With a new art book and upcoming exhibit in India,
M.I.A. is recasting her image as a multidisciplinary creator.
...
By
Jonathan Durbin / Photographed by Jessica Craig Martin
M.I.A.
is doing it wrong. For years critics and marketing execs have been
telling her that if she were to choose a single medium -- art, music,
politics, whatever -- she'd be more successful. But that's success on
their terms, not hers. And above all else, M.I.A. has made a name for
herself over the past seven years by not caring about their terms. This
is a woman who is deep-down, ground-in, almost genetically punk rock.
She's perhaps the most fiercely political performer active today, and
that creates friction when the mainstream comes courting. The mainstream
wants the music, not the message; the pretty wallpaper, not the hard
questions; the style, not the substance. And even if M.I.A.'s substance
is, at times, thoroughly inscrutable, there's no questioning she
presents herself the way she wants to, not the way she's been told she
needs to. She's not safe. You don't know what she'll do next. Unlike
many of her celebrity contemporaries, she refuses to fade into the
background, and she's been rewarded for her temerity. M.I.A. is the only
artist ever to be nominated for an Academy Award, Grammy Award, Brit
Award, Mercury Prize and the Alternative Turner Prize. More importantly,
she's raised awareness of the strife caused by the civil war in Sri
Lanka -- the conflict that displaced her family and precipitated her
move to the U.K. as a child refugee.
The
37-year-old provocateur (aka Mathangi Maya "M.I.A." Arulpragasam) has
released three full-length albums and a handful of mixes. (A recent
mixtape,
Vicki Leekx, is available for free on the Internet. At
one point during the half-hour mash, she quips, "I'm not saying it
should be freer, I'm saying music should be free," which, one imagines,
was met with tight-lipped exhaustion by the suits at her label,
Interscope.) She's also a visual artist, famously having gotten her
start by designing album covers for Justine Frischmann of Elastica, and
selling some of her early work to Jude Law. It's that part of her
career--although, speaking with her, you get the sense that she'd never
call what she does a "career"--that she's concentrating on now. "People
have heard the journey through music," she tells me one recent evening
over coffee at a hotel in TriBeCa. "Now it's like exploring the journey
to this point through visuals."
So, the coffee-table book.
M.I.A., out now from Rizzoli, is a gorgeous collection of the artwork
she made to accompany each of her albums --
Arular,
Kala,
Maya -- as well as the
Vicki Leekx
mix and her record label N.E.E.T. (The acronym, commonly used to
describe impoverished young people in the U.K., stands for "not in
education, employment or training.") The art follows the narrative of
her releases: the
Arular stuff is all spray-painted Tamil iconography and photographs taken in the jungles of Sri Lanka; the
Kala
work is a riot of colors and plays on hip-hop lyrics like "Goat Rich or
Die Frying" and "It Takes Immigration of Millions to Hold Us Back";
while the
Maya pieces display a chopped-and-screwed obsession
with the aesthetics of the Internet. There are lyrics, short intros to
each section and an essay written by Steve Loveridge, a filmmaker and
M.I.A.'s frequent collaborator and old friend who is currently working
on a documentary about her. The two met while they were students at
Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London in the late
'90s. The school's fashion program is hailed for producing alums like
Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney. Loveridge and M.I.A. were in the
school's less-celebrated film program. (Among the revelations in
Loveridge's piece: M.I.A. wrote a script for a film called
Gratis,
a look at her younger brother's experience in a British young
offender's institute. It was never shot. Loveridge writes that the
script was "the best thing I had ever read.")
Click to enlarge image
Born
in U.K. but raised in Sri Lanka, M.I.A. moved with her mother and
siblings back to London at age 10. They were fleeing the political
turmoil of the island nation, where among many other struggles, her
primary school was destroyed in a government raid. When the family
arrived in England, they moved to a rough neighborhood in London. M.I.A.
barely knew any English. All those cultural and social factors -- her
South Asian heritage, her adopted Western home, Third World unrest, her
refugee status, what it meant to be young and in London and reading
The Face -- are represented in her art.
If
M.I.A. feels like a best-of book, that's the point. The idea was to
show fans how the work came to be, as well as to help the artist figure
out what she wanted to do next. "Even though kids embraced [my art], and
people started making crappy fashion GIFs on the computer and
disgusting websites and wearing weird leggings, there never was a place
where people could go to be like, 'This is where it came from,' she
says. "I didn't really care. Some of the pieces I made, I don't know
where they are now. I would just go and live in a place and leave them.
Then they would get lost. That's how it was. It's all recyclable and out
there." The ones she didn't leave behind are reproduced throughout the
tome, works that are as much about energy as they are about composition.
She
describes herself as an intuitive artist who doesn't belabor her work
by self-editing. Loveridge agrees. "Maya works in single sessions of
activity. There's no coming back tomorrow to rethink it, or add final
touches. Either it works or it doesn't. If you need three weeks to
gently craft and build something, then it's not right for M.I.A.," he
says. "I think it's symptomatic of the environment she grew up in as a
child. She works as if the computer or the camera might not be there
tomorrow. There's a real sense of urgency to get the idea out there
before the opportunity is snatched away from her."
On a macro
level, M.I.A. is a wonderful pop star for the modern age. She's versed
in the means and ways of hardcore rap, rave and punk rock, quoting from a
variety of influences (like sampling the Clash on her biggest hit,
Kala's
"Paper Planes"). And M.I.A. brings an attitude to her music and artwork
that totally redefines worldbeat. Her version comes without any of that
pandering Sting funk -- the post-colonial sense of pity that's come to
characterize that very tired genre. Hers arrives on the heels of tribal
yelps and gunshots -- provocative enough by themselves, but when
combined with her politics, her work is explosive.
M.I.A.
hasn't had an easy go of it these last three years. She had a son,
Ikhyd, with former fiancé Ben Bronfman in 2009, but ended the engagement
with him last year. She moved from Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn to Brentwood in
L.A. -- about as wild an oscillation on the socio-economic scale as
you're going to get in the U.S. -- and finally to London, to be closer
to her family. Her third record,
Maya, released in 2010, courted
controversy for the redhead genocide depicted in the video for "Born
Free," directed by Romain Gavras, which was pulled from YouTube the day
of its release. That year she was the subject of Lynn Hirschberg's
deeply unflattering profile in
The New York Times Magazine, which
she claimed to be innacurate after its release and was awarded a
printed correction for having been misquoted. She remains a vocal
supporter of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, composing the theme song for
his television show,
The World Tomorrow, and attending Assange's
press conference in London last August when he was granted asylum by
Ecuador. She's spoken out on a number of hot-button issues, from the
violence in Sri Lanka and the plight of Palestinians to the U.K.
government's response to the London riots of 2011, and she's gotten more
than her fair share of hate mail because of it. The lady has opinions, a
Twitter feed and a platform -- and she isn't afraid to use them. "Maya
breaks rules, and I think people celebrate that and get really excited,
until she breaks one of theirs," says Loveridge.
Which is what
happened at the Super Bowl. Last February, M.I.A. helped the NFL further
its tradition of halftime media debacles by flipping America the bird
on live TV. She was performing "Gimme All Your Luvin'" with Madonna and
Nicki Minaj -- perhaps the most inoffensive song Madonna has ever
recorded -- when M.I.A. raised her middle finger to the crowd. She has
not, to date, explained her actions. When I asked her if she ever would,
she shook her head. (For more on the subject, see music critic Sasha
Frere-Jones' blogpost for
The New Yorker from February 6, in
which he explains that M.I.A. was just replacing the gunshot hand
gesture she makes in the video for the song, and that, let's be honest,
there are far more important things to worry about than M.I.A. upsetting
football fans.) "I feel like people being reactionary to what I do is
really on them, not on me," she says. "The media freaking out is always
going to happen. It's cultural, you know. If I stick a middle finger up
in England, it's not shocking there. It's shocking here."
In putting together the book,
M.I.A.,
she says she was forced to examine the last few years of her life. It
was a valuable exercise: she went backward to move forward. "The first
album is about dealing with these voiceless people in the jungle in Sri
Lanka," she says. "The second one was the same situation, just extending
it out to the rest of the world...and putting them on the map. The last
one was me engaging with the Internet because that's how our generation
deals with shit now." In August, she took to Twitter to release details
about her fourth full-length album, due out next year. Along with some
invectives against critics and those who have done her wrong, she wrote
that it sounds like "Paul Simon on acid." (Two tracks are already on the
Internet: "Bad Girls," which was on
Vicki Leekx, and a preview of "Come Walk With Me.")
But
before the new album, there's the art show. M.I.A. is creating an
architectural piece for the first Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kerala,
India, which opens in December. She says she plans to turn the work into
the stage set for her next tour, and that it was working on this piece
that gave her the clues to what she would do next. "When I went to
India, I was looking on Google for stuff that was the color of a certain
green, and that's when this green goddess, Matangi, popped up. I was
like, that's weird, the whole time I've been alive on this planet, my
mom never mentioned where my name came from. Matangi was the goddess of
knowledge and the arts--music, art, dancing, spoken word. When they
invented this mythology 4,000 years ago, the concept of someone being
about all those things was normal."
The album is titled
Mathangi,
after M.I.A.'s given name, and in tribute to the goddess. M.I.A., who
was raised with no specific religion, notes that there are more than a
few unnerving similarities between herself and the Hindu deity.
Matangi's mantra is "Aim," M.I.A. backward; she's the patron goddess of
outcasts and the disenfranchised; and "her Mudra," M.I.A. explains,
"which is basically like all these yoga movements on your hands, is the
middle finger -- to top it all off." For M.I.A., the discovery taught
her that her sense of herself as an artist-- someone who is able to
create, no matter the medium--is time-honored and respected. Not weird.
Not wrong.
"I felt like people put me down because I did too
many things. Like, 'You put so much effort in so many directions that
there's not enough yield. You don't focus on money. But you put all
these things together and you don't make it work for you. You don't sell
shit. Why don't you have your leggings line at American Apparel?'...I
love that the freakiness [about Matangi] happened on the most mundane
tool I have, the Internet, and I didn't have to go climb a mountain or
anything like that." She continues: "I always stayed true to myself.
Even on my last album when I got criticized, I knew I was sticking to
something I needed to stick to. Whatever the consequences that led me to
that point, the concept of somebody who fights for the truthfulness of
words was my thing -- telling the story, getting it out, questioning it.
Information -- that's what I fought for."
Bloggers are suppose to be dope...
-Patrick SpagLO
