Rebel With a Cause

By Jonathan Durbin
Photographs by Cass Bird
Styling by Jason Farrer

Sometimes M.I.A. just doesn't feel like it anymore. A fall tour through Australia found the underground agitator wondering whether making music was still right for her. Everyone's entitled to an off day, but some of us less so than others. When you're one of the few political voices in alternative culture, an artist who's staked her reputation on doing things the hard way, those days are few and far between. "I feel like whatever motivates me to make music next either has to be something that's incredibly good or incredibly bad," she says quietly in a voice verging on the cynical. "At the moment I feel like I'm free-falling. It's a bit scary. The main cultural musical icons right now are Britney Spears, who is a tragedy, and Kanye West, because he's that crass about selling himself. Everybody talks about Britney being so pathetic for her performance at the VMAs. That shows no understanding of a human being and what they go through. If that's how you get judged, and that's what it takes to [make it] in America, then I don't want that. I don't want to compromise what I say to get on the radio."

Her mood was colored in part by what had happened at the border: Australian officials had asked her to sign a document that stipulated she wouldn't insult the government. According to M.I.A., it explained that Australia supports freedom of speech, but that there are limits to the country's hospitality -- in other words, so far and no further. This wasn't an isolated incident. Instead it's become typical of her customs experiences over the past three years. She intended, for instance, to record her latest album, Kala, in the U.S., but was denied an entry visa; she wound up traveling the world, taping songs in Liberia, India and Japan. ("Boyz," the second single on the album, began as a rejoinder to border guards across the globe.) When asked what, exactly, Australia was afraid she would say, M.I.A. explained, "I'm a bit beyond being an artist who says, 'Give peace a chance.' Part of me is like, 'Give war a chance,' just to stir it up, you know what I mean?" At her show in Brisbane, she lit the entry document on fire. The crowd loved it.

M.I.A. wears a vest and top by Harmon, necklace by Mended Veil and ring and bracelets by Fallon for United Bamboo.

As much as recorded music will allow, there are shocking moments on her second full-length. Like her first, Arular, named after her father, a Tamil revolutionary who lives in Sri Lanka and London, and whom M.I.A. has not seen since she was a child, Kala (named for her mother) wraps incendiary political discourse up in a blend of various styles -- world beat, hip-hop, punk rock, baile funk and bhangra. The British-born upstart makes each style her own, including enough musical references to sate indie music's appetite for navel-gazing ("Bamboo Banga" lifts lyrics from Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers' "Road Runner"; "20 Dollar" features a chorus stolen from the Pixies' "Where Is My Mind?"), while remaining trenchant enough to appeal to credible hip-hop's journalistic sensibilities. It's tough stuff. Recorded in Liberia, "20 Dollar" is about the cost of an AK-47. Over a grinding sample and a wail that recalls a prayer chant, she raps: "So I woke up with my holy Koran and found out I like Cadillac . . . price of living in a shanty town just seem very high," before offering a haunting interpretation of Black Francis. Similarly, "Paper Planes" is built around samples from The Clash's "Straight to Hell," along with gunshots and a cash register. "We pack and deliver like UPS trucks" is a sloganeering simile for thugs with guns who are trying to control corners. It's her next single. It's not radio-friendly.

"She wants hits, too," says the New Yorker pop-music critic Sasha Frere-Jones, one of the first to write about M.I.A. in the mainstream press. "But as close as anyone on a major label can get to it, I get the feeling that she really doesn't give a shit."

M.I.A., born Maya Arulpragasam, is a crossover artist in every sense of the word. Her music speaks to neon-clad club kids, Third World refugees, Los Angeles rap stars and Brooklyn rockers. It should: She works with many of them. Ben Jones of Paper Rad, the touted East Coast art troupe, animates the artwork she provides him with for her videos. Timbaland produced Kala's final track and raps with M.I.A. on it. She shot a film with Being John Malkovich director Spike Jonze about meeting a friend, the musician Afrikan Boy, in London. She's toured with French electro-funk DJs Justice. Diplo, one of her producers and a former boyfriend, is part of the team behind the renowned Philadelphia-based DJ crew Hollertronix. She counts Justine Frischmann, the former lead singer of Elastica, and Luella Bartley, the fashion designer, as former roommates. She guested on Missy Elliott's The Cookbook. Juergen Teller is about to shoot her for a Marc Jacobs campaign, although she says she couldn't even get into the designer's Fashion Week party last season. Her connections to both the underground and overground form a bewildering map of contemporary culture, one that flouts the usual divisions between black and white, urban and suburban, British and American, the obscure corners of nightlife and the bright lights of MTV. Her music doesn't belong to any one genre -- it belongs to all of them. Because she refuses to compromise her vision and devotes herself to pushing artistic boundaries, she represents integrity. And sometimes, as it was in Australia, integrity can be tiring.

By the time she returned from tour to New York -- M.I.A. moved to Brooklyn's Bed-Stuy last year -- she felt more sanguine. "I have ups and downs," she says, laughing. "It's about being a human being. I'm not a robot. I'm not some product who comes along and churns it out for record companies. The majority of [being an artist] is like that. You're constantly working it out. I'm always thinking about it." One thing she's got nailed, though, is what she isn't. "I don't want to become a pop star," she says. "That's not my agenda."

M.I.A. doesn't think of herself as a spiritual person. When asked whether she ever feels herself headed in a more pious direction, she laughs. "Everyone always tells me, 'Maya, whatever you do, don't get spiritual.' When you're an artist there are only three things you can end up being. One is a drug addict. One is to get yourself a spiritual guru. And the other is to go insane. My friends are like, 'Whatever you do, don't take the spiritual option!'"

With M.I.A., what you see is what you get. She stresses that there's no difference between her onstage persona and the way she is at home, which, on a surface level, means she's easily recognizable. (During our interview she was dressed in an outfit that crossed the anarchic sensibilities of a William Gibson heroine with the playful patterns of Kidrobot. She looked like a future-hippie-rave-ninja. Even pulling her hood over her face didn't prevent passersby from stopping to wave.) "She's always kind of M.I.A. She's this really blunt, charismatic person all the time. If you take her someplace, she'll probably say something to make you embarrassed," says Santi White, M.I.A.'s friend and the singer from the Brooklyn next-wave band Santogold. "She's always on. If we go out to the store -- she lives around the corner from me -- or if we go to the gym, it's like, I put on the crackhead outfit and she puts on, like... the works." White laughs. "You know what I mean? I find that inspiring! She's genuinely one of the most stylish people I've ever met."

M.I.A. isn't a gym rat. "We only went once," the 30-year-old says, smiling. "But yeah, I actually am this person. There is no difference. When you see me in music, I actually am that person."

That person, as reflected in her music, is a fearless woman who isn't afraid to speak her mind and act on it. M.I.A. has backbone, and she likes to play devil's advocate. There are a number of stories to illustrate that, but perhaps the best concerns her application to Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. She was admitted and went on to study film and fine art, but only after an interview with an admissions officer in which she threatened to become a prostitute if she wasn't let in. "I was like, 'If you say no, then there's only one option: I go out the building and I catch the number 19 bus. It takes me to King's Cross. I become a hooker for three years, and I come back with a better film than anyone in this fucking class.'" She laughs. "He said, 'That's emotional blackmail.' And I was like, 'Yeah, but....' I just couldn't believe that somebody had that much power over my future. I was like, 'How is this dude going to completely remake my life?'"

At least until college, her life was made, remade and remade again by events beyond her control. Born in Hounslow, London, M.I.A. (an acronym that stands for both "Missing in Action" and "Missing in Acton," the rough west London neighborhood where she lived as a teen) is the middle child of Kala and Arul Pragasam. Arul moved the family to his native Sri Lanka when M.I.A. was an infant, where he helped found a Tamil revolutionary group. Wanted by the Sri Lankan government, Arul went into hiding, and, as the conflict intensified, Kala moved the family to India. But because of their poverty and scant resources, M.I.A.'s mother was forced to move the family back again to Sri Lanka. Then, fearing for her children's safety, she eventually fled the country and settled in London. M.I.A. was eight years old. The only English words she knew were "Michael Jackson."

She learned the language at school and by listening to the radio, which introduced her to acts like Public Enemy and N.W.A. Political rap and her war-child background influenced her work at Saint Martins. Following graduation, she mounted a solo show in London, where her stencil graphics referenced visuals of both Western graffiti and Tamil iconography (think guns and tigers), and she was short-listed for an Alternative Turner Prize. Around the same time, Justine Frischmann commissioned M.I.A. to create the cover art for Elastica's second album. Frischmann invited M.I.A. on tour to document Elastica's performances on film and that's where M.I.A. met sex rapper Peaches, then Elastica's opening act. Peaches taught her to use the Roland MC-505 Groovebox to write music. The second song M.I.A. ever wrote was "Galang," the enormously popular 2004 club hit, and one of the songs on the demo that convinced XL Recordings to sign her.

At a recent show in Manhattan at Terminal 5, a music venue that still echoes its previous incarnation as a megaclub, M.I.A. was all business. Inciting the normally stoic New York crowd to dance, she preened and mugged like a Flygirl gone awry, a hip-hop backup dancer run amok, offering an imperfect synthesis of punk, rap and club beats astonishing for their energy. When she sang "Bird Flu," she invited audience members up onstage. More than a hundred danced madly beside her. The song demands it. In a way, it felt like a homecoming, and, in a way, it was. After moving to Bed-Stuy, M.I.A.'s schedule demanded she spend most of her time this year on the road. She was looking forward to an evening at home. "I love Brooklyn," she says, "but the amount of concrete here gets to me. It's definitely a growing up and getting older thing. Like I went to this house in Japan. I was hanging out after my show. This guy had a huge, amazing six-foot flat-screen TV. We wound up just watching a bunch of grapes for hours." She laughs. "I was like, 'Wow! Is this where we're at? Where we have to watch nature like it's a movie?' But it's everywhere. Now I go around to people's houses and they're watching David Attenborough wildlife specials. We need it!"

M.I.A. is on tour until the new year, when she has two months off. She says she's going to use the time to rethink her music, but that she doesn't see any Broadway shows or major motion pictures in her future. ("I'm going to be in Boys on the Side 2 with Jessica Simpson," she jokes. "I'm the brown Jessica. She plays the white one.") She doesn't know what she's going to do, but figuring it out is what keeps her going. "I don't want to be fake," she says. "I don't want to play along. Part of me feels like the only way to maintain yourself in this is to be human about it. I feel like a mirror, reflecting back everyone's perceptions of me and who I am. That's why I question whether I want to do this. Part of me wants to carry on. Part of me wants to stop. It's a long and slow road."

But she hasn't lost her humor -- once a rebel, always a rebel. "I am what I am. I just happen to be in music right now. I might be in carpentry next year. Who knows? I could be fucking up shit in the carpentry system."

Hair by Sarah Potempa for Aussie at the Wall Group * Makeup by Itsuki for Christian Dior at the Wall Group Shot at Kehinde Wiley's studio

Photography assistants: Joan Hernandez, Colin Simmons and Ellen Blaschke * Stylist's assistant: Stacy Hall * Makeup assistant: Hiroko Takada * Interns: Ace Eure and Meagan Brant * Gerlan Marcel, Lil' D, Carrie Mackin, Daymond Walford and Kehinde Wiley