M.I.A.
the evolution
of ... M.I.A. Tamara Roper noisey
Remember when “Paper Planes” propped up stoner comedy film trailers and sport montages and everyone was treating M.I.A. like she was just this new thing that appeared rather than a totemic cultural figure who’d spent over a decade grafting through war zones, bourgeois music circles, tabloid frontlines, and political exile? Her story shouldn’t be skirted over. So here we retrace the evolution of M.I.A., from small-town beginnings to an unlikely global icon: a pop star responsible for radio bangers; an anti-style icon with a conscience; a terrorism relativist; a dominating trans-global force of creativity. M.I.A. has thrown the finger to middle America, supported Wikileaks, worn pants capable of inducing epileptic fits, and collaborated with some of the most innovative in the international underground. But before all that, there was Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam.
It’s well documented that Maya’s Dad was a Tamil loyalist in Sri Lanka, and founder of Eros, a student body which campaigned during the 70s and 80s for a separate Tamil state. Maya was born in Britain, but her father took the family back to Sri Lanka when she was just six months old so that he could help fight for Tamil independence. Picking up scraps of clothing from her seamstress mother’s table—“because what fell on the floor was mine”—and surrounded by the errant bullets of civil war, the prominent parts of M.I.A.’s future soundboard started to form.
GROWING UP ACROSS THE GLOBE WITH A DIAL-UP CONNECTION
Her career has been peppered with pushback against the Sri Lankan government. She has frequently tried to expose their wrongdoing, claiming that they’re guilty of the genocide of local Tamils. Her Glastonbury performance in 2014 featured t-shirts protesting against Tamil deportation. Yet despite a shared cause, she hasn’t spoken to her father much since childhood, since his role within the Tamil Tigers forced the family to flee Sri Lanka and return to London in 1986, where they lived in hostels and council flats (the UK equivalent of the government housing). Returning to the UK in a single parent family, the Arulpragasms found themselves the Sri Lankan filling of a Irish-Jamaican projects sandwich. She told Time Out: “I was 10 years old and I didn’t know anything about punk or hip-hop. The only words I knew in English were “dance” and “Michael Jackson.” We got put in a flat in Mitchum and the council gave us second hand furniture, second hand clothes and a second hand radio that I took to bed with me every night. There was a black family on one side and an Irish family on the other. Between them and the radio I got to hear London Posse, who were the best of British hip-hop and had a really original flow and fresh beats that made me feel good, and The Clash, who were also really important for me and for London. Then the Irish family nicked my radio while I was at school.”
DATING DIPLO, DROPPING MIXTAPES AND BIRTHING HER DEBUT ALBUM The M.I.A. sound was an amalgamation of Londonesque slang laced with political inference via the street beats of a thousand different developing world countries. It didn't fit into a music scene nursing its millennium hangover, so M.I.A. searched out a contemporary which she found in Diplo. Physically her opposite but creatively her equal, Thomas Wesley Pentz was the global voyeur that Maya needed.
THE TRANSATLANTIC SUCCESS AND TRIBULATIONS OF GOING GLOBAL After spending a summer playing festivals—in which she received a rare encore during her Coachella set—and touring with the likes of Gwen Stefani and LCD Soundsystem,
the wheels were quickly set in motion for Kala, M.I.A.’s sophomore record. Now signed to Interscope in the US, Kala, named for her mother, was to be a stiltedly international affair. She was
“ boyz” Incorporating British fashion, Jamaican dancers, and an entirely otherworldly vibe, “Boyz” was color in cardiac arrest, launching a thousand spin offs. Even Diplo would later accuse Rihanna of copying it in “Rude Boi,” mixing a characteristically coy mash-up to emphasize his point. M.I.A was trailblazing.
sporadically prevented from entering the US due to visa complications, and it was recorded instead in India, Liberia, and Trinidad.
“When I started recording a song in India, say 'Boyz.' I recorded the drums in India, then I had the files in Trinidad. We put it together and did the vocals in Trinidad, and then we did some extra work on it in Brooklyn, and then we went back to India and did some extra extra work,” she told The Village Voice in 2007. “Boyz,” a tri-blend of influences, became an instant dance track smash with a ludicrously vibrant video to match. Styled by the godmother of new rave fashion, Cassette Playa, it was filmed in Jamaica after gaining a heap of popularity as a club track in Kingston (“it got everybody to turn up”).
THE INTERNATIONAL SUPERSTAR After Kala’s release, “Paper Planes” was picked up by the biggest distributors possible: Hollywood and Kanye West. Used on the trailer for James Franco’s cheese’n’cheetos frat party epic, Pineapple Express, and then on the Kanye-produced blockbuster “Swagga Like Us,” which featured Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, and T.I, “Paper Planes” became inescapable.
t was inevitable that her creative process would change, though she refused to be swept along with a tide that could have easily carried into a realm of emotionless hits. Instead, she invested time into her record label, N.E.E.T. music, signing a visual artist, Jaime Martinez, with whom she created an early incarnation of the gif—featuring #onfleek artwork, rather than today’s arrangement of Netflix-era TV shows with an easily quotable slice of text.
After giving birth, she spent most of her time in LA. Exploring countries had been replaced by reading about them on the internet. A tool that had once been a such a help became a hindrance—her political associations could be displayed for all to see, and easily. The rise of Twitter became a poisoned chalice as death threats aimed at Maya and her son came from Sri Lankan sympathizers branding her a terrorist. She hit back, posting videos of unlawful killings of Tamil Tigers on her own profile. She fought online fire with fire, and the situation exploded in a blaze of glory in April 2010, with the release of “Born Free.”
GINGER GENOCIDES, TWEETING PHONE NUMBERS, AND GIVING MIDDLE FINGERS M.I.A. became an official figure of controversy after her decision to collaborate with the French director, Romain Gavras, on “Born Free.” It was her most visual attempt at making the unspeakable inescapable. The video, which was nine minutes long and shot in the desert, depicted the extra-judicial killing of Tamil males she had uploaded three months prior to her Twitter feed, by showing the rounding up and killing of a group of red-haired children by an armed militia. Released without her label’s knowledge, the video was promptly banned from YouTube and television stations, and she became an icon of controversy.
Representational of several —the unspoken genocide in Sri Lanka, immigration in Arizona, the mistreatment of prisoners abroad—“Born Free” is symbolic of an M.I.A. who’d graduated from the school of bright, gratuitous colors, switching up her talking point tactics to something shocking beyond eye-strain. She responded to the criticism of “Born Free” by redirecting back to wider realities, saying how “fascinated” she was by the reaction. “I think it's interesting how we react to fiction and how we react to realism on the internet... this is mainstream media, I wish I was talking about way more underground theories, but [I'm] not, this is just me digesting what I see in the mainstream,” she told MTV News. The new Justin Bieber video is “more of an assault to my eyes and senses than what I've made,” she would later tell NME.
THE REBIRTH OF MATHANGI AND THE FUTURE M.I.A.’s most recent record Matangi returned to world town for inspiration. Recorded after finding relief from her inspiration slump in India, M.I.A. had returned to old faithful’s like Switch to help her record, revisiting India to research and reinvent. Named for the Hindu Goddess of music and learning, and her own middle name, Matangi carries with it an airiness lost in the claustrophobic curtain twitching of /\/\ /\ Y /\. A slight calm after a hurricane, her face emblazoned the front: M.I.A. had returned.
“The evolution of...m.i.a.” Tamara roper Noisey https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/the-evolution-of-mia
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the evolution of...