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M.I.A. is, obviously, aware of the discourse that’s followed her in recent years. Google “Whatever happened to rapper M.I.A.?” – mindful to heed her prescient line, “Connected to the Google connected to the government” – and you’ll enter a wormhole of biblical proportions.
In Reddit threads, you’ll find fans lamenting the artist’s polarising statements about COVID vaccines and Black Lives Matter. On YouTube, you’ll find video essays detailing “the untold story behind her career decline”, including her middle finger during her Super Bowl performance with Madonna in 2012 (the NFL sued her for $16.6 million in damages) and her subsequent beef with Jay-Z, her short-lived manager at Roc Nation. You’ll find articles with headlines like “M.I.A., chronicle of a radical artist who ended up supporting Donald Trump and anti-vaxxers”.
You might also find a link to her clothing line Ohmni, where she sells pieces made from copper and nickel designed to “deflect electromagnetic waves such as Wi-Fi and 5G”, which she’s described as the “armour of the modern knight”. (The clothing line even includes a literal “tin foil hat”.)
M.I.A. performing at Primavera Sound Festival in 2022. The artist will “break my silence” with shows in Sydney and Melbourne this month.Credit: WireImage
The brazen attitude that made Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam a global star following 2005’s Arular and 2007’s Kala – genre-blending albums that fused hip-hop, punk, dancehall, house and Brazilian funk with her own Sri Lankan heritage and radical politics into what’s still some of the most idiosyncratic, forward-thinking pop of the modern era – also turned M.I.A. into a public pariah.
“How much of that discourse is real? I don’t even know,” M.I.A., now 50, says over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. “Every single person who’s ever criticised me or thrown mud at my name, they’re doing it out of jealousy or some other thing that’s making them do that.”
The daughter of a Tamil freedom fighter, M.I.A. was born in London, raised in Sri Lanka and returned to London as a refugee at 10. After graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2000, she segued from visual art to music on the advice of her friend, Elastica’s Justine Frischmann. Beyond her bright aesthetics and smash hits like Paper Planes, she became as much known for her activism – in support of refugees, immigrants and the globally oppressed (including the Palestinian struggle before it was front-page news), and against government surveillance and techno-capitalism.
More recent controversies, however, have pushed M.I.A. to the media’s margins, that land of cancelled souls, specifically the alt-right podcast circuit of Russell Brand, Tim Pool and Candace Owens, the controversial influencer who has been banned from entering Australia by the Federal Government (and lost her High Court appeal against the decision this week). The rapper has spoken on these shows about converting from Hinduism to Christianity after experiencing a vision of Jesus. But woe anyone who jumps to conclusions from these appearances.
“How could you be pro-Palestinian and hate Candace Owens, when she’s, like, the number one person standing up to that? That’s so confusing to me and none of those people have a leg to stand on,” she says of criticisms she’s gone far-right. “M.I.A., as a concept, was already way past the point of left and right, and knowing it’s all just a game. So to put me in that zone and that’s where they’re going to drag me on? It can’t be real. Those are not my fans, and they were not my fans in the first place.”
The online sentiment that she’s betrayed the left, or disappointed her progressive fans, also doesn’t hold water with the musician. “I’ve been around long enough to see what the left was 20 and 30 years ago and what the left is now, and I’ve seen the left get hijacked,” she says. “While real voices are being muted, unnecessary causes have taken up that space and the left lets that happen. Everything to me is cause and effect, and you have to appreciate free-thinkers on all sides. Everyone’s got the same battle at this point, and it’s not the time to point fingers and drag each other over little things.”
Somehow, amid all this, there’s been music. In 2022, after a six-year pause, M.I.A. released Mata, an album that took her globalist mélange to avant-garde extremes. In June, she released a new song called Safe, which takes aim at haters and lost fans, and finds her examining why she’s been a recurrent lightning rod for two decades.
“The amount of strife I’ve had every year where I’m in the wrong, it’s just impossible,” she says. “I’m not saying that everybody has to like me, but even if you asked AI ‘What’s the probability of this person being cancelled every single year?’, it would say, ‘It’s pretty difficult.’ But I’ve managed it.”
She used to think the issue lay in her outspoken politics. “But now I don’t because you see everything I stood for politically, other people stand for it now and get praised. When I was doing it, I was deemed the worst thing in the world, and I was censored and cancelled. But now it’s fashionable to stand for exactly those things,” she says.
She’s also never struggled with addiction or depression, she says. “So I was like, what is it? Because there’s always been such resistance to me. Beyond the political or the social, beyond skin tone, race, identity, class, beyond all these things that everyone used to justify why they were ready to cancel me – because it came from everywhere and every one of those cards got used – ultimately it must be a spiritual thing because I don’t know how else to explain it.”
M.I.A. pictured at Stella McCartney’s womenswear show at Paris Fashion Week in March 2024.Credit: WireImage
Before our interview, M.I.A. says she was texting with Dave “Switch” Taylor, the producer she worked with on much of her groundbreaking work. “We’ve been talking about possibly recording again,” she says.
So what’s been inspiring her? “My favourite artist right now is Kurtis Wells, he’s got a song called Holy Water and I love that song.”
Is she across Britain’s bubbling underground rap scene, young artists like Fakemink and Feng who have galvanised a generation and been labelled, as she once was, as Britain’s new musical saviours? “Ok, who is Feng? Feng is always hitting me up. Why is everyone obsessed with Feng?” she asks.
Just the future of music, according to internet hyperbolists. Coincidentally, he also released a tribute to the artist, titled M.I.A., last year. “I think I’ll do something with Feng, just because Feng reminds me of me,” says M.I.A. “His dedication and persistence is insane. He bombs my Instagram Live literally every day I go on there, so I think I’m gonna work with him just for that.”
It sounds like the story M.I.A. recently shared on Rick Rubin’s podcast about how she got into Central Saint Martins by pestering an admissions dean with daily phone calls until they relented. “Exactly. He’s doing my thing, so I’m gonna work with him just to keep it going.”
’If you asked AI, ‘What’s the probability of this person being cancelled every single year?’, it’d say, ‘Pretty difficult.’ But I’ve managed it.’
M.I.A.Her son Ikhyd, with her ex-partner Benjamin Bronfman, scion of the billionaire Bronfman family – their post-breakup custody battle was another dramatic wrinkle in M.I.A. lore – is now 16-years-old. Surely he keeps his mum up-to-date with new music? “My son only wants me to work with Yeat,” says M.I.A. “He’s always like, ‘Unless you work with Yeat, I don’t even wanna hear about M.I.A.’ So that’s my son’s bar. I’ve gotta beat Yeat. But I’m gonna give him Feng instead.”
If the controversies have been endless, gigs have been sparse. On Instagram, M.I.A. announced she was “getting ready to break my silence in Australia” with shows in Sydney and Melbourne this month. She has a strong relationship with Australia: on Kala, recently voted as one of the 100 best rap albums of all time by Pitchfork readers, she recorded Mango Pickle Down River with the Indigenous NSW crew, the Wilcannia Mob. “I am definitely connected to Australia, and in more ways than one. I would say that Tamils hold a bit of Aboriginal DNA, so I feel like the connection’s quite deep,” she says.
What does she have planned for the shows? “Well, it’s the 20th anniversary of Arular, so I wanted to keep it about that. But it depends on my fans and what they want to hear because if they want the other songs, I’ll make it more like a DJ set and just make sure it’s a party.”
It’s also the 15th anniversary of Maya. The 2010 album, sceptical about the internet before the rest of us, was maligned on its release but has since been reevaluated amid social media’s grim stranglehold and AI’s rising convulsions. M.I.A. has previously described the album as the point her career turned sour, feeling like everyone hated it and wanted her out of music. Has she come back around to it?
“There are songs on there I still love like Born Free and Story To Be Told. But it’s kind of a deep album. I’m scared of Maya sometimes because it puts me in a different zone. If I applied Maya to the AI era and addressed that, it scares me to step into that because I think, oh my god, what if I don’t come out?”
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Her debut Kala, meanwhile, is “much more celebratory and joyous and I’m in that mood right now,” she says. “Even though it’s Arular’s 20th anniversary and I think it’s the right album for this moment, just with seeing the protests in Australia for Palestine and all that, I think [the shows] need joy. At this point, I don’t want to come and complain. I just want to be that escapism thing that happens in people’s lives, where you come and have a good time and feel good.”
M.I.A. performs at Harvest Rock in Adelaide on October 25, Melbourne’s Forum on October 26, and Sydney’s Enmore Theatre on October 29.
