http://www.popandpolitics...cleID=1811
Missing M.I.A.
by John Tomasic
MIA is one of the biggest artists in new music today. Her unreleased mixtapes made her an underground star and the queen of download culture in 2004. Her heavily anticipated debut album, Arular, won her a Mercury Prize nomination and inclusion in nearly all the top-ten lists of the industry magazines, including Spin, Rolling Stone, URB and Blender. Time magazine included Arular in its "Best of 2005" section and tastemaker Sasha Frere-Jones at the New Yorker has written about MIA for the magazine and at his blog. Artists can't get enough of her: Jude Law bought her paintings; Diplo mixed her tapes and her album; Timbaland wants to produce her next-round material. In fact, she was supposed to be working with "Timba" on that right now, in New York, but she's not.
As newspapers would put it: Maya Arulpragasam (29), known to her fans as MIA, has been caught up in the broad net of the War on Terror. According to the British Guardian and more than a few US-based websites, MIA was denied a visa to enter the country by the US government this spring. On 7 April she shouted the news like a mixtape rap from her MySpace page:


Roger roger do you hear me over!!!! The US immigration wont let me in!!!! I was mennu work with timber startin this week, but now im doin a Akon "im locked out they wont let me in" im locked out! They wont let me in! Now Im strictly making my album outside the borders!!!! [...]
to my people who walk wiv me in the America, don't forget we got the internet! Spread the word! Or come get me!!!! Ill be in my bird flu lab in china! Liming and drinkin tiger beer with my pet turtel.

The US government, MIA's US label Interscope records, and her lawyers all refuse to either confirm or deny the allegations. MIA reportedly told NME.com in June that her lawyers were "trying to sort out the situation," part of which seems to have involved deleting the MySpace entry and taking down MIA's official website, miauk.com. At this point all that remains of MIA's visa trouble are cyberspace fingerprints. Interscope spokesperson Lauren Burns, no stranger to the press, avoided calls about the visa for the last two weeks only to muster a one-line email: "Let me look into this and see what kind of information I can dig up for you."

A week later Ms Burns still hasn't "dug up" any news "for me" on the disappearance of the label's newest exploding star.

Here's some information: Web rumors in March suggested MIA's visa troubles were all cleared up and that she would soon touch down in Dallas to begin delayed Stateside recording and touring. That didn't happen. Interscope's artist is probably somewhere in Asia.

Other relevant information is that MIA has had political trouble in the past. The Guardian reported that the US government "visited" MIA's now-disappeared website on "numerous occasions" and MTV refused last year to play the video for her hit "Sunshowers," a song in part about a suspected suicide bomber.

MIA is British/Sri Lankan and her father was and perhaps still is a member of the Sri Lankan separatist Tamil Tigers. She has had no contact with him reportedly from the time she moved with her mother from India to England at age 11. But her father's involvement in the long-running armed conflict in Sri Lanka continues to inform her work.

As a successful visual artist in the years before she became MIA, she blended graffiti art, pink camouflage, photo stencils of rebel fighters, bombs and guns in works that posed questions about freedom of expression and terror. The work was too poppy to be serious about its subject matter, which made it sexy, which made it inappropriate, which made it powerful, and vice versa. It was hard to know where to put it and why it mattered, which is why it was nominated for the Alternative Turner Prize and why her paintings all found buyers.

The same formula guides her as emcee, except that she's even better at using it to make music. Her ethnically eclectic pastiche raps and beat-box mixes are the perfect art for the contemporary digitalized, file-trading, global market for cultural products. The fact that she dabbles in a general politics of liberation not grounded in any single national context, an "indulgence in vague guerilla chic" that includes references to the PLO, for example, and materialist corporate monoculture in a few choppy lines, has added to her appeal. More and less than any political platform, her "speechifying" is an instantly and internationally recognizable reference to dissatisfaction with the state of the militarized, torturing, beheading world today.

Her MySpace posts are an extension in another medium of the same. She wrote this at the end of May, after her visa troubles entry disappeared,:


weeee keep it cheap save our money in a heep send it home and make em study fixin teeth.
got a family, friend in need a hand throw the gasoline a mobile phone hooked up to the scene hello my friend yes it's me

sometimes i wish i sang about sex and money, money sex sex money money and sex. but you know me, i dont wanna get rich or die trying. and these days the money that immigrants send aint even for fixin grillz but more like limbs. […] if freedom of speech is worth killing and dying for then tell me how you want me.

Because MIA has lived and worked as a touring artist in the States before, the question is Why is she being prevented now from returning?

Earplug speculated that someone in the Administration finally got turned on to Eurocrunk. It's a powerful image: Rumsfeld hooked into a staffer's boombox, circling the office to "Bucky Done Gun," moving his fists in the air, first in an epiphany of rhythm, and then in anger at the irresponsibility and the naysaying and the coded, catchy, anti-authority rantings of this young "crunk" woman rapping these ideas right into his ears from somewhere technically beyond his jurisdiction.

That version of events seems at least less banally sinister and foolish than one where a Homeland Security bureaucrat, trolling MIA's website and Googling her in his windowless DC office, decided she posed a terrorist threat to the United States.

Most likely is that someone wanted to send a message. MIA has become relatively big game and an easy target in the hunt against dissent in any form. If that's the reasoning behind the visa denial, then Interscope and MIA's lawyers have their work cut out for them. Because the bureaucrat hiding behind the impenetrable fortress of the government's recorded phone messages and help lines and offices within offices within offices will want MIA to make a show of saying things and renouncing things she won't say and she won't renounce.

I bet she'd rather stay liming and drinking tiger beer with her pet turtel.

John Tomasic is managing editor of Pop+Politics. Contact him at tomasicjohn@yahoo.com.



i LOVE this girl (piracy... and arular are both AMAZING) and this sucks on so many levels, i hope this all can get worked out