Music & political fervour

Rivetting

At the Grammy Awards in 2009, Maya Arulpragasam, also known as M.I.A., performed her biggest hit, ‘Paper Planes’, a rap song that infuses rebellious, defiant lyrics with the sounds of her native Sri Lanka, a riff lifted from the Clash, the bang-bang of a gun and the ka-ching of a cash register. Maya, as she is called, was nine months pregnant (to the day), and while she was onstage rapping about ‘some some some I some I murder, some I some I let go’ — in a black skintight, body-stocking dress, transparent except for polka-dot patches that strategically covered her belly, breasts and derriere — she began to experience contractions.

As the pain hit, Maya was performing with the male titans of rap (Jay-Z, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, T.I.) and she said later that she thought all the free-floating testosterone caused her to go into labour. While American rappers today tend to celebrate sex, wealth and status, Maya, who grew up listening to the politicised rhymes of Public Enemy, takes international dance beats and meshes them with the very un-American voice of the militant rebel. In contrast to, say, Bono or John Lennon, with their peacenik messages, Maya taps into her rage at the persecution of Tamils in Sri Lanka to espouse violence: While you’re under the sway of the beat, she’s rapping, ‘You wanna win a war?/Like P.L.O. I don’t surrender.’

Although her publicist had a wheelchair ready and a midwife on call, Maya, who has a deep and instinctive affinity for the provocative, knew that this Grammy moment was not to be missed. It had everything — artistic credibility, high drama, a massive audience. The baby would just have to wait. The combination of being nearly naked, hugely pregnant, singing incendiary lyrics and having the eyes of the world upon her was too much to resist. She was riveting, upstaging the four much more famous guys and dominating the stage.

Three days later, her son, Ikhyd (pronounced I-kid) Edgar Arular Bronfman, was born. His father is Maya’s fiance, Ben Bronfman, son of the Warner Music Group chief executive and Seagram’s heir Edgar Bronfman Jr. In one of many contradictions that seem to provide the narrative for Maya’s life and art, Ikhyd was not, as she had repeatedly announced he would be, born at home in a pool of water. As usual, she wanted to transform her personal life into a political statement. “You gotta embrace the pain, embrace the struggle,” she proclaimed weeks before Ikhyd was born. “And my giving birth is nothing when I think about all the people in Sri Lanka that have to give birth in a concentration camp.” As it happened, Maya, who is 34, gave birth in a private room in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. “Ben’s family insisted,” she said a year later in March at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, in Beverly Hills.

Mind of her own

Before the Grammys, Maya and Bronfman moved to Los Angeles from New York, buying a house in Brent-wood, an isolated and bucolic section of the city with a minimal history of trauma and violent uprisings. “We went to the Grammys, we had the baby and we bought the house,” Maya said. “A month later, all this stuff was happening in Sri Lanka” — the Tamil insurgency was being defeated amid reports of thousands of casualties — “and I started speaking up against it. And then, within a month, I found out my house was being bugged, my phones were being tapped and my e-mails were being hacked into, I was getting death threats, like ‘hope your baby dies.’ The biggest Sinhalese community is in Santa Monica, people who are sworn enemies of the Tamils, which is me.”
Maya’s political fervour stems from her upbringing. Although she was born in London, her family moved back to Sri Lanka when she was six months old, to a country torn by fighting between the Tamil Hindu minority and the Sinhalese Buddhist majority. In the 1970s, her father, Arular, helped found the Tamil militant group Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students, trained with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in Lebanon and spearheaded a movement to create an independent Tamil state in the north and east of the country. EROS was eventually overwhelmed by a stronger and more vicious militant group, the Tamil Tigers.

In their struggle for political control, the Tigers not only went after government troops and Sinhalese civilians but also their own people, including Tamil women and children. “The Tigers ruled the people under them with an iron fist,” Ahilan Kadirgamar at Sri Lanka Democracy Forum said. “Maya’s father was never with the Tigers. He stayed away.”
In 1983, when she was eight, Maya, her mother and her two siblings moved to London. Her father stayed in Sri Lanka. Throughout her music career, which began in 2004, Maya has used the spot light to call attention to Tamil grievances. By the time her first album came out, the Tamil cause was mostly synonymous with the cause of the Tamil Tigers. Maya, committed to the cause, allied herself with the group despite its consistent use of terror tactics, which included systematic massacres of Sinhalese villagers. (In turn, government forces were known to retaliate against Tamil villages and were accused of supporting death squads.)

In the press, Maya was labeled a terrorist sympathiser by some; others charged her with being unsophisticated about the politics of Sri Lanka. But many of her fans didn’t listen too closely to her lyrics, concentrating instead on the beat, the newness of the sound and her own multiculti, many-layered appeal. It didn’t hurt that Maya was absolutely great looking. “Maya had all the pieces of the puzzle,” Jimmy Lovine, chairman of Interscope Records, Maya’s American label, said. “When I met her, I thought, Who wouldn’t want to sign her? Her politics didn’t matter to me. The whole game is about waiting for that moment to move popular culture. Maya can move the needle.”

Maya’s allegiances have fueled her music and her rhetoric. In January 2009, while the civil war in Sri Lanka was raging, Maya repeatedly referred to the situation as a “genocide.” This rankled Sri Lankan experts and human rights organisations engaged in the difficult task of helping to forge a viable model for national unity after decades of bitter fighting. “Maya is a talented artist,” Kadirgamar said, “but she only made the situation worse. What happened in Sri Lanka was not a genocide. To not be honest about that or the Tigers does more damage than good."

Unity holds no allure for Maya — she thrives on conflict, real or imagined. “I kind of want to be an outsider,” she said, eating a truffle-flavoured French fry. “I don’t want to make the same music, sing about the same stuff, talk about the same things. If that makes me a terrorist, then I’m a terrorist.”

On a crisp, sunny day in mid-April in London, Maya and her publicist, Jennie Boddy, were in a car being driven to the home of a Sri Lankan wedding photographer. Instead of doing standard publicity photos to promote her still-nameless third album, due out in early July, Maya had the idea of using a photographer she found in the phone book who worked, as many Sri Lankan photographers do, in an almost Bollywood style, by inserting a simple picture, in this case of Maya, into dozens of fantastic, almost surrealistic tableaus. A few days earlier, Maya had hatched this plan, which like most Maya plans was inventive, artistic and, in an unsettling way, combined the high with the low. “I’ve had my eye on some jewellery from Givenchy forever,” Maya said. “It is millions of dollars’ worth of gold jewellery. To wear it for these pictures, Givenchy had to send a bodyguard. I liked the idea of a photographer shooting me in his council flat in all this gold, knowing that the jewellery requires a bodyguard.”

Innate sense of art

Maya had flown to London nearly a month before and was living with Ikhyd at her mother’s apartment an hour outside the city. Initially, she came to see her mom and work on the album art and the first video, for the song ‘Born Free.’ But she needed to renew her US visa, and until her immigration lawyer could resolve the matter, Maya was stuck in London. Maya has always been interested in having a political agenda, no matter how murky. In 1993, she applied to Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London; she had decided to become a filmmaker. For four years, she concentrated on directing movies, but she was not patient enough for the form. “Film is not instant enough for the person I am,” she said. Maya switched to videos (which were faster), and her classmate, Justine Frischmann of the band Elastica, asked her, in 2000, to create the artwork and a video for the band’s second album, ‘The Menace’.

Frischmann and Maya became roommates, and when the two went on vacation to a small island off Saint Vincent in the Caribbean, Maya began tinkering with Frischmann’s Roland MC-505 Groovebox. “I was bored,” Maya recalled. “And I saw the machine. I’m tone deaf and not very musical, but I like dancing, if that counts. I’ve got rhythm. Justine had disappeared for about six hours, and I waited and waited, and I finally thought, I’ll just make something. The second song I made was ‘Galang’, and I didn’t plan on singing it myself. When we got back, I scouted girls to sing it, and I would tell them, ‘This is how you do it: ‘Galangalang a lang lang’, and none of them could do it right. So I thought, I need to do it myself.”

If she was reluctant, her nervousness didn’t last long. ‘Galang’, original and addictive, became her calling card. In 2003, she put ‘Galang’ and two other innes on a 12-inch record. “Maya’s got a lot of hustle,” Richard Russell said admiringly. Russell’s XL Recordings is a small but influential label in Britain that puts out an eclectic mix — Thorn Yorke, the White Stripes, Devendra Banhart, Adele, the Horrors.

When Russell signed Maya, he imagined her as a kind of English answer to American hip-hop. Just as the Beatles and the Stones channeled American R&B, Russell said he felt that Maya would rework the sounds of rap music from the States. “England is good at being mongrel,” Russell said. “Maya is a mixture of black American culture, Sri Lankan culture, art, fashion. We mix it up well here and sell it back. As a country, we’ve always known how to do that. You see that in ‘Galang’ — the different ethnicities, the art vibe, the Missy Elliot influence. Maya got it right and added to it.”

Ravi Thiagaraja, the Sri Lankan photographer, answered the door of his flat and invited Maya in. As he and his wife ushered us into the living room at the rear of the house, they wished Maya a happy Sri Lankan New Year. “I had no idea it was today,” she said, as she settled into a sofa and clicked open her laptop. The photographer handed Maya a disc, and she slid it into her computer. There were dozens of shots, each featuring Maya dripping in gold. She was wearing seven-or eight thick gold bracelets on each wrist, heavy earrings and what appeared to be ropes of gold attached at the throat like a tight gold turtleneck. In shot after shot, she was perched on different thrones, posing with dancers, encased in a bubble ascending to heaven. In most of the shots, Maya appeared to be a very wealthy deity.

Maya studied her computer screen. “This could be a possible album cover,” she said. “And I’d love a calendar, if you can make one. Twelve months of these pictures.” It was hard to imagine what the initial photo shoot was like. This flat was so humble and the Givenchy jewellery was so Midas that the contrast, while striking, also seemed a little unkind. Yet, the pictures were fascinating and memorable. Maya’s concept, though somewhat mocking (of both sides), was clever and original. She took an art form that is common in India and added her own flavour to it, which is, more or less, her gift as an artist.

Romain Gavras, the director of the video for ‘Born Free,’ arrived in London from Paris in April with the master version of the nine-minute minifilm. Maya hadn’t sent it to Interscope, even though she planned to release the video in America in four days. “The Interscope lawyers will want to send the video to a censorship board,” she said. Seemingly designed to be banned on YouTube, which it was instantly, the video is set in Los Angeles where a vague but apparently American militia forcibly search out redheaded men and one particularly beautiful redheaded child. The gingers, as Maya called them, using British slang, are taken to the desert, where they are beaten and killed. While ‘Born Free’ is heard in the background throughout, the song is lost in the carnage.

“The video was more than fine with me,” Lovine said. Despite Maya’s efforts, he had seen it. A canny showman, Mr. Lovine knew that the video would get attention, that Maya would get her visa (which she did) and that all the noise was good for business. At XL, the publicists wanted Maya to concentrate on her European press. She had finally decided on a title for the record, which was meant to be an artistic rendering of her name. “I need to figure out what to wear for a photo shoot for tomorrow,” Maya said. “I think we should go shopping.”

Gavras and Maya left XL and headed for Portobello Road, a few blocks away. She passed a small shop that sold Indian clothing and pottery, most of it cheaply made. She spotted a tiger costume, complete with whiskered hood, hanging next to an orange sari. “Look at that tiger!” Maya said. “I could wear that at the photo shoot tomorrow!” She paused and considered the implications of dressing up as a tiger. “It’s probably too much,” she said finally. “It might seem like I was making a joke.”