M.I.A.'s Music Bravely Keeps Tackling Media Taboos, and Her Critics Just Can't Handle It

Photo Credit: tammylo

You could make a killing but don't forget the feeling

People stealing money and down with double-dealing

M.I.A. sets herself apart from other pop artists by creating more than the next explosive visual spectacle. While some reviewers call her actions and videos gratuitous, what they’re missing is that her message is largely rooted in histories of resistance. Much of the time, those reviewers write for outlets that have omitted coverage of popular resistance or nuanced analysis from their pages. Since her perspective isn’t something the writers are versed in, they dismiss her.

M.I.A.’s latest album MAYA, an inescapable component of any summer soundtrack, was eagerly anticipated after the shocking video for the single "Born Free" came out in April. The sequence featured an unflinching insight of authorities targeting young men of a certain complexion, and was instantly banned from YouTube.

In the video, redheads are a metaphorical “terrorist” group, putting light-featured faces where the nightly news typically might show brown and black visages. M.I.A. challenges the viewer's unconscious biases. There's no escaping the reality of state-sanctioned raids interrupting lives (including coitus, graphically if fleetingly), tearing apart homes and exacting terrible violence. The gory details of executions and limb-rending landmines nearly explode out of the screen. Unlike newspapers that rely on “embedded” reporting, M.I.A. gives it to us straight.

Some of M.I.A.’s background is well-known. Mathangi Arulpragasam (Maya for short), was born in England in 1975 to parents who had fled Sri Lanka. Part of the Tamil minority, her family moved back to Sri Lanka while she was still an infant, but her upbringing was hardly secure there. She rarely saw her father, who was active in a Tamil group and had to use an underground identity much of the time. To find a safer environment the family moved to India for a while, then back to Sri Lanka.

When Arulpragasam was a pre-teen, her single-parent family settled in some of London’s most dangerous public housing, the Phipps Bridge Housing Estate. Hers was one of two Asian families in the entire project, described in detail in this review of her first album.

M.I.A. overcame tremendous odds and attended college, becoming a visual artist and graphic designer. Those skills no doubt helped to form the commercial success she enjoys today. They also were a medium to relay experiences that shaped her childhood, and for parallels she had with other young people around her who were also seeking asylum from war-torn homelands.

In spite of her experiences, she’s either treated dismissively (as in a recent New York Times article), or subject to reactive anger for her political advocacy, getting death threats/wishes for her son even before he was born. The new track "Lovealot" is reported to be a tribute to a Russian suicide bomber. The lyrics don’t seem to support that theory, appearing to refer to a bomb thrower in a Nintendo game.

Even if there are between-the-lines references to the Moscow subway bomber that I’m missing, discussing the incident is not the same as endorsing it. But a conservative Web site dedicated to “documenting, exposing and neutralizing liberal media bias” says she’s referencing terrorism and getting kids to mindlessly sing “I really love Allah” when she drops the “t” in the song’s title.

The site also lumps her family in with “radical Sri Lankan terror groups,” omitting any reference to the Tamil minority. Because mainstream news stories often ignore or oversimplify Tamil resistance when they address conflict in Sri Lanka, there isn’t much to counter with when the right-wing starts throwing the word “terrorist” around. It seems that M.I.A. is aware of that tendency and fights it by normalizing the religion: “Get my eyes done like I'm in a black burka” references Muslims who choose to cover all but the eyes, wearing glamorous makeup on their sole visible feature.