The Washington City Paper covers the M.I.A. buzz with some true musicology:
… M.I.A. [is] a battlefield acronym that’s also a play on her real name and the London neighborhood of Acton… despite being an exotic and a refugee, M.I.A. is no primitive. She found a well-worn DIY-aesthete’s path out of London’s housing estates, leading to Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. As much a pop-music finishing school as anything else, Saint Martins offered an art career, but also introductions to Elastica’s Justine Frischmann, Pulp’s Steve Mackey, and electroclash diva Peaches… In her glammier shots, she looks a bit like multi-ethnic actress Rosario Dawson…The title [‘Galang’] sounds Malay or Indonesian, not Tamil, although some experts insist that it’s actually a dancehall contraction of “go along…” “Pull Up the People” is a potential Peace Corps anthem with Baader-Meinhof attitude. “Fire Fire” name-checks the Pixies, the Beasties, and Lou Reed, but also invokes “Growin’ up brewin’ up/Guerrilla getting trained now…”
She’s been officially classified as a rapper, and though she’s no Celine Dion, that’s not quite right. M.I.A. is more of a chanter, and such vocal hooks as “Hello this is M.I.A./Can you please come get me” come as close to singing as the vocals of any monotone rocker… Arular recalls minimalist proto- and postpunk—maybe not Wire or the Stranglers, but definitely Suicide, T. Rex, and Bow Wow Wow…
There are but a handful of conspicuous samples on Arular, including the sitar bit that opens “Hombre”—ironically, given that the tune is a lustful plea to a Spanish-speaking hunk. (Sitars, by the way, aren’t prevalent in Sri Lanka, which feels almost as Indonesian as Indian, and where the dominant music is baile, derived from the Iberian dance music of the island’s former Portuguese rulers.)
Billboard reveals M.I.A.’s given name is Mathangi ‘Maya’ Arulpragasam (subscription required). The magazine says she’s viewed by some as not a mere Asian, but rather the potential savior of UK rap (Dizzee Rascal has plateaued). She swaggers, saying she signed with XL Recordings because it was closest to her house, and so they’re lucky to have her. There’s this delicious little bit of braggadocio: she says she told the label, ‘Trust me, you’ve been looking for me,’ dropped off the ‘Galang’ tape, and they called her back 20 minutes later. She says her dad asked her not to use his name as the album title (maybe it increased his risk in the field?), but she refused. She’s sad he chose his cause over his family.
M.I.A. says she virtually lives in immigration offices these days trying to get her U.S. visa (she says, caustically, something like ‘There’s a reason why there aren’t many Sri Lankan musicians in America.’) Her shout-outs to the Tamil Tigers has nothing to do with it, I’m sure. What can you do? Girl is a beauty. Girl supports belt bombs. It’s the plot of Dil Se and Roja, Manisha Koirala would be so proud.
I just love how non-desi music critics totally whitewash the issue, pun intended:
Does M.I.A. support anti-Sinhalese violence, including the suicide bombings that the Tamil Tigers once employed? … Probably not…
That’s it. That’s the entire discussion. The issue is raised and dismissed in 17 words. The Village Voice is little better:
… beyond a link now apparently deleted from her website to a dubious Tamil tsunami relief organization, I see no sign that she supports the Tigers… She obsesses on them; she thinks they get a raw deal. But without question she knows they do bad things and struggles with that. The decoratively arrayed, pastel-washed tigers, soldiers, guns, armored vehicles, and fleeing civilians that bedeck her album are images, not propaganda—the same stuff that got her nominated for an Alternative Turner Prize in 2001. They’re now assumed to be incendiary because, unlike art buyers, rock and roll fans are assumed to be stupid. M.I.A. has no consistent political program and it’s foolish to expect one of her.
Christ, Christgau. That’s your absolution on behalf of album-buying hipsters everywhere, that’s your silver bullet? That she’s young and cute and politically naive and you really, really like her music? I’ll tell you what’s insulting to American music fans: assuming they won’t give a shit that this group blows up civilians and prime ministers and pioneered suicide bombings for the entire Middle East, because they aren’t linked to 9/11.
Sadly, he’s probably right. If she was supporting a group that had killed JFK rather than the prime minister of India, she wouldn’t have gotten anything like her current buzz without disavowing the murder of civilians.
Very few musicians, celebrities or 27-year-olds have coherent, well-thought-out political beliefs. Her support of her father is to be expected. She’s an innovative musician. But for her to step forward and say, ‘I support the political goals of the Tamil Tigers yet abhor their violent tactics’ would not just be commercially astute, it would also show real maturity. As it is, she’s thin both corporeally and politically; and if she’s going to sell discs using bombs, she only delays her day of disavowal.
M.I.A. will be performing at Coachella on May 1.
M.I.A.’s detractors claim her flirtations with terrorism and revolutionary politics reveal the biggest case of sufferer’s envy since Joe Strummer but little depth of thought. But if the latter is true, so what? An in-depth examination of demonizing The Other, the relationship between the West and developing nations, or the need to empathize with one’s enemies would likely make for a pretty crappy pop song.
