M.I.A.
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IN YOUR FACE
By Balarama Heller
Like a cultural wrecking ball, Maya Arular aka M.I.A. is destroying the confines of popular music. In its place, the 28 year old Sri Lankan-born misfit has left international audiences agape with her first album Arular, released this past February. M.I.A. has become the new face of world music. This isn't the world music your social studies teacher listens to, though. No. M.I.A. and her music are casualties of war, displacement and globalization. M.I.A.’s voice is harsh, in-your-face, addressing the circumstances that produced her with direct boldness. Drawing on many different musical inspirations, from Bangra to Brazilian beat, to dancehall and hip hop, M.I.A’s sound is an ethnic mishmash, the dynamic result of clashing cultures, events and rites of passage woven seamlessly together. M.I.A has graced the cover of Fader and appeared in major magazines including, The New Yorker, Dazed and Confused and Black Book. Rolling Stones gave Arular a four star rating and Spin gave the album an A, writing, “If this is the sound of revolution, we’re ready to posse up.” Taking a break from touring, M.I.A. sits down with EGO to set the record straight on revolution, her ties to the Tamil Tigers, and the real message behind the lyrics.
Maya, you graduated with a degree from St. Martin’s in film and video and had a brief, but successful, career as a painter. How did you find your way into music?
I wanted to get my film degree from an elite institution like St. Martin, amongst people who have money and privilege, but then take that education and apply it to people who need help. But the first place I went to was Sri Lanka, which was a fucked-up thing, because I wasn’t allowed to do it. Then I started making videos for bands, but that seemed really meaningless because the bands were not really saying anything. When I watched the bands perform every night on tour, I was thinking, shit, if I had the opportunity to do something like this, I would use it for a good cause. I wouldn’t just sing about things other people have sung about, just to fit in. I saw there was a need for someone like me in music. I don’t want fame. I don’t want to go on about how big my tits are. I would rather talk about people who need help. Yeah, there are a bunch of people in Sri Lanka who are starving and they are not allowed to tell anyone about it, so I’m going to do that for them. Music is my voice, it’s my being, it makes me happy. But my music came from wanting to shed light on someone else’s plight.
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It's been a combination of things, but I think mostly it is from having the bravery to be like, “Look, I come from this, but I’m gonna go over there, and hang with people over there. I come from this, but I want to get an education and go to an art school. I come from this, but I wanna not be scared of coming to America.” Every step of the way, there are always limitations that I don’t like and have to break through. That is how I see music and whatever else I do. In the past people have taken away my family, have taken away my home, have taken away my life, but one thing that no can take away is yourself, your voice. When I sat down to write music for the first time, I was really frustrated with the world. At that time, I was talking to lots of people and everyone seemed frustrated with the world, too, but everyone just kept singing love songs and pretending like “the butterflies in the poppy fields, lets get along, and every thing is great.” I was like, well, what’s the point, why live in denial? Unless we address shit, we can’t really change it. I’m going to talk about things that need attention and that young people should be aware of.
Do you in any way view yourself as a revolutionary or catalyst to create a general sense of awareness in a time where that is needed and there is a lot of complacency about political issue?
I don’t know, I try to be honest and if honesty is something revolutionary today then that’s a good enough statement. I was the first person who was brave enough to put my life on the line like that. And I literally did put my life on the line and I don’t care. My life has been so fragmented from the start, I really felt like I had nothing to loose by talking about it. The difference between other artists and me, I think, especially in rock music, is that you just don’t get such honesty, anymore. And you definitely don’t have musicians having politics opinions or current affairs issues in their music anymore. That has always bothered me because here we are, England and America, democratic societies. Yet, we are censoring ourselves. The same week I graduated from St Martin’s, my cousin died in Sri Lanka. He was the same age as me, we went to school together for ten years, and he was my best friend. And it just made me think about how delicate life was. It’s too easy for us over here to blanket talk about war and those kinds of issues from a real Biblical point of view. Like, blah blah blah is bad and da da da is good and blah blah blah and da da da is bad. I was sitting there in England in the middle of the most pretentious art school in Europe with loads of privileged kids talking shit and I didn’t know how to make the connection between them and my cousin who was prepared to die for a cause, who was not going through apathy.
It is almost as though your music is not calling for a revolution in politics, rather your music is a revolution of authenticity. You’re calling for a new doctrine of honesty. Is that safe to say?
Yes. One of the things that was going on in Sri Lanka which really caught my attention was that politics has become so full of jargon and so complicated that real people, who have truly suffered the fate of whatever political decision is made, didn’t understand it. When real common people don’t understand politics and decisions that are being made on their behalf, how do they ever stand up to it? That is how most people get away with carrying on the wars for no reason, I think, because they dumb the people down and then shut them out of politics. But, at the same time, they use the people to carry on the war, which becomes an industry. War is an industry.
You’re calling bullshit on the system.
I call bullshit on any system that holds me down. If the system changed my life the way it did and it totally abused my life and my family, then I’m willing to stand up against it. My goal is to bring people into the system. If I have to use some shocking imagery or if I have to use some honest up-front language to get in and wake people up, so be it. At least, it has sparked up some discussion and young people feel like they have the right to talk. That’s all you can hope for, to induce discussion and then make people feel like they have the right to discuss political issues.
There is definitely a consistent continuity between your art, your music and of course your music videos. One item that I’ve noticed in your art and your videos is the tiger. I’m sure you’ve been asked about this before…..
Yeah!!! People are all like Whoohahahaha! If I wear a Bangles Tigers jersey or an American football team shirt with a tiger on it people think that I’m a Tamil Tiger supporter. That is really interesting because people just think that Tamil equals Tiger, even though I do not have Tamil Tiger logos. Its like I’m sitting here in this Ukrainian club and the two people who came to photograph me are wearing tops with a tiger on the hood and a tiger print t shirt. They do it and no one is photographing them and putting them on the internet saying they support the Tamil Tigers. I’m not some manufactured propaganda machine by the Tamil Tigers, but I think people assume that I am. I’m like, hell no! Tamil Tigers fucked my life up and so did the Sinhelse government. They both fucked my life up. I was just a kid skipping around the street in Sri Lanka totally oblivious to politics and anything that was going on. Everyday at school we had to sing the Sri Lankan national anthem, and it just changed one day to drill lessons every morning, like how to duck bullets. I don’t have any affiliation to either of those entities. The statement I try to make through my music is that it’s the civilians and refugees that get caught up in the cross fire of politics. It is the civilians and refugees that get affected by two middle aged men sitting somewhere fighting over some ego addiction to war bullshit, money, and oil, or whatever the thing is.
So, the image of the Tiger is an ironic icon. People are making assumptions for themselves based on the very little they know about politics.
Exactly, trends picks up issues and makes them so disposable. At the time when I started making my art and my music, terrorism was getting chewed up and spat out by the fashion industry, put on the run way. Face magazine in England was doing fashion shoots with girls holding machine guns and fucking rocket launchers. Yet, when something genuine comes through that, like me, using the same language, it doesn’t apply. That’s what I’m learning because that’s what I’m about. I wanna learn what my limitations are within your value system.
What is next for you ? Are you working on something new?
The way I live, I walk along and whatever wall I hit, I choose a direction from there. What I do next is going to be determined by who puts up the biggest wall in front of me. For now, I’m still coming to terms with this touring thing. I haven’t been able to put together my ideal thing yet.
What would that ideal thing be?
I’m still scouting people to come on board with me. I’m trying gather up all the misfits on the planet into one collective, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. My circus.
Photographs by David Titlow. Courtesy M.I.A.