by RAF KATIGBAK

Maya Arulpragasam is out of breath and apologetic when she answers her phone, explaining that she was just exercising so she can “look good next to Gwen Stefani.” She’s joking, of course. Not about being next to Stefani, who she’ll be touring with in the coming months, but about getting in shape—she really couldn’t give a shit about looking posh. In fact, she doesn’t even own a hairbrush.

Despite her modesty (the girl is actually, as they say, fit), the real truth behind her breathlessness is that Arulpragasam just ran from upstairs at her mum’s London flat, where she was frantically sewing herself some new digs for the upcoming tour. As if this kind of DIY aesthetic hasn’t set her far enough apart from other gussied-up dancefloor divas out there, she’s thinking of going for a skinhead look, which she claims “is just enough to be confusing.” “Plus,” she adds, “I quite like wearing braces.”

45 revolutions per minute

Confusing legions of screaming prepubescent Gwen Stefani fans is exactly the kind of subversive entertainment the 29-year-old Sri Lankan (via London) known as MIA excels at. While her visual art—brightly coloured, spray-stencilled images of urban warfare and guerrilla revolution—may have been nominated for an alternative Turner Prize in 2002, most know MIA for her music. Last year, thanks to a healthy dose of Internet buzz, helped by her free online mixtape Piracy Funds Terrorism, she became one of the most hyped underground artists of 2004. Like her visual art, her first dancehall/grime hybrid singles “Galang” and “Sunshowers” are rife with revolutionary slang and urban malaise designed to explode dancefloors with future-proof, mortar-shell beats.

“Galang” eventually topped many in-the-know DJ charts, and anyone who heard the debut single knew wide-scale success was imminent. MIA’s sound filled a void in dance music. It was smart, edgy and political without being didactic. At a time when dance music, like the rest of the globe, was becoming disillusioned with the status quo, her music captured that confusion and tried to make sense of it, spitting it back with the force of ten-ton electro rhythms. For MIA, who moved to a racially divided London from Sri Lanka at 11, it was as much an urgent attempt to forge an identity and make sense of her world as it was a desire to create music that’s undeniably danceable. Since then, her long awaited full-length Arular (named after her father, a revolutionary fighter for the Tamil Tigers) has been touted as the most raucous political dancefloor music since the Clash.

Motion in the ocean

But success is always a mixed blessing, and as soon as the media picked her up, MIA found herself having to navigate through a superficial world she openly railed against.

“It’s really weird for me,” she says. “On the one hand, I’d much rather be hanging, riding my bike and thinking about, ‘Oh my god! The green on that spray paint is sooo wicked!’ That’s kind of what I’m actually like, doing my thing, wearing the same clothes for three days straight, I don’t really care. Then I think there’s a bunch of Sri Lankans thinking, ‘Yeah, she’s the only one we’ve got.’ So then I also feel I have to say, ‘You know, I don’t look like this because I have a crack addiction, I look like this cause I’m actually busy doing work.’ Because I want to be a woman who actually got there on the strength of being good or being creative, not because I looked good or shagged my way to the top.”

Yes, MIA is an independent woman, but don’t expect long diatribes on women’s lib or any rags-to-riches style monologues during her concerts. At a show she’s there to do one thing: rock a crowd.

“I’ve stopped being so precious at my shows now because there’s so much written about it on the Internet. The analogy I think of is, you have this little island in the sea. And you look at it and you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s a little island with a palm tree,’ but when you look at it below sea level, it goes down deep and it’s a whole mountain. You can see the tiny tip of it and it looks like a tiny lonely island. And that’s how I see myself as an artist—I don’t mind presenting to people a tiny island with a palm tree, but there’s enough there, and as long as it promotes discussion and debate, if it spins off some inspiration, then that’s good enough for me.”

With Spank Rock at le Spectrum
on Saturday, Sept. 24, 8 p.m., $25, all ages

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