by Dave Eggers
Maya's music has been described as a combination (it's always a combination) of world beat, hip-hop, punk rock, baile funk, techno beat, Jamaican dancehall, whirring sonics (whatever the fuck those are), Indian bhangra, blah blah blah ... In other words, she sounds like absolutely nothing you've ever heard before. And like everything you thought you'd heard before, too. She also drops finer lyrics than just about anyone with a gold chain knocking against his chest. Indeed, she can craft a story better than scores of novelists out there, her tunes somehow conveying the pain of losing one's family and homeland in the most joyous way possible. And with this third album, she's attempting to get huge without sacrificing any of the drooling critical adoration that put her here.
Seven thousand words, though. Holy shit.
One thing you should know before we proceed together is that my taste in music isn't very good. For me, listening to contemporary hip-hop is just a way to summon an attitude, to blend in with a more powerful person's sense of himself and to pretend that I also possess some of that ineffable power. M.IA.'s music certainly fits the bill, not to mention that she also confers easy cred upon her listeners. If I were single, I'd be pumping her new album on every date, all the while talking up a trip I took to Brazil a few years ago, the time I met these kids who might have come from a favela or something. Anyway, they were poor.
I stopped seriously listening to music when Ice Cube began appearing in the Friday movies. When I was a kid at Oberlin College, somewhere in Ohio, one of the whitest and crunchiest institutions in America, our obsessions focused on Ice Cube and Kurt Cobain, who managed to die my junior year abroad as I was flying Olympic Airways from Athens to Zurich. The pilots found out midflight, and the young stewardesses began to cry in unison as they tried to pour us our glasses of cloudy retsina. Back then, you see, musicians were still gods who walked among us. But it was the beefy gentleman emerging straight outta Compton, a self-described crazy motherfucker named Ice Cube, who provided our daily soundtrack as we jacked up my roomie's Saab and aimed it at Oberlin's sole McDonald's, located in the most "urban" part of this sad village of 8,000 crushed souls. Ice Cube's music—racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic (full disclosure: my roommate Mike "the Zap" Zapler and I were both nominally Hebrews)—rocked our little black Swedish convertible all the way down College Street as we dreamed of a Big Mac as hot and rancid as Cube's funky lyrics. The Zap and I were both political-science majors with a lot to lose, but Ice Cube seemed like he came from a world where the apocalypse had already wiped clean any vestige of hope—an exciting, existentialist posture for a twenty-year-old cracker still unsure of how to play the opposite sex. Since its East Coast inception and up to its recent blinged-out downfall, hip-hop has always been an exhilarating form of tourism for privileged young Americans, a journey into that shit-stained part of the country that always seems so near and yet so far. Bitch, you shoulda put a sock on the pickle, Ice Cube rapped firmly as he educated two guys in a Saab about the correct uses of birth control in a tone no Oberlin woman would ever tolerate. And your pussy wouldn't be blowing smoke signals. Uh, yes, I'll take that with fries.
After Cube had completely sold out, it was pretty much downhill for me. I fell under the influence of the Detroit ghetto-tech rapper DJ Assault, whose lyrics I actually paid to use in my last novel (Aw, shit, heah I come / Shut yo mouf and bite yo tongue = $500). And then, like many men and women stumbling headlong into middle age, I just stopped giving a shit about music.
My first meeting with Maya takes place one day last fall in the lobby of the Bowery Hotel in New York's East Village, a dark, moody depot for transatlantic wankers of a certain caste. She's rock-star late to the interview, and Maya's publicist has been trying to call up to her room. "Maya Arulpra—" she begins telling the desk clerk. "Who?" "M.I.A." No response. Despite her ubiquity on every iPhone in Williamsburg, there's clearly still some brand-building ahead for Maya and her label.
Six hours later, she approaches my table with a just-got-out-of-bed look, resembling one of the sloe-eyed Israeli girls who sleepily haunted my Hebrew school. She tells me she doesn't want to do the usual kind of interview, where she enlightens the reader about what it's like to be Maya and I ask her questions about her past. No, she wants to come up with something creative. Maybe we should look at artwork together and discuss. Or maybe we can challenge the jerk who made her sound like a terrorist-loving Tamil Tiger groupie in New York Times by holding a panel with the guy from The Village Voice who defended her. Or maybe this whole piece could be about the cell phone videos of innocent Tamils, Guineans, and others being killed and raped—a truly ghastly video of Sri Lankan soldiers laughing while shooting bound, naked Tamil men has been making the rounds on YouTube. Or maybe "It shouldn't be about Sri Lanka; it should be about truth. It should be why, when things are changing so fast, journalism's not changing as fast as the world is changing, and no one seems to be independent enough to just be like, 'I'm going to go look into this.' Every little thing just needs to be so whitewashed on the bigger scale. I think it's really interesting to focus in and say, 'Right, we're just going to take ten fucking cell-phone footages from around the world that didn't become an outrageous piece of proof that stands up in the U.N.,' which makes the U.N. really redundant, you know what I mean?" She pauses. "But all that footage crushes so many things that we stand for. It crushes art. Like, I can't look at any art right now, 'cause I just think it's all bullshit." A few beats later: "In the future, I want to move more into art." A little later: "I think [art is] good for my ADD, my music."
Her attention deficit disorder is endearing. She's razor smart while somehow managing to be warm, standoffish, and suspicious. She wants to be in charge, controlling the interview, challenging her critics, crushing the United Nations once and for all. I get the sense she's not completely aware of her own psychology, which may be an aid to her artistic work, where it all just comes pouring out like an uncapped volcano in the Philippines. Itching to get away from the interview and back to her music, she tells me the studio is where she talks her shit out. "If's like therapy, seeing journalists for me," she says. "I'll send you a bill," I tell her.
The inevitable Robert Christgau, self-proclaimed dean of American rock critics, has called M.I.A. "the brown-skinned Other now obsessing Euro-America," and Maya's biography could be summed up in one of her own lyrics: I got brown skin but I'm a West Londoner / Educated but a refugee still. When she talks about her past, one thinks partly that she's making it up as she goes along, not just because the stuff is so fantastical but because she's such an effortless storyteller, explaining complicated events with small details, like the time her mom locked her in a room in her grandmother's house in Sri Lanka to keep her from filming a potentially dangerous protest, or the gruesomeness of life on a Liberian rubber plantation she recently visited. "I'm sad I come from a country like this," she says of Sri Lanka, "full of racism and hatred." Although maybe L.A. and New York aren't quite the ticket, either. "I'm ready to go to Ohio," she says, sort of kidding. "I would love to move next door to Dave Chappelle. Thats my dream. If I stick around America, thats what I'm doing."
If you had to invent the person of the future, you could do worse than to start with Maya as a baseline. She's the Third World refugee who lost her teeth to malnutrition as a child but later bagged a film degree from London's Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, alma mater of artist Lucian Freud and Clash singer Joe Strummer. (Funnily enough, the basis of "Paper Planes" is pretty much a straight loop of the Clash's "Straight to Hell," with the guitar maybe smoothed out a little.)
Maya isn't so much self-made as self-sampled: She's an assemblage of what it takes to be relevant, with a profound understanding of just how fucked-up and unglamorous it is to grow up at the bottom of both First World and Third World societies. No one on the corner had swagger like us / Hit me on the burner prepaid wireless, goes "Paper Planes," and it's the prepaid wireless thats genius: the tiny sociological detail of the immigrant buyin
g prepaid minutes as opposed to the monthly plan, the daily calculations amounting to an extra fifty bucks a month sent back to Chiapas, Mexico, or Lomé, Togo, that rings true to those of us who came to the West from more dysfunctional parts of the world. Like a fine novelist mixing motit's and sentiments to produce the kind of unplugged stream of consciousness that Holden Caulfield or Alexander Portnoy would be proud of, M.I.A. in a song like "Sunshowers" posits a universe of perceptions all at once. A personal assertion like I salt and pepper my mango may please the liberal mango-biters of Park Slope, Brooklyn, but it soon slides into Like P.L.O., I don't surrendo, which causes many of the above to choke on their mango pits. Educated but a refugee still may be just the ticket as the West swoons into decline and the East prepares itself for dominance. She's proud that her son's first words were in Tamil, not English. "He said Ammaa and Appaa, which is like Mom and Dad."
Whatever Maya Arulpragasam is, her music and her rather fast-moving mouth have made her some serious fans and some pretty serious detractors. Drinking my way through brownstone Brooklyn, where the Worldwide Media lives and opinionates, mention of her name unleashes a flood of commentary. "For two different interviews, she gave me two different ages." "She wouldn't tell the Times how old she is." "She's prickly." "She's like the popular girl in art school." "Everyone's afraid of her." "Honestly, I think she's prone to embellishment, and this is one big art project for her." "I've interviewed a million musicians. No one's struck me as being as dishonest as she is." "Goddamn, is she a pain in the ass." And then there are her political views. As one Sri Lankan rapper put it: M.I.A., you represent terrorism in the worst way. When it comes to a singer with this complex a background, everyone wants to shape the story, which pisses Maya off to no end. "If I can't tell people what happened to me," she says, "if I'm denied my own history, yeah, I'm gonna say something about that."
Anyway, this much is likely true: Maya was born in 1975 in Hounslow, London, to Kala and Arul Pragasam. Her father, Arul, adopted the nom de guerre Arular, and when she was six months old, he dragged the family back to Sri Lanka. Arular was a founding member of the Eelam Revolutionary Organization of Students (yes, EROS), a group devoted to establishing an independent Tamil state in Sri Lanka's north and one of about thirty that sprang up during this period in response to increasing oppression by the Sinhalese-majority government. (The Sinhalese are Buddhists, the Tamils predominantly Hindu.) Her father's revolutionary résumé is legendary—schooling in Moscow, training with the PLO—but his tenure as a parent was somewhat less distinguished. He all but abandoned his young family in favor of the struggle and to this day does not have regular contact with his daughter.
Kala, however, is still at the center of Maya's life. "She's this sixty-two-year-old Sri Lankan seamstress," she tells me. "She's like one of those Puerto Rican women you see here." I'm sort of getting an image, but that doesn't begin to explain the fortitude it must have taken for Kala Pragasam to get her family through what happened when they returned to Sri Lanka. Violence was a constant. With her father effectively an enemy of the state, the child endured questioning by soldiers. She witnessed shootings and government raids. Her uprooting continued, from Sri Lanka to mainland India's Tamil Nadu state and back to Sri Lanka, with malnutrition and disease hot on the heels of her and her two siblings. Her sister contracted typhoid. In past interviews, Maya described having her gums cut open with rice grain after losing most of her teeth. It would be one of her last memories of Sri Lanka. In 1986, the family escaped the teardrop island and boomeranged back to a life of Western poverty in South London.
The first ten years of Maya's life read like a textbook case of what not to do to a child. I was born in Leningrad, the son of Soviet parents who did everything possible to airlift my ass out of the motherland first chance they had. The idea of Maya's father dragging two young children back into the conflagration suggests a man of monstrous self-regard at the level where the political becomes the personal. Her childhood gave Maya an insight into the world that few of her artistic peers would have, but it also left her with an inexhaustible sense of anger and resentment. Of the plight of her people she told me: "Every single Tamil person who's alive today, who's seen how the world does nothing, has to find a way to exist that isn't harboring bitterness and hate and revenge." To her Sinhalese detractors, her music is precisely that form of revenge.
Life for a brown-skinned refugee in a London council estate (the PJs) was shit, but early hip-hop acts like N.W.A. and Public Enemy gave Maya a lift out of the quotidian, filling her head with dreams of a new life as a gangsta's bitch in South Central L.A. (Is there anyone of our generation N.W.A. didn't inspire?) By the time she managed to get into Central Saint Martins—she told the head of the art department she would become a hooker if she wasn't admitted—the violent childhood and missing father were channeled into canvases run wild with armed militants and tigers, the same wild, bright, tropical graphics that would eventually make it into her epilepsy-inducing videos. The tiger was not an incidental animal. It would be seen as an endorsement of Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers, a group perceived as liberators by some and as terrorists by many others. (The Tigers, for example, pioneered the use of suicide bombers.) Her father's dealings with the organization helped fuel M.IA.'s terrorist-sympathizer moniker, an allegation she has yet to live down in some quarters. "You have all this shit going on in the publication world," she tells me unhappily. "They're calling me a terrorist and a liar." The singles came first, "Galang" in 2003 and "Sunshowers" a year later. The wonderfully foulmouthed Canadian electroclash musician Peaches taught her to program electronic beats on the Roland MC-505, an all-in-one drum machine and keyboard unit, and the resulting music was DIY honest. "It's unpretentious, stuck together with Scotch tape," the critic and musician Sasha Frere-Jones tells me. "So many people have tried to copy that style since."
Maya has always viewed her art as a collaborative process, an outgrowth of the communal nature of growing up in Sri Lanka. Hooking up with Peaches was only the beginning. She found her ultimate collaborator in Diplo, born Thomas Wesley Pentz, a middle-class white kid from Florida whose thing was to take all kinds of pop music—a classic-rock instrumental here, a rap a cappella there—and seamlessly blend it, jumping recklessly from Dirty South hip-hop like Three 6 Mafia to Björk, Missy Elliott, the Cars, and the Cure without pause. Maya grabbed on to this aesthetic, bringing her own London and Sri Lankan sensibility to the mix. (Cue the bhangra, the Jamaican dancehall, et al.) With Diplo as her producer—and for a time her lover—she kept three steps ahead of everyone, stitching all this noise into a new sound that was as exciting as it was disorienting. Together they redefined what smart popular music could mean with the re-lease of M.I.A.'s "Piracy Funds Terrorism" mixtape—worth the trouble of locating just for the "Galang" remix (featuring the irrepressible Vicious) as well as Maya's hilarious grand larceny of the Bangles' "Walk Like an Egyptian." DJs on both sides of the Atlantic went ape for the redefined grooves, and "Galang" went viral across the Internet before anyone was even using the word "viral."
The rest was a well-aimed bottle rocket to the top. The albums Arular (2005) and Kala (2007), named after Maya's father and mother, respectively (make what you will of the fact that Dad came first), wet the pants of our nation's music critics, a slow drip that continues to this day. Although it sold only 139,000 copies in 2007 (if's now up to about 520,000), Kala was named record of the year by Rolling Stone and ended up on forty-five year-end "best" lists, including some by publications I for one have never heard of, such as Drowned in Sound and The Sacramento Bee. But as far as the hoi polloi were concerned, it was "Paper Planes," pumping up the trailer of Pineapple Express and sending the scenery flying in Slumdog Millionaire, that made M.I.A. There's something almost sweet and old-fashioned about what happened to Maya with that song. All the praise in the world, a zillion pages in magazines, but when it came down to it, it took a hit single.
Onstage M.I.A. is nonpareil, a stunning performer. I fly out
to the San Diego Street Scene music festival to see her show. Maya has talked about "how the First World is collapsing into the Third World," and San Diego, with its goofy-looking street rickshaws and omnipresent condo foreclosures, feels Third World these days. The festival is hot and stupid. All evening long I've been running into people who resemble the Family of Early Man, but things get noticeably better when M.I.A. hits the stage. Here's a true mélange of humanity: white hippie chicks, some wayward Vietnamese young ladies, a woman wearing tight shorts with the legend GIRLS DON'T POOP on her ass. Maya is rocking it in sunglasses, a tiny woman dominating a big venue, shooting off imaginary air guns as out-of-date dorks in porkpie hats shoot them right back. "Lef's pahr-TAY," she shouts, and even though she's tired (this gig was a last-minute thing), she's just the best fucking dancer out there, and the chances of taking your eyes off her grinding form are nil. When if's time for "Paper Planes," the crowd has a collective seizure; even San Diego's blonde navy-brat girls know every single word, follow every ka-ching, every bangl!, every and take your money. "We outie. Peace. We love you," Maya says as she gets the hell out of there.