KARMAGEDDON: SHIFTING TO A HIGHER GROUND

Originally published by Clash Magazine 
January 2015 Cover Story 
Words by Matthew J Bennett

If M.I.A. was actually a super heroine, then she’d rarely hit the crime scene on time. She’s nearly two hours late for Clash’s four-hour cover shoot and although her charming publicist reliably informs us M.I.A. is indeed in a car (somewhere loosely in Hackney), we are worried.

So we wait. We think about her imminent fourth album. And we ponder a potentially large elephant that might enter the room with her: what are we actually going to call the 38-year-old rapper when she does arrive? She recently revealed her name isn’t Maya at all. Apparently that was just the name of her mother’s ski instructor in the 1980s. Obviously.

M.I.A.’s new album is supposedly titled after her ‘real name’ and this is now Mathangi, like the Hindu Goddess of music. Our thumbs twiddle a little faster. Finally, she sweeps in.

“Hhmm, no, well… I don’t know, it IS weird,” concurs the singer as she finally hangs up on a German journalist on her mobile phone “My family don’t call me Maya. My friends would call me Mathangi for 10 years in middle school, and then I did 10 years as Maya, and then 10 years as M.I.A., so if you count all the people M.I.A. now outnumbers the others.”

We ask how her grandmother or mother address her. “They call me something different,” she smiles. “They call me ‘girl’ in Tamil, which is ‘Mathu’. That’s my main name.”

Fuck the ski instructor, let’s stick with her nom-de-guerre; a moniker that suggests M.I.A. has always been the moving target she remains today. It’s here that she thrives, livid in the peripheries, causing a stir where she can.

When we last spoke in 2010 this British-born, Tamil rapper was preoccupied with the notion of Orwellian governmental snooping. On her track ‘The Message’ we hear her chatter along to a love of nursery rhyme wordplay: “Headphones connect to the iPhone / iPhone connected to the Internet / Connected to the Google / Connected to the government”.

This was before WikiLeaks. This was before Edward Snowdon. But at the time M.I.A. told us: “I can’t believe everyone is like: ‘OMG Conspiracy theory!’ Well, go back on Google and fucking Google it. It’s all there.”

Three years later and history has completely vindicated her ‘paranoia’. The naysayers who slagged her are silenced. M.I.A. is notoriously lippy so you’d think she’d be taking this opportunity to gloat through the channels of receptive press. But instead she remembers how confusing the revelations were as another crisis was breaking in her life. “Oh my god! [Edward] Snowdon’s revelations happened two days after my custody battle started. So I felt really fucked up. It was really personal, but it was horrible at the same time.”

M.I.A. was back in the USA, trying to fight her billionaire former fiancé Ben Bronfman for custody of their child, Ikhyd. She was facing the institutions of America heads on. She was facing the same system that snoops on their own people, the very ones she criticised. And she was facing the possibility that her mouthy and cutting opinions may see her lose custody of her child.

“If you’d been someone who was vocal about WikiLeaks, no one will cut you slack in America,” she frowns. “Everyone was too accepting of what was going on. In America, every social group, no matter who they are - whether it’s the poorest or the richest, or intellectuals, the hood people, whatever - everyone had resigned to the idea that people die. And that’s okay? There is no uproar or outrage in America about anything, there hasn’t been for a long time, no matter what technology or access these people have.”

Ultimately M.I.A. retained custody of her child before moving back to London. Ultimately too, it transpired that very few people seemed to care that the government were reading and storing every single email and Facebook message of America’s public. Edward Snowdon’s online interviews explaining the architecture of surveillance have been viewed just 2.5 million times on YouTube, whereas M.I.A.’s ‘Bad Girls’ video has had 45 million views. This is the world we now live in. Where a pop video is nearly 20 times more popular than the biggest political and social news to hit America possibly since 9/11.

However, M.I.A. is numb to this horrendous skewing of relevance. She’s been fighting such statistics for years through the propaganda that suggests a Tamil genocide hasn’t been in existence

Asked how vindicated she felt after 2010’s ‘/\/\/\Y/\’ precognition on surveillance rang true, she simply shrugs and says: “I tweeted (German Prime Minister) Angela Merkel two nights ago. I tweeted her the link to my song and said: ‘You have to buy this’.”

Yet even through this cheeky repartee you get the impression M.I.A. has moved on slightly. And this brings us to her fourth album, ‘Matangi’. Whilst we digest the fallout from PRISM, Miss Arulpragasam has scampered off into the arms of Eastern spirituality. ‘Matangi’ is not only her forename, the Hindu goddess of music and the goddess of the ghetto, but as of 2013 it is also an album that bridges Hindu motifs with M.I.A.’s cut-and-paste rap aesthetic.

It is also a recording that we are lucky even exists. The rapper, after her three-album deal, was effectively “done with music”. The cycle of ‘/\/\/\Y/\’ had taken its toll in a couple of distinct ways. “I just wanted to go and make art, and relax a little bit. I wanted to take my son and go and spend time teaching him Tamil,” explains the singer. “‘/\/\/\Y/\’ got released, the touring cycle happened in the winter time, and I was on a shitty tour bus with a one-year-old baby, and to go through that and put THAT album out, whilst the world is like ‘Fuck you! This is bullshit’, and you’re playing it to your fans - it was a dark tunnel.”

And then the Super Bowl happened. Madonna asked her to perform alongside her on national American television. M.I.A. said yes, and in a gushing aside offered her a song she’d just written called ‘Sexodus’ as a gift. M.I.A. then got classically carried away and flipped her middle finger to America during the half-time adverts live on the box and suddenly we had the next controversial chapter; a turbulent episode that ironically helped her refocus.

“I was really close to giving up [being a musician],” she confides. “Even at the Super Bowl when I was giving my songs to people, I was like: ‘Take it!’ I wasn’t going to release a record. But I released the ‘Bad Girls’ video, and it was kind of fun, and Madonna was like: ‘Here is your song back! I hate you!’”

Then it was down to Google to play its serendipitous role. M.I.A. stumbled across the meaning of her disregarded forename along with a suspicious set of images whilst searching the web in India whilst on a holiday away from music. “The first thing that came up was Matangi’s 64 (chosen) arts, and my Mum’s name ‘Kala’, the name of my second album, and it read: ‘She sits on a studded throne’. I was like, ‘What does that look like?’ So I cut and pasted ‘Gem-Studded Throne’ into Google Images, and it was (Sri Lankan President) Rajapaksa being awarded a throne by the monks. He is the one who basically shat on me and my last album. I got into trouble for speaking up against him, and it was interesting, you know, he’s got the throne. The chances of Google Images throwing up Rajapaksha as the first image was just insane!”

M.I.A. is keen to point out that she isn’t religious. At one point she describes how her concept of God is way more rooted in the notion of mathematics or an energy net that encloses humanity. She was raised as a lapsed Christian who grew up on Temple Road in Tamil Nadu, India, and had always ruminated on the subliminal effects of proximity. “I woke up to the sound of drums every day,” she recounts. “And that’s why I thought I loved drums; my beats were always so drum heavy.”

We do however get the impression that this singer is spiritual, sentimental and also prone to being influenced by the nuances of coincidence. Her hour-long Google research set the cerebral cogs in motion where M.I.A. could once more glimpse a path through her passionate turmoil and frenzy of ideas towards producing a fourth album.

“I had given up music, and I went to India… [long pause] I’m just saying it gave me a gift - at a time I didn’t want it. It gave it to me in a way that I understood information; it came to me on a computer saying here’s this thing, and that thing about the Hindu sign - it’s weird, and it’s pretty random that I had never seen it before.”

Where once she sampled gunshots now we have temple chants. Where the sonic screech of fighter jets competed with Sleigh Bells’ scything guitar we now find rabidly played Indian shehnai and cocky musings on the mechanics of Karma.

M.I.A. describes her album as a “parking lot” at the end of the journey found across the other three albums. When Clash questions this unsexy description she goads us with a giggle: “It depends which parking lot it is; a lot can happen in parking lot you know?” She delves deeper into her fledgling concept: “Matangi is a very obscure goddess, even within Hinduism, it’s the avant-garde. Matangi represented the outward expression of inner thoughts, and if you sum it to that, you put all creativity in that bracket. There’s an inner thought, and then the outward articulation: that is creativity, and it can be applied to any medium. There you go!” smiles the singer radiantly. “I could do whatever I wanted! When I looked up the 64 core arts [of Matangi], there was some hippy shit - making jewellery, making embroidery and things like that - and then there’s painting, music, blah blah blah - one of them is even being really good at using sex toys, erotic art and stuff. It’s pretty open; there are 64 ways to express yourself.”

So let’s nail some devil in the detail that these spiritual structures gave shelter to. ‘Matangi’ may well be her most unswerving album since her debut ‘Arular’ in 2005. If her second album ‘Kala’ was lopsided with the weight of ‘Paper Planes’ and her third album ‘/\/\/\Y/\’ was a terse wall of distorted and confused anger, then ‘Matangi’ is much more consistent, if such a sturdy word could ever be applied to our tardy Tamil heroine.

Having reconnected with producer Switch after a year of silence she then drafted in Hit Boy, Partysquad, Surkin, her brother Sugu and Doc McKinney alongside hype artist The Weeknd, who picked up ‘Sexodus’ where Madonna had lain it down.

But like everything M.I.A. produces it’s a mongrelised and magpie patchwork. Yes ‘Matangi’ is a mess of ideas, but does that matter? It’s livid with thoughts and departing notions, as much a mood board as a 15-track album. And buried under her chorus of ohms we still find sinister western currents in the form of a robust political skit she made with WikiLeak’s Julian Assange. This is called ‘aTENTion’ and it’s a story within this story, and one obsessed with the Internet once again.

“When WikiLeaks released the cables on Sri Lanka it was amazing!” recalls the girl who was forced to flee Sri Lanka as a child due to her father’s role in the resistance. “The cables came out and there was one that helped the Tamils, in the Tamil press - essentially it said: ‘There were chemical bombs used, civilians were killed, and here’s cables to prove they [our foreign nations] knew about it’. And when that happened, I was like: ‘Julian Assange is my fucking hero!!’ I only ever needed one.”

She quickly entered the studio to passionately forge a mix tape in 48 hours called ‘Vicki Leekx’ in homage to her new hero. This in turn triggered Assange to tap up M.I.A. to ask if she’d record some music for his new online chat show. The singer was understandably blown away: “I was freaking out when he got in touch,” exhales the singer with a grin. “When he came and asked for help, I was like: ‘Of course!’ I wanted to support someone who is basically creating dialogue and putting truth out there.”

But it wasn't a straightforward case of repaying a favour. M.I.A. could feel modern culture was being split in two: “I felt that a really amazing moment in history was unfolding. Because right now people will discredit him and say all kinds of things about him, but as time goes on, he’s gonna represent a modern, new idea of this cyber-revolutionary type of thing. And I didn’t know what it looked like before; that concept of information-war blah blah that you heard about in the ’80s. Now is the first time you saw it happen.”

Thus, as Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning stew in their own casserole of achievements we are aware that once again, where the tangle of socio-political web issues are concerned, M.I.A. speaks the truth with incisive perception.

Now back to the song; one of the fastest, most bureaucratic and unique collaborations you’ll hear this year: “I was writing this ‘aTENTion’ song when Julian came into the studio with me to write music for the show, and he asked what I was doing so I played him the song, and he asked for my computer. I was like, ‘No!’ but he took it as I was standing next to him and I was like, ‘Shit!’ I had no clue what he was doing.” Here M.I.A makes a bevy of computer sound-effects and wiggles her fingers over imaginary keys before looking up like the inspired art student she once was and finishes off: “But he generated me this document with 4000 TENT words, and I was like, ‘Oooh! Thanks!’”

As 2013 rolls to a close, M.I.A. is still representing Assange’s honourable solo crusades and trying to accurately pinpoint their true value in history. When we discuss her view on Assange’s alleged sex crime she laconically expresses her doubts with a depressing deflection: “Nowadays, when you ‘get’ people, you don’t send a sniper out, you discredit them. You discredit their character, and say they don’t mean anything. You snuff them out. And that’s what they basically were doing with him; it’s easy to do that. It’s the same with Snowden: governments don’t get someone to kill him, they take the oxygen out of what he’s saying, and the flame is distinguished by itself, and then everyone is like, ‘Well, that wasn’t a fucking light, was it?’”

And this rhetorical question leads her back to the issue that was mooted on her last album and still haunts her today, that the West is increasingly trapped by its own infernal comforts: “We have all this technology, but how do we use it? Like, America is inspired by these tales of revolution online, and by Iran, when it happens in Egypt etc, and everyone is like, ‘Yeah, we’re liberating Muslim women!’ But it should actually be totally reversed.”

“American people are in this fucked up situation where they are told ‘This surveillance is for the good of you. We built this system to keep YOU safe’, but they are also getting spied on, and it’s making people not be free. So they think: ‘If I revolt, then I am fucking up a machine that will keep me safe. So what do I do?’ That’s a really fucking massive issue. I don’t know what the answer is.”

We’re conscious that these last seven words are a rare utterance from M.I.A. It’s true that doesn’t have the answers, although she puts in a heroic daily shift in trying to figure them out. We also aren’t sure her assumption of religious symbolism is going to stick or stretch to her next album.

Nor are we sure why M.I.A.’s migrated out of sync with the global dialogue she so accurately predicted and into the arms of a soothing religious narrative, though she makes at understanding it herself. “The spirituality is hitting me right now because…” She enjoys another long pause. “…I don’t know why. Everything else is done. Politically what else do you want to know? I mean Angela Merkel’s getting hacked, wiretapped, and she’s not getting hacked by Assange or Snowdon, but by another government. They are all fighting it out. The hippies lost, and Steve Jobs is dead.” This last word hangs heavy in the room before M.I.A. wraps up our meeting with a knowing and self-mocking conclusion as she laughs: “And I don’t like the new iPhone 5! I don’t like the interfacing at all.”