January 25, 2012

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After more or less ceding the indie spotlight following the controversy surrounding /|/| /| Y /| back in 2010, M.I.A. has announced that she's coming back in full force in 2012.

Firstly, she's got a new single, "Bad Girls," due out next Tuesday. It's a new version of the single she released on her late 2010 mixtape, VickiLeekx, and it'll be out on Jan 31 on iTunes. A video for the song will follow on Feb. 3.

That's not all: Apparently M.I.A. fourth album is due out this summer. That's right, M.I.A.'s new album is due out this summer. Is it too late to add it to our list of most anticipated albums of 2012?

[Edited 2/2/12 16:03pm]

I see someone else is capitalizing on their Super Bowl appearance. Well good for her... That Halftime Show is such a great look for her. Can't imagine how many people will be introduced to her for the first time.

A new M.I.A. single the same week as Madonna's single drops and Lana's album is released?

I need to lie down, 2012 is gonna be a fucking fantastic year.

I like her 2007 single "Paper Planes" the first time I heard it,I was like "WTF?" but it grew on me.It's a very bold song.

RKJCNE said:

A new M.I.A. single the same week as Madonna's single drops and Lana's album is released?

I need to lie down, 2012 is gonna be a fucking fantastic year.

I wasn't all that impressed with MAYA. Hopefully this album she's a little more serious about putting together a tight set of songs.

I love everything this girl puts out, but certainly MAYA put a damper on any commercial momentum she had going.

And I'm still addicted to Vicki Leekx!

M.I.A. Talks Madonna, Super Bowl, And New Album

January 30, 2012

M.I.A. has remained out of the spotlight since the release of 2010’s /\/\/\Y/\.

Today she resurfaced with a new single “Bad Girls,” produced by Danja, and her first interview in months.

Speaking with BBC Radio 1’s Zane Lowe from the Super Bowlrehearsals, the firecracker femcee dished on her upcoming performance with Madonna at Sunday’s halftime show, collaborating with the pop queen, and her fourth album, due this summer.

On performing with Madonna and Nicki Minaj at Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis: “Yes, I’m going to the Super Bowl. Actually I’ve never been to the Super Bowl, so it’s my first time. I’m going to be performing with Madonna and Nicki Minaj. If you’re gonna go to the Super Bowl, you might as well go there with America’s biggest female icons.”

On collaborating with pop royalty: “She is the original. If you’re gonna support someone, that’s a pretty dope achievement. I’m sure my mum is gonna be way [more] into that than me putting ‘Galang’ out.”

On why she wanted to work with Madge: “As musicians, we’re two women and we represent two opposite sides of the world. If we can come together on a piece of music or something likethe Super Bowl, I feel like that’s actually a cool thing to see this year because it’s getting silly out there.”

On her as-yet-untitled fourth album: “I want it to be a summer thing ’cause it’s a summer record. As soon as I finishthe Super Bowl, I’ve gotta do another couple of weeks with European producers.”

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I'm such an MIA stan, so the fact that she's working with Madonna is a total dream come true. These two girls are gonna make 2012 a year to remember!

Her latest single, "Bad Girls".

not sure if I like that new song

I'm addicted, but it isn't very different from the Vicki Leekx track like I was hoping. Can't wait for more!

Photo from the "Bad Girls" video shoot.

The video is SO GOOD!!

Oh yeah, she's dope and the vid is better than expected!

Got me excited for the new project.

I'm digging this song. Im thinking if the rest of the album is more on a crafted song approach of Arula & Kala that this albums this could be pretty good. I wonder what other producers she worked with for the new album. I remember Diplo saying he wasnt too happy with what she was doing songwise when he worked on Maya with her, so I wonder if he came back.

Tmbaland's former protege Danja produced the new single.

SoulAlive said:

not sure if I like that new song

Just wait, it will grow on you.

Identity said:

SoulAlive said:

not sure if I like that new song

Just wait, it will grow on you.

YOUR RIGHTT!

I hated this on the first listen

After listening to it for about 4 times... it is rather catchy.. .

She has a couple of good songs that I have liked in the past... got to listen more to her stuff to give a full opinion on her overall.

I really dig her style, very pretty girl..

This girl is so badass! I love her. I love the song and props to her political message in the video.

Deconstruting M.I.A.

Confused revolutionary? Brilliant provocateur? As her Super Bowl digit malfunction reminded everyone, Maya Arulpragasam is one of the most polarizing figures in pop today, a neon blur of contradictions and conflations — but she may also be the most thrilling.

Here's a handy primer to her life and art and everything in between SPIN originally published in our August 2010 issue.

By some accounts — including her own — we should all be done talking about Maya Arulpragasam. In 2007, promoting her sophomore album, Kala, the singer known as M.I.A. told an interviewer, "I feel like a mirror reflecting back everyone's perception of me. Part of me wants to carry on. Part of me wants to stop." Eight months later, onstage at Bonnaroo, she went even further: "This is my last show," she announced.

Like many things she says, the statement posed more questions than it answered. And soon enough, M.I.A.'s career was on another upswing: In the summer of 2008, the trailer for Pineapple Express turnedKala's best song, "Paper Planes," into a hit; she performed at the Grammys (on the day she was scheduled to give birth); got an Oscar nomination for Best Song for the Slumdog Millionaire track "O…Saya"; and saw Kala go gold.

Now, she's just released her third and most anticipated album, /\/\/\Y/\, and the mirror is only getting bigger and bigger, shifting fun-house-style. The ultraviolent video for "Born Free" caused a media shit storm.

The New York Times Magazine chimed in with a nine-page feature that attempted to expose M.I.A. as an entitled, politically naive hypocrite (if you missed the ensuing Internet-fueled micro-scandal, you really need to spend less time outside). Of M.I.A.'s many talents, explaining herself may not be her strongest or her favorite — she declined to go on the record for this story — but that's okay. We're happy to give it a shot. In that same 2007 interview, she predicted, "I might be in carpentry next year." Or maybe not.

I. HER MUSIC

M.I.A. has claimed that when she moved from war-torn Sri Lanka to London in 1983 at age eight, she only knew two English words: "Michael Jackson," as if her beats-without-borders worldview came via some sort of Thriller-inscribed primal scene.

When "Galang" hit in 2004, it worked a space between hip-hop, dancehall, and then-trendy grime, like the Slits meets rave meets Missy Elliott. Never much of a singer or dancer, she worked in the tradition of technically limited geniuses like Madonna and Miles Davis, who only used exactly the amount of talent necessary to make a scene.

"She's got a million ideas," says Rusko, one of the producers on her new album. "When we record her, we fix some of the out-of-tune notes and keep some in. A lot of recording with her is happy accidents."

M.I.A. got her start as a London graphic designer and scenester, hanging with English pop heavies like Elastica's Justine Frischmann and Blur's Damon Albarn. In 2000, while working as Elastica's tour videographer, she learned how to operate a Roland MC-505 drum machine with help from the tour's opening act, smut-rapper Peaches.

A large coterie of producers and engineers worked on her 2005 debut, Arular, but it still had the euphoric feel of a novice punching buttons and letting her chanting-rapping-trilling-spieling vocalese bounce off the sounds she conjured.

"Today, hip-hop is club music," says Rusko, who notes that having M.I.A. on his résumé led to work on new Britney Spears tracks. "Hip-hop and R&B are looking towards club music for ideas right now. She and [ex-boyfriend and frequent collaborator] Diplo were some of the first people to do that. It's the rule now."

2007's Kala was supposed to be the record where she went pro. Timbaland was on tap to coproduce (he ended up doing one track). But when the U.S. government denied her a long-term work visa, she regrouped and recorded throughout the third world, culling performances from Nigerian MC Afrika Boy and a 30-piece Indian drum circle, among others. On Kala, the sounds of third-world slums hammer at the gates of first-world pop; "I put people on the map that never seen a map," she sang on "20 Dollar."

In a sense, /\/\/\Y/\ is a map, a global picture of the matrices of technology, power, and money. The technology theme gestated during her pregnancy, where the housebound mom-to-be became obsessed with new media. (Google is thanked in the liner notes.) "XXXO" turns on a metaphor about flattened identities in the iPhone era; "Internet Connection" is a meditation on aloneness inspired in part by a three-hour bout with customer service; "Lovealot" is the story of Russian Islamic teen terrorists who met online; and the album-closing "Space Odyssey" turns the floaty phrase "My lines are down, you can't call me" into a double metaphor for romantic disconnection and techno-alienation.

The music is as universal as the theme, less worldly in that it doesn't use global beats but more of-the-world in that it plays off the pop music that most people actually listen to. It's folk music for the iPad age, her most radical gesture yet.

II. HER POLITICS

In 2004, M.I.A. and Diplo released their first mixtape, titled Piracy Funds Terrorism, comparing downloaders to suicide bombers. It established her unique political posture, charging herself with being the chief Western voice of Sri Lanka's Tamil minority, an ethnic group that has been subject to systemic oppression at the hands of the country's Sinhalese majority. This has forced her into a problematic rhetorical relationship with the militant separatist Tamil Tigers, whose most extreme tactics include the use of child soldiers and many suicide bombings (which they are credited with popularizing).

M.I.A.'s father founded a nonviolent forerunner of the Tigers, called EROS, and while many early stories on her fabricated a Tiger connection, she strenuously claims he was never in the group. In 2008, she said, "I don't support terrorism and never have," and she doesn't support the Tigers. Other statements ("Give war a chance"), suggest a radical-chic identification with violent rhetoric that recalls '60s groups the Weather Underground and Red Brigades. Detractors point to her use of tigers in her videos and on her website; in 2008, a Sri Lankan–American rapper named DeLon posted a parody video of "Paper Planes," featuring images of Tiger atrocities.

She has been articulate in explaining the ways reactionary leaders brand all dissent as "terror": "When [Westerners] think Tamil, you automatically think Tiger," she said in 2009. "If you're a terrorist organization, you don't have the right to speak. That's been passed on to the Tamil civilians." At the same time, she can play fast and loose with facts.

She claims, for instance, that the Sri Lankan military is "a million soldiers big" — it's closer to 340,000. She has also been criticized for calling the civil war in her native country a "genocide," though it hasn't been officially designated as such.

"Any time you're trying to address a complicated situation or complex ideas, you're going to have a hard time getting it across," says Boots Riley of leftist Bay Area rappers the Coup (and rap rockers Street Sweeper Social Club), who caused a media maelstrom by depicting the World Trade Center exploding on the cover of a record that was supposed to come out right after 9/11. "When it's CNN interviewing you and you've only got five seconds, you've got to cut to the core." In 2009, shortly after her genocide claim, hostilities in Sri Lanka came to an end. Yet at least 80,000 Tamils still live in army-run camps.

M.I.A. throws herself into this mess headlong, embodying the impulse to incite and also to heal. If her comments often seem contradictory, that too is a kind of message. "If I represent anything, it's what it's like to be a civilian caught up in a war," she said in 2005. In other words, she represents not just struggle, but dissonance, a kind of permanent refugee status. Maybe that's why her political statements can at times end up sounding like this recent tweet:

"I got digital cash Hactivism at its best Google Bombing with my Infotainment."

III. HER BUSINESS

M.I.A.'s only hit began to bubble up just as the global economy started to tank. "Paper Planes" was built around a sample of the Clash's "Straight to Hell" and its refrain ("All I want to do is [boom boom boom] and take your money") circled a nexus of capitalism and nihilism, the rallying cry for the AIG gangstas torching our 401(k)s.

Like everything about her, M.I.A.'s own connections to capitalism are complex. This year, she turned down licensing offers from Coke and Pepsi, and recently said, "Money is the enemy of music." Yet, in 2008, she told this magazine she was "polluting the mainstream" by licensing "Galang" to Honda.

It's a measure of M.I.A.'s heart-tugging power over leftoid music fans that this engendered debates about the nature of selling out and quaintly harkened back to the early days of punk.

Reflecting a less tortured impulse, her own actions, and those of her fiancé, Benjamin Bronfman, suggest a positive relationship between wealth and power; Bronfman used seed money from his father, Warner Media Group CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr., to cofound Global Thermostat, a sustainable-development firm. M.I.A. gives extensively, though quietly, to a number of charities.

IV. HER AESTEHTIC

"When i met her, she was silk-screening her own covers for the 12-inch for 'Fire Fire,' " Diplo recalls of the pre-Arular M.I.A. "I was amazed. It was hand-painted, with these Molotov cocktails and her tiger prints and stuff. She always knew this was the angle."

Before the candy-colored images of guns, war planes, bombs, and tanks that decorate theArular CD booklet caused controversy, they won her acclaim as a visual artist. In 2002, she was nominated for a prestigious Alternative Turner Prize, and early profiles of M.I.A. often noted that Jude Law was among the early collectors of her work.

The mix of hyper-bright and vaguely insurgent is a thread she's followed in making the now-standard pop-star move into fashion design. M.I.A.'s own look can run from futurist-aerobics instructor to new-wave pirate to dancer in an old X-Clan video to queenly candy raver. Early-'90s photos of African slum kids carrying AK-47s and wearing Michael Jordan jerseys donated by American charities goes a long way toward explaining this.

The clothes she sells are pastiches, radiantly bright and button-pushing, not exactly the kind of thing you can expect to see trickling down to Filene's Basement. From a bomber jacket ($210) resembling a hodgepodge of African flags (like the cover of Bob Marley's Survival) to a sleek hoodie festooned with watermelon slices, her music's themes of commodification, appropriation, and noticeability-at-all-costs (including a $65 tank top) are all there.

"She samples styles and mixes colors and prints the same way she constructs music," says designer Carri Munden, who has worked with M.I.A. since the "Galang" video. "It's chaos. But the end result is unique, and she is one of the only female artists on her level to be completely in control of her own style."

Indeed, in an era in which music occupies an increasingly thin, crowded cultural bandwidth, being a "multi-platform" operation is essential. "Even when we were working on tracks, she'd be putting pictures together and getting images off Google," says Rusko. "She was always thinking about the whole package."

M.I.A. smartly gives this strategy its own global-revolutionist cast.

"The Kala artwork and sound and clothes are all about being worldly and representing the idea of the whole world being mashed up into one," she said in 2008.

V. HER LIFE

Ironically, /\/\/\Y/\ is actually less steeped in the iconography of terror and revolution than her previous work; there is a song called "Teqkilla" but nary a Molotov cocktail gets flung. It's easy to credit this shift to a savvy assessment of her fans' rosier Obama-era worldview.

Those close to her credit the shift to something more basic that isn't easy to discern from outside. Confrontational videos and guerilla media tactics aside, her life is more normal than ever.

"She's content now," says Rusko, who lived in the L.A. home she shares with Bronf-man and traveled with her to Hawaii while recording /\/\/\Y/\. "Her life is a lot more settled now. She's got the baby. When we were recording, she'd do vocals, then go upstairs to be with the baby for a couple hours. There wasn't much drama."

It shouldn't be shocking that the less hard-knock her life has gotten the more hits she's taken and the more paranoid of the press she's become. When M.I.A. first arrived in 2005, the gorgeous, impossibly cool singer with the exotic background and "freedom fighter" father made for ideal copy.

Five years later, the image has flipped. In the lengthy Times Magazine profile, writer Lynn Hirschberg mustered a wide range of evidence (the food she eats, the house she lives in, the way in which she gave birth) to imply a disconnect between M.I.A.'s radical political rhetoric and her comfortable lifestyle. M.I.A., who sings, "I fight the ones that fight me" on "Lovealot," walked the walk by tweeting Hirschberg's phone number and posting an incendiary dis track on the N.E.E.T. site.

"That writer was setting her up," says Boots Riley. "An artist has access to media now that allows you to hold a writer accountable. Her move was brilliant."

The track is at once confrontational and wounded. Titled simply "I'm a Singer," it gives off a sense of awe at the values of a world that cares about the words of a pop star and ignores the real suffering of real people. ("Babies lying in the ditch / Thinkin' if they had a Kyte phone, you'll see this shit").

The old mirror paradox is back in play — scale, proportion, focus,

all out of whack. "All I ever wanted was my story to be told," she sings on /\/\/\Y/\. For someone so skilled at image manipulation, that's hardly the whole picture. But if tomorrow night, the CIA black helicopters of her wildest fantasies really do swoop in and remove her to some undisclosed location for waterboarding and Justin Bieber–enhanced interrogation, and "I'm a Singer" was her final statement to the outside, its message would be clear enough: In the end, it's really all just art.

http://www.spin.com/artic...ign=020712