. ‘Kala’, the 2007 album in tribute to her mother, was nominated for a Grammy for Record of the Year. (Paper Planes is taken from here). Then came ‘Maya’ (2010), and now ‘Matangi’, perhaps her most accessible record.

The sexy and very cool M.I.A., whom The Guardian called a great pop contrarian, was born in London to Sri Lankan Tamil parents.

She saw little of her father as he steeped himself in the Eelam movement, bringing his family back to Sri Lanka. He was in hiding for many years, and this would later inspire her to become M.I.A. or Missing In Action.

The family was constantly displaced as refugees, moving to Chennai and then back to Jaffna, and finally London. It was here that she began to discover herself as a visual artiste and a songwriter.

In a recent interview with The Guardian, she had this to say about one of her songs from ‘Matangi’, “It’s sort of to describe the refugee philosophy — people who live in tents — because I feel they are the modern-day untouchables... they’re faceless and placeless.”
I have long-admired M.I.A.’s courage, outspokenness and compassion. Apart from never failing to criticise the Sri Lanka government, she doesn’t duck controversies, even at the price of her own freedom and peace. Her political awakening and her music came together on a visit to Sri Lanka as a very young woman. It was to be a film on her cousin who had gone missing.

“The day I graduated,” she tells The Guardian, “I heard about Jana. There was a story that he’d died. Then somebody said, ‘No, he’s alive, but he’s a vegetable’. Then somebody else said, ‘No, he’s just MIA’. When someone in Sri Lanka joins the movement, you never know what happens to that person. I grew up with him for 10 years; he was like my twin. So the first time I used MIA was when I was looking for him.”

Speaking about her new album in various interviews, she tells of her time in India and how her name ‘Matangi’ inspired her to look more closely at Hindu mythology to inform her songwriting. Her parents are Christian, and though she feels she can never be a Hindu, she felt excited that her name referenced the goddess of music.

Matangi is described on her website as “the only goddess who didn’t live in clouds or in a palace, she made her temple as a shack in the ghetto where she walked on the street with outcasts and undesirables to deepen her understanding...”

In terms of her beliefs, she tells The Guardian that she feels closest to something she worked out herself: “I devised this theory that the world is made out of three types of people. Squares are logical and scientific. They create tools, so Steve Jobs would have been a square. Pyramids are the money, religious, ideological structures built by human beings.”

“It’s always a pyramid: a guy at the top, billions of people on the bottom, and you have to claw your way to the top and kill a lot of people on the way. The circle is all the other stuff we can’t explain. If you cut a tree, the rings are circles; your eyeballs are circles; cells are circles. Einstein discovered how to split a circle and it resulted in the most negative thing for humankind. You can’t mess with it. And to be a successful human being, you have to understand all three concepts.”

Finding out more about her, I was astonished to realise that she is not as popular here as she is in the UK, Europe, America and Sri Lanka. In Slumdog Millionaire, she also features on O Saya, composed by Rahman and her for the movie. She jumps into the song in the middle and hip hops and raps for a few lines and disappears.

In the movie and in the original CD soundtrack, she is showcased better with remixes of Paper Planes from her two best-selling albums ‘Arular’ and ‘Kala’. M.I.A. followed Rahman’s work closely and felt inspired to record with him in Chennai while working on ‘Kala’.

She has been described by many respected and influential music critics as the ‘voice of the future’.