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 merican rappers often talk about a war in the streets, but the British-raised Sri Lankan MC MIA emerged from an actual civil war. After benefiting from the tutelage of former Elastica frontwoman Justine Frischmann and electro crotch-rocker Peaches, the artist and documentarian focused her energies on rapping, hooking up with American DJ Diplo and getting major underground respect for the Piracy Funds Terrorism album. Now, with the newly released Arular, MIA is going global.Taking her roots more seriously than most, MIA named her album after her father; "Arular" was his code name during his time with the Tamil Tigers, who have been battling the Sri Lankan government in a bitter civil war that has flared up time and again since 1983. When he went missing, his daughter Maya Arulpragasam took on her own code name, MIA. With her laid-back flow and mixture of styles, MIA has been tagged as everything from "grime" (the current British obsession which also covers Dizzee Rascal) to the always hideous "world music," but when it comes down to it, girl can flat out blaze it. Tracking the elusive MC for months, Hooksexup finally caught up with her at the Miami Winter Music Conference to ask her about her urban pin-up proposals and what kind of man measures up to a revolutionary. — Ryan Kennedy Emma Goldman said, "If I can't dance, I don't want any part of your revolution." How close is that to your own philosophies? It's quite close. If you can't make a sound that makes people feel good, then it's probably true, what's the point? I think any revolution is there to make people better, right? Give them a better quality of life, and partying is a part of that. I know you spent some time with Peaches. What sort of influence was she? At the time, I just needed to meet her because basically she showed me how simple music and life can be. At the time I was hanging around a lot of people and I was doing a documentary about how complicated and complex the [music] industry was, and she popped up and showed me that it was the opposite, depending on how you do it. Learning that was really good, that she was strong about how minimal she was. Learning that you could have one microphone and one groovebox and make just as much of a loud noise was very valuable to me. Our image of growing up South Asian in West London comes from Bend It Like Beckham. How socially conservative was your upbringing? Pretty much without any boundaries, because I didn't fit in anywhere. Nobody could pin me down. The conservative Sri Lankans didn't hold me down, and my family at home couldn't pin me down. I spent a lot of the time out of the house, and just got into anything that was around. I think I felt like my mum couldn't afford a conservative lifestyle, so we were just brought up wild. The kids had to be really independent because my mum couldn't speak English. She worked in a supermarket and worked as a seamstress, so we were allowed to do what we wanted. But that's all we had — my mum. The British press — NME and the daily tabloids — are famous for hyperbole and scandal. Have you had any trouble with them yet? I haven't had any, thank god. I do my best to stay out of there, it's a little too hardcore. But the only people that make it into tabloids are the ones that seek it, I think. Ultimately, I think it is like that, but you can me smart and be a musician and avoid all that. As for NME, they only really cover bands, right? Well, they cover the Streets and Dizzee Rascal. Yeah, but they're boys. As a chick who does music, I think I confuse them too much. They definitely wrote about me when the "Galang" single came out, but since then I don't think NME knows how to write about me. They're putting really big commercial things on the cover, but most of the time they exist just to write about the Libertines. Which, by the way, is baffling over here. I confuse them, because I go "reggaeton, blah blah blah, Baltimore club, da da da da da," and then "dancehall blah blah blah blah" and then they're like, "what?" And that's cool, because I'll go over here with the people that do get it. And they'll eventually figure out that music is music and that we have to push things forward, which is what the Streets say: "let's push things forward." They just don't practice that philosophy. What's the situation with female MCs in Britain? Lady Sovereign is getting a lot of press. I like Lady Sovereign. She's really cheeky and quite inventive with it. But it's really difficult to say. At the time I got signed, there seemed to be a bunch of girls signed. And magazines would call me up and say "can we do a group photo of like, grime girls," and I just thought, I'm not really part of it, so I can't really rep it. I support grime, I think it's doing a great job, and if it could get out of London, it would be amazing. I want to open up the world, like an information highway thing. Like, that's why I exist. I want to bust the doors on where I come from, all my influences come from everywhere. Have you had time for relationships in the last year? Not really, no. I'm never home, I never do anything, I never have time off to just be. If you did have time, what would your criteria be? For a man? Yeah. It would someone who is open-minded and saw the beauty in everyday stuff and everyday people. That kind of stuff is really important. People who see the beauty in everyday life, and are really interactive with life but don't follow any formulas, like he doesn't aspire to have the Bentley and the Rolex and the six-foot model, know what I mean? It has to be someone who is worldly, but I don't know what I'm going to be doing in two years or five years, so that person will have to be able to roll with that. And as long as they have that philosophy, that's cool. n°
© 2005 Ryan Kennedy and hooksexup.com. |
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