^{some liquor, chill in the SUV.’ Maybe it happens every day} like that in R. Kelly’s world, but it’s not realistic for me.” “^‘PAPER

M.I.A. does not own a car or even drive for that matter, but PLANES’ even if she did, she’d be more likely to write songs about the _{kids in India who were paid two cents an hour to make the} COULD BE _{vehicle’s after-market seat covers than the hoochie riding A RIP-OFF} ^shotgun. “^{If you’re having problems paying rent, then rap or} sing about it,” she says, lifting her soda can in the air as if it ^{OF ‘LIKE A} _{were a symbol of resistance.} “_{Or is life really that great for VIRGIN,’} ^{everyone else, and I’m the biggest pessimist in the world?} “^{I have to know, ’cause now I’m having a child,}” ^{she says, BUT YOU’D} looking down at her swollen belly. “Do I need to turn it up NEVER or tone it down?”
KNOW,

BECAUSE I’M THAT OUT OF TUNE.”

Toning it down is not an option for the daughter of former Tamil militant Arul Pragasam. M.I.A.’s father was known in ’70s and ’80s Sri Lanka as Arular (Maya named her first album after him), founding member of the Eelam Revolutionary Organization of Students, or EROS. One of many emerging separatist groups, they opposed the rule of the Sinhalese majority government on grounds that the Tamils, an ethnic minority, were being oppressed and discriminated against. Their goal was the creation of an independent Tamil state. His life as an activist and fighter found him moving his family from the U.K., where Maya was born, to Sri Lanka when she was just an infant, only to leave his wife and three kids behind for the cause. M.I. A. spent much of her young life destitute in the Sri Lankan countryside. “ ‘Jimmy’ used to be my anthem when we lived there,” says M.I.A. of the Bollywood disco hit she revamped on Kala. “For a living, I’d dance to that song and people paid me. I’d come home and bring my mom food or money. If not that, I’d go to parties and draw stupid portraits of people, and they’d give me money.” Ironically, the movie “Jimmy” came from, 1982’s Disco Dancer, concerns a poor boy who performs on the street for money and grows up to be a star.

She was just six years old when war broke out in Sri Lanka in 1983, and by the close of the decade, she fled the violence and poverty with her seamstress mother (whom she named Kala after) and two siblings. Back in England, they settled in a government-funded South London housing project. There, in a neighborhood called Mitcham, she would learn how to speak English, fall in love with American hip-hop, and aspire to be a filmmaker. She attended London’s Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, where she received a fine-arts and film degree and was soon commissioned by the band Elastica to create the artwork for their second album, The Menace. She eventually toured America as the band’s videographer. “People always said, ‘ You look like you could do music, and you dance like you could, but it’s clear you’re really tone-deaf,’ ” recalls M.I.A., launching into a bar of “Thriller” to support her point. “When I sang songs down the school corridor, people would be laughing. Even now, ‘Paper Planes’ could be a rip-off of ‘Like a Virgin,’ but you’d never know, because I’m that out of tune.”

She says she recorded her first song out of boredom at a friend’s flat using a keyboard and Dictaphone. From that impromptu session came the track “M.I.A.,” which ended up on Arular. From there, she banged out “Galang,” with its battle cry of “Ya, ya, hey!” It was picked up by the U.K. indie hip-hop label Showbiz and pressed into 500 vinyl singles in 2003. Though there was some confusion as to exactly where her sound fit, it became a favorite of club DJs in the U.S. and U.K. The single also spread via the Internet, reaching a global fan base well before the album was even released. “In the beginning, my battles were so different from now,” M.I.A. says. “People were like, what is it? Is it rap? Is it grime? I’d have to go to these meetings where they didn’t get it. I was going through managers left, right, and center because finding someone who believed in me

was difficult. Then Wes came along and finally,
someone believed in me.”

Wesley Pentz (better known as Diplo) was a DJ from Philly who made a song M.I.A. loved called “News Flash.” After she finished recording Arular, she sought him out to collaborate on what would become 2004’s Piracy Funds Terrorism mix tape; they became an item shortly thereafter. Arular was released in 2005 on XL Recordings, complete with guerrilla artwork by M.I.A. herself: Arabic graffiti, stenciled images of tanks, bombs and machine guns, and colorful African-style prints. “The first album, I wrote it to be really cheeky, to say, ‘I’m so outside of this, I don’t even care if I throw a dirtball and get killed for it. I got nothing they can take from me,’ ” she says matter-of-factly. “Then I started thinking that I don’t just want to go on about coming from a war and guns and bombs and blah de blah blah. I wanted to talk about economy and education and how the first world is collapsing into the third world. How everything’s changing. I wanted to be part of that.”

M.I.A’s attempt at assimilation would include
signing with Interscope in 2005. It was not an
easy decision for a girl who’d made her name as an
outsider, but she says the label, which rereleased

Arular in the U.S., promised her full creative control. “It’s definitely something to do with embracing the system while at the same time having something else to offer,” says M.I.A., who teamed up with one of Interscope’s major production talents, Timbaland, for a track on Kala. “In the beginning I thought if your song was in a commercial, that’s selling out [‘Galang’ had been featured in a Honda Civic ad]. But if someone working at a nursing home in Wyoming can hear me, that’s actually good because, well, I was heard. It’s not a war between the mainstream and underground to me anymore. It’s about polluting the mainstream, or hacking into it.” The recording of Kala brought M.I.A. to Trinidad, Liberia, India, Jamaica, Australia, and Japan. The U.S. would not be part of that global

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Galang’s all here: ( 1) M. I. A. with Lydia Hearst
and Brittany Murphy at Fashion Week;
( 2) her cover photo for Elastica’s The Menace;
( 3) Baltimore’s Rye Rye, whom M. I. A. is
producing; ( 4) M. I. A. at Coachella in April

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CLOCK WISE FROM TOP: JOHN PARRA/ WIREIMAGE. COM; STEVE C. MITCHELL/EPA/CORBIS; MATTHEW SALACUSE/RETNA

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