 "Photo: rollingstone.com")
When samples of M.I.A.'s music first hit the Web late last year, hipsters and bloggers worked themselves into a lather over the young rapper from Sri Lanka whose dense, inventive songs suggested, among other things, her ambiguous stance on terrorism.
The controversy was enough to make M.I.A. the hottest ticket during March's South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas.
Once her debut, Arular, hit stores, however, it became clear that M.I.A. was more interested in guerrilla marketing than guerrilla warfare. For all the revolutionary politics suggested by its tanks-and-guns cover art, Arular is a party album just as likely to hit listeners in the feet as in the head.
And that's just the way the woman born Mathangi Arulpragasam likes it.
"I feel like all my lyrics could be interpreted in a global way," she said during a phone interview from London. "Some people just get the politics and not the fun, some people just get the fun and not the politics.
"My music is always open to interpretation. For me, it's about taking everything - everything you are, everything you've been through and everything you've thought about - and making one giant soup."
While growing up, Arulpragasam spent time living in her native Sri Lanka, with stints in Madras, India, London, and even Los Angeles. She rarely interacted with her father, a political dissident active in an ethnic group that was trying to overthrow the Sri Lankan government.
After graduating with a film degree from London's St. Martin's College, Arulpragasam met Justine Frischmann, lead singer of the British rock group Elastica.
"When I left college, the only [film] jobs you could get were videos with bands," she said. "So I made a video for Elastica. And I ended up making clothes for Justine. I used to take all the photos, I did all the artwork, and I filmed the tours."
Making music herself, Arulpragasam said, was almost an accident.
"One day, I was in the house on my own and I was bored," she said. "Either I could sit and waste my time watching telly, or I could pick up a machine and just do it. I just wanted to know what I could come up with."
Arulpragasam's music draws from a rich tapestry of genres, using hip-hop as a base and adding British, Jamaican, and South American flourishes to create a sound that's unlike anything else out there.
While it has yet to find significant sales in this country, Arular captured the ear of the music industry after its March release on an independent label. Arulpragasam said she took calls from five or six major labels before settling on Interscope, home to Eminem, 50 Cent, and U2. She's set to record a follow-up with Missy Elliott's collaborator, Timbaland.
"Making music is exactly the same as making a picture or making a curry," she said.
"It's the same as if someone asked me to paint their front room. I would put my own stamp on it. You're an artist first, and then the medium comes after that," she said.
"I want to push the boundaries of myself with everything I do."
(c) 2005, St. Paul Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minn.).
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