M.I.A. (rapper)
Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam[2] MBE[3] (Tamil: மாயா; born 18 July 1975), known by her stage name M.I.A. (an initialism for both "Missing in Action" and "Missing in Acton"), is a British rapper, record producer, and singer. Her music combines elements of alternative, dance, electronic, hip hop and world music with electronic instruments and samples.
Several terms redirect here. For other singers, see Mia (singer) and Mia (disambiguation).
M.I.A.
18 July 1975
Maya
Central Saint Martins, College of Art and Design
- Rapper
- singer
- record producer
- activist
2000–present
1
- Arul Pragasam (father)
Kali Arulpragasam (sister)
- Vocals
- N.E.E.T.
- XL
- Mercury
- Interscope
- Virgin EMI
- Showbiz
- Polydor
- Roc Nation
- Island
Born in London to Sri Lankan Tamil parents, M.I.A. and her family moved to Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka when she was six months old. As a child, she experienced displacement caused by the Sri Lankan Civil War, which made the family return to London as refugees when M.I.A. was 11 years old; the war had a defining influence on M.I.A.'s artistry. She started out as a visual artist, filmmaker and designer in 2000, and began her recording career in 2002. One of the first few acts to come to public attention through the Internet,[4] she saw early fame as an underground artist in early 2004 with her singles "Sunshowers" and "Galang".
M.I.A.'s first two albums, Arular (2005) and Kala (2007), received widespread critical acclaim for their fusion of hip hop, electronic, and world musics. The single "Paper Planes" from Kala reached number four on the US Billboard Hot 100 and sold over four million copies. Her third album Maya (2010) was preceded by the controversial single-short film "Born Free". Maya was her best-charting effort, reaching the top 10 on several charts. Her fourth studio album, Matangi (2013), included the single "Bad Girls", which won accolades at the MTV Video Music Awards. M.I.A. released her fifth studio album, AIM, in 2016. She scored her first Billboard Hot 100 number-one single as a featured artist on Travis Scott's "Franchise" (2020), and two years later, released her sixth studio album Mata, featuring lead single "The One".[5]
M.I.A.'s accolades include two American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) awards and two MTV Video Music Awards. She is the first person of South Asian descent to be nominated for an Academy Award and Grammy Award in the same year.[6] She was named one of the defining artists of the 2000s decade by Rolling Stone, and one of the 100 most influential people of 2009 by Time. Esquire ranked M.I.A. on its list of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century. According to Billboard, she was one of the "Top 50 Dance/Electronic Artists of the 2010s".[7] M.I.A. was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2019 Birthday Honours for her services to music.[8]
Life and career[edit]
1975–1999: Early life[edit]
Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam was born on 18 July 1975,[9] in Hounslow, London, the daughter of Arul Pragasam,[10] a Sri Lankan Tamil engineer, writer, and activist, and his wife, Kala, a seamstress. When she was six months old, her family moved to Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka, where her brother Sugu was born.[11] There, her father adopted the name Arular and became a political activist and founding member of the Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students (EROS), a political Tamil group affiliated with the LTTE. The first 11 years of Arulpragasam's life were marked by displacement caused by the Sri Lankan Civil War.[11] Her family went into hiding from the Sri Lankan Army, and Arulpragasam had little contact with her father during this period. She has described her family as living in "big-time" poverty during her childhood but also recalls some of her happiest memories from growing up in Jaffna.[11][12][13] Maya attended Catholic convent schools such as the Holy Family Convent, Jaffna, where she developed her art skills—painting in particular—to work her way up her class.[14][15]
During the civil war, soldiers would put guns through holes in the windows and shoot at the school.[15] Her classmates were trained to dive under the table or run next door to English-language schools so that, according to her, they "wouldn't get shot."[15] Arulpragasam lived on a road alongside much of her extended family and played inside temples and churches in the town. Due to safety concerns, Arulpragasam's mother relocated herself and her children to Madras in India, where they lived in a derelict house and received sporadic visits from their father, who was introduced to the children as their "uncle" in order to protect them.[11][16] The family, minus Arular, then resettled in Jaffna temporarily, only to see the war escalate further in northeast Sri Lanka. During this time, nine-year-old Arulpragasam's primary school was destroyed in a government raid.[17][18]
Her mother then returned with her children back to London in 1986, a week before Arulpragasam's 11th birthday, where they were housed as refugees.[11] Her father arrived on the island and became an independent peace mediator between the two sides of the civil war in the late 1980s–2010.[19] Arulpragasam spent the rest of her childhood and teenage years living on the Phipps Bridge Estate in the Mitcham district of south London, where she learned to speak English, while her mother brought the children up on a modest income. Arulpragasam entered the final year of primary school in the autumn of 1986 and quickly mastered the English language. Hers was one of only two Asian families on the estate at the time,[19] in an atmosphere she has described as "incredibly racist."[20]
While living in England and raising her children, Arulpragasam's mother became a Christian in 1990 and worked as a seamstress for the Royal Family for much of her career.[12] She worked from her home in London's Tooting area. Arulpragasam had a difficult relationship with her father, due to his political activities in the 1980s and complete absence during much of her life. Prior to the release of the first album, which Arulpragasam had named after her father, he emailed her: "This is Dad. Change the title of your album. I'm really proud. Just read about you in the Sri Lanka Times. Dad."[21] She chose not to change the album title. Arulpragasam attended the Ricards Lodge High School in Wimbledon. Following high school, she attended Central Saint Martins by gaining admittance through unconventional means despite not having formally applied.[22] In 2000, she graduated from London's Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design with a degree in fine art, film, and video.[12]
2000–2002: Visual art and film[edit]
While attending Central St Martins College, Arulpragasam wanted to make films and art depicting realism that would be accessible to everyone, something that she felt was missing from her classmates' ethos and the course criteria. At college, she found the fashion courses "disposable" and more current than the film texts that she studied.[23] Maya told Arthur magazine "[Students there were] exploring apathy, dressing up in some pigeon outfit, or running around conceptualising ... It missed the whole point of art representing society. Social reality didn't really exist there; it just stopped at theory."[23] She cited "radical cinema" including Harmony Korine, Dogme 95 and Spike Jonze as some of her cinematic inspirations during film school.[24] As a student, she was approached by director John Singleton to work on a film in Los Angeles after he had read a script she had written, though she decided not to take up the offer.[24][25] For her degree, M.I.A. prepared her departmental honours thesis on the film CB4.[26]
Arulpragasam befriended students in the college's fashion, advertising and graphics departments.[23] She met Justine Frischmann, front woman of the British band Elastica, through her friend Damon Albarn at an Air concert in 1999, and Frischmann commissioned Arulpragasam to create the cover art for the band's 2000 album, The Menace, and video document their American tour.[14][17][18] Arulpragasam returned to Jaffna in 2001 to film a documentary on Tamil youth, but was unable to complete the project because she encountered harassment.[25][27] In 2001, Arulpragasam's first public exhibition of paintings after graduating took place at the Euphoria Shop on London's Portobello Road. It featured graffiti art and spray-paint canvasses mixing Tamil political street art with images of London life and consumerist culture.[18][28] The show was nominated for an Alternative Turner Prize and a monograph book of the collection was published in 2002,[9] titled M.I.A.. Actor Jude Law was among early buyers of her art.[14][28][29]
Artistry[edit]
Musical style and influences[edit]
M.I.A.'s music features styles such as electro, reggae, rhythm and blues, alternative rock, hip hop, grime, rap ballads and Asian folk and references to her musical influences such as Missy Elliott, Tamil film music, Lou Reed, the Pixies, Timbaland, Beastie Boys, and London Posse.[33][36][47][177] She was a childhood fan of Boney M, composer A. R. Rahman and pop artists Michael Jackson and Madonna,[23][36] also she has cited Björk as an inspiration and has been influenced by The Slits, Public Enemy, Malcolm McLaren and The Clash.[33][178] Noting her early inspirations, she said "When I would go to bed, I'd listen to the radio and dream about dancing and Paula Abdul and Whitney Houston, and that's how I fell asleep. When my radio was burgled, I started listening to hip hop".[23] She has revealed her ideal karaoke song would be "Germ-Free Adolescents" by X-Ray Spex.[179] M.I.A. describes her music as dance music or club music for the "other", and has been described as an "anti-popstar" for refusing to conform to certain recording industry expectations of solo artists.[66] M.I.A.'s early compositions relied heavily on the Roland MC-505, while later M.I.A. experimented further with her established sound and drew from a range of genres, creating layered textures of instruments, electronics and sounds outside the traditional studio environment.[66][67]
Jimmy Iovine, the chairman of M.I.A.'s American distribution label Interscope, compares M.I.A. to Reed and punk rock songwriter Patti Smith, and recalled, "She's gonna do what she's gonna do, I can't tell her shit."[180] "The really left-of-center artists, you really wonder about them. Can the world catch up? Can the culture meet them in the middle? That's what the adventure is. It doesn't always happen, but it should and it could."[181] Richard Russell, head of XL Recordings, states, "You've got to bend culture around to suit you, and I think M.I.A has done that" adding that M.I.A.'s composition and production skills were a major attraction for him.[182][183] As a vocalist, M.I.A. is recognisable by her distinctive whooping, chanting voice, which has been described as having an "indelible, nursery-rhyme swing."[55] She has adopted different singing styles on her songs, from aggressive raps, to semi-spoken and melodic vocals. She has said of the sometimes "unaffected" vocals and delivery of her lyrics, "It is what it is. Most people would just put it down to me being lazy. But at the same time, I don't want [that perfection]," saying some of the "raw and difficult" vocal styles she used reflected what was happening to her during recording.[23][64]
Legacy[edit]
Music culture writer Michael Meyer said that M.I.A.'s record imagery, lyrical booklets, homepages and videos supported the "image of provocation yet also avoidance of, or inability to use consistent images and messages." Instead of catering to stereotypes, he felt that M.I.A. "played with them" creating an uncategorisable and hence unsettling result.[47] Critic Zach Baron felt that it had been shown in her career that M.I.A. had "always been adept at using a larger force against itself."[245] M.I.A. has been hailed as demonstrating dislocation to be a "productive site of departure" and praised for her ability to transform such a "disadvantage" into a creative form of expression.[230]
Regarding her first two albums, Arular and Kala, PopMatters writer Rob Wheaton felt M.I.A. subverted the "abstract, organized, refined" distilling of violence in Western popular music and imagination and made her work represent much of the developing world's decades-long experiences of "arbitrary, unannounced, and spectacular" slaughter, deeming her work an "assault" with realism.[19] Frank Guan of Vulture said that Kala "sounded like the future" and that "M.I.A.'s immediate influence was remarkable", as the album "seems to herald certain trends current in contemporary hip-hop". Guan further gave appraisal to M.I.A. for being the "precursor" for "fashion-rap" acts, including Travis Scott, Lil Uzi Vert, Playboi Carti, and ASAP Rocky.[246] Writing for Dazed Digital, Grant Rinder praised the album for transforming M.I.A. from a "cult hero" to an "international star". Rinder commented that the album was a "tremendous" step forward towards shedding light on the realities of Third World countries that the Western world may not have thoroughly understood. Reflecting on diversity and representation issues in society, as well as politics surrounding President Donald Trump, Rinder said that Kala "feels particularly ahead of its time", and concluded that "M.I.A. was truly a pioneer for a global humanitarian perspective that no artist has been able to deliver quite as well since."[247]
Some detractors criticised M.I.A. early in her music career for "using radical chic" and for her attendance of an art school.[202] Critic Simon Reynolds, writing in The Village Voice in 2005 saw this as a lack of authenticity and felt M.I.A. was "a veritable vortex of discourse, around most likely irresolvable questions concerning authenticity, post-colonialism, and dilettantism". He continued that while swayed by her chutzpah and ability to deliver live, he "was also turned off by the stencil-sprayed projection imagery of grenades, tanks, and so forth (redolent of the Clash with their strife-torn Belfast stage backdrops and Sandinista cred by association)" while the "99 percent white audience punched the air", admonishing what he perceived as a "lack of local character" to her debut album.[248]
Critic Robert Christgau described Reynolds' argument as "cheap tack" in another article written in the publication, stating M.I.A's experiences connected her to world poverty in a way "few Western whites can grasp". He questioned why M.I.A.'s 2001 Alternative Turner Prize nominated images of pastel-washed tigers, soldiers, guns, armoured vehicles, and fleeing civilians that bedeck M.I.A.'s albums and videos were not assumed or analysed as being incendiary propaganda, suggesting that unlike art buyers, rock and roll fans were "assumed to be stupid".[249] Reynolds later argued that M.I.A. was the "Artist of the Decade" in a 2009 issue of The Guardian.[250]
Social causes[edit]
Activism[edit]
M.I.A.'s commentary on the oppression of Sri Lankan Tamils has drawn praise and criticism.[251] The United States has restricted her access into and out of the country during her career since the release of her debut album.[252] M.I.A. notes that the voicelessness she felt as a child dictated her role as a refugee advocate and voice lender to civilians in war during her career.
Personal life[edit]
M.I.A. met DJ Diplo at the Fabric Club in London,[318] in 2003, and the two were romantically involved for five years.[319][320][321][322]
From 2006 to 2008, M.I.A. lived in the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York, where she met Benjamin Bronfman, an American scion of the Bronfman business family and the Lehman banking family who founded Lehman Brothers.[323][324] They became engaged and she gave birth to their son, Ikhyd Edgar Arular Bronfman, on 13 February 2009, three days after performing at the Grammy Awards.[325][326] In February 2012, it was announced that she and Bronfman had separated.[327][328]
M.I.A. was raised by her parents as a Hindu. However, in a 2022 interview she revealed that in 2017 she became a born-again Christian because she saw a vision of Jesus Christ.[329]