M.I.A.: Is She For Real? What's Real?

A few weeks ago I got it into my head to write a piece about popular music and political violence. You know, from "John Brown's Body" up through Bob Dylan's "Masters of War" and Rage Against The Machine's "Bomb Track", plus Irish songs like "Rising of the Moon," and Fela Kuti too.

To do justice to a piece like that would really take a mound of sociological and demographic data that I neither have, nor would gladly research and cook down just to put on the interweb for free. So the piece I had in mind lolled and languished, half-started and nowhere near any conclusions. Everything I grasped at dissolved into air.

The problem is, at the end of the day bullets have killed approximately a billion more people than guitars have. Including the unfortunate cases of former Yardbird Keith Relf and former Shadow John Rostill, both electrocuted while playing the guitar, I think the score is something like bullets: a billion, guitars: three-ish. That disparity has to be accounted for. It seems that words draw less blood than weapons and the very question of how to relate music to violence is a difficult one to frame. As Frank Zappa said, music is just decorated bits of time.

But then again that is letting musicians off the hook too easily. Sometimes music can matter, or Union soldiers wouldn’t have sung an anthem to a domestic terrorist (“John Brown’s Body”) when they marched into battle against the Confederacy.

The reason I started the now defunct piece in the first place was because of M.I.A. M.I.A. is a 28 year old conceptual artist from London who came by a secondhand drum machine and started creating beats and laying down tracks. Those tracks eventually became an album, Arular, that has become a chart hit in the UK and a critical sensation on this side of the Atlantic.

M.I.A.'s real name is Maya Arulpragasam. She was born in Sri Lanka and grew up dodging bullets and capture by the Sri Lankan army before escaping to London with her parents at age 11. She spent her teenage years in some truly dire London council estates (that's "the projects") and at first found she could not start school because her English was not good enough. Safe to say, she has had an "interesting" life, if by "interesting" you mean dangerous, bizarre, and difficult. The nickname “M.I.A.” is a double entendre which in London is understood to primarily mean “Missing in Acton,” Acton being (I am told) the council estate she grew up in.

As for “Arular”, that’s her father, a former member of the Tamil Tigers, the Sri Lankan dissident group recognized as a terrorist group by several nations including the United States. This is the reason for her family’s flight from Sri Lanka and the direct inspiration for a good amount of her music and artwork.

M.I.A.’s music amalgamates an entire world's beats into one exhilarating stew. Imagine a Sri Lankan woman from London rapping Jamaican dancehall style over Atlanta crunk spiced with Indian bhangra and you get the picture. Her debut single "Galang" is a rattling minor masterpiece that some people have hailed as the harbinger of a new era of world music. And it does seem that M.I.A.’s naïve newcomer approach has resulted in a truly “world” music that does not make distinctions between bhangra, crunk, baile, dancehall, and techno.

Article Author: John Owen

John Owen is a music writer, multi-instrumentalist and music industry veteran based in coastal Massachusetts.

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