Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam aka M.I.A. is a superwoman. She is an entity that is distinctly superior to you; something you cannot match or encounter at the same plane of reality. Together with Betty Davis, Shampoo, Spellling and Billie Eilish, M.I.A. is one of my grand dames in popular music.
Her biography is adventurous. Of Tamil descent, Maya Arulpragasam has experienced the horrors of civil war and “big time” poverty during her childhood in Jaffna, Sri Lanka (yet, as she recalls, also some of her happiest moments of her life). Her father, Arular, was a political activist on behalf of the oppressed Tamil minority (or, as the Sri Lankian government would claim, a terrorist), and was mostly absent during her childhood as he had to live in hiding. At the age of 11 Maya moved with her mother, Kala, to London. There, she experienced outright racism. Nevertheless, she attended art school and had her first exhibitions as a visual artist in the early 2000s. She encountered early success with her art and was also awarded for the Alternative Turner Prize. Then somebody suggested to her making music.
Under the pseudonym M.I.A. she became a critical and commercial success as a musician in the second half of the 2000s, with her albums Arular and Kala (both named after her parents). She had numerous singles and even one great, everlasting hit, Paper Planes, which rightfully got included in the Rolling Stone´s list of 500 best songs of all time (Kala got included in the list of 500 best albums of all time). She struck the audience with her off-the-wall mix of dance and electronic music mixed up with many other influences. Most notably, she struck with her authentic off-the-wall existence. A refugee and victim of many sorts of racism and poverty, coming from a rather unknown country, her M.I.A. project gives you a sense of dislocation as well as a perspective on unity and humanitarianism – a global human perspective, which, as critics mention, has not been reached before or ever since. The M.I.A. songs deal about migration, political violence, rebellion, revolution, oppression, gender stereotypes, and the like. Moreover, they seem to deal with all that at once. Her music has been described as an “eclectic world-underclass dance amalgam”.
The most noteworthy aspect about M.I.A. is, however, its permanent guerilla attitude and its permanent sense of dislocation. Critics have noted an “image of provocation, yet also avoidance of, or inability to use consistent images and messages”. M.I.A. is an artist that cannot ever be “typed”, she is running out in (and retreating from) all directions. She radiates a great deal of chaos and randomness and of psychosis-like creativity. She has a talent of mixing up avant-garde with mainstream, yet in a way of avoiding both the traps the lie in one as well as in the other. It has been said that she is always able to use a larger force against itself. With the result of M.I.A., as suggested at the beginning, always becoming a larger force than you, something truly superior, of another category: a superwoman. M.I.A. is a creative genius of the highest order, to say the least. Respectively, as “genius” might be something you´ll be quite familiar with in popular music, she is a genius of a special kind that needs special investigation.
Not surprisingly, M.I.A.´s music is quite heavy metal. It is agitated, loud, overloaded, confusing, difficult to catch up with, pushing the boundaries, (forever) ahead of its time. Actually it is cacophonic, with her talent being able to turn this inherent cacophony into something relatable nevertheless. Of course, there are also moments of outright beauty and transcendence, with beautiful melodies and harmonies, as this is inherent in the entire M.I.A. perspective as well. Her music is described as fusion between electronic, electroclash, hip hop, alternative, reggae, rhythm and blues, dance, world music, and Bollywood. Indeed, M.I.A. likes to draw many registers. It can also be summed up as avantgarde pop combined with mainstream elements – or the other way round. Nevertheless, whereas fusion sound may often be some helpless eclecticism and something that is blatant and boastful, M.I.A.´s fusion is highly genuine and organic, it originally and organically seems to come from the depths of her mind. What a complex mind! Yet what a strangely complex mind, seemingly transgressing our understanding of complexity into something unfamiliar and unknown, into something other. M.I.A.´s complexity is not an ordinary complexity. M.I.A. has described her music as dance music of club music for the “other”.
Years ago I attempted to characterize such individuals as the „ultracomplex people“. I have written more recently about (Clyfford Still and) radical otherness. M.I.A. is a radical other. A while ago I have written about the “antisphere”: the final sphere of extreme creativity, a negatively curved space, where everything flies into the infinite, and the dances between signifiers and the signified become most eccentric – nevertheless become unified into a whole, a phantasma, that is nevertheless transgressed and understood (as you can most perfectly see it in Spellling´s Under the Sun; M.I.A.´s mind is however too political to be of exactly the same sort and to reside in exactly the same sector within the antisphere; as the political finally refers to some exactly defined and clear meanings). Most recently I have written about alterity: as the condition of the mind of the poète maudite. Due to this sense for alterity, the mind of the poète maudit can grasp infinitely large structures (like establish a universal human perspective): as alterity both contains the ego and the other, in some sort of (“nonlinear”) mutual relationship. It makes the ego look like the other, and the other like the ego, like something inherently familiar to the poète maudit. In M.I.A.´s mind, there is this alterity. That is why she is such a great poet – a poète maudit. M.I.A.´s mind can make up a universal, heterogenous gathering of all races, notably of the global underclass. That is a seldom achievement. (And it is precarious as well: Since the beautifully, colourfully heterogenous elements of this gathering are homogenous in the special mind of the poète maudit, yet heterogenous in reality and to themselves. They are likely to truly diverge. Likewise, what the poète maudit can not truly grasp is conformism, i.e. the true fabric of humanity and society. Therefore, in his universalism, the poète maudit will live in splendid isolation or “forever in the future”. Yet, as M.I.A. acknowledges: hers is club music for the “other” anyway.)
M.I.A.´s videos are extremely creative and they are part of the M.I.A. Gesamtkunstwerk, if one may say so. Her skills as a visual artist come to play in her videos. Often they exhibit acute sensory overload, on other occasions they make impact with very easy, though eccentric means. Bad Girls is one of the strongest (“power women”) videos I have ever seen, Sunshowers features her with Tamil female guerillas in the jungle, XXXO is pop in a hyperspace, Borders powerfully delivers a humanitarian message, Go Off solely shows explosions in a mine (and that work great with the music). I have watched some music videos for Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Dua Lipa or Rihanna occasionally. Therein, they are all presented as some kind of untouchable, erect queens. M.I.A., by contrast, oscillates in more dimensions. She is clearly more interesting. She oscillates with the world. She is a bit hard to touch as well, but that is due to her complexity, and not due to something that seems fabricated. She seems stronger than the pop queens because she exhibits distinctly more room for maneuver. M.I.A. is clearly liberated and free, whereas the pop queens clearly are not. Taylor, Rihanna et al. clearly are enslaved.
M.I.A. is also often labelled as “the rapper from the future”. In stark contrast to the usually awful voices of rappers, M.I.A.´s voice and singing is beautiful, bright and penetrating. Apart from rapping, M.I.A. has adopted various types of singing. She is described as having a whooping, chanting voice coming in with “an indelible nursery-rhyme swing”. The artwork of her albums, naturally done by herself, are on the verge of being eye-hurting, as it exhibits sensory overload and a guerilla-like approach to art and visual imagery. Like Betty Davis, Spellling, Shampoo or Billie Eilish, M.I.A. exhibits an acute sense for fashion. Fashion in the ordinary sense usually is something quite boring and conformist, even if it is elite. All those mentioned sister musicians and sister geniuses dress themselves in extravagant, random ways, with clothes that often do not fit together. Such a highly penetrative aesthetic view upon the world is something that you can obviously expect from that sort of people. M.I.A. is, all in all, beautiful. A beautiful voice of the global underclass.
Sadly, there is potential that such individuals become alienated from society, if not humanity. M.I.A. always claimed that she did not desire mainstream success, rather would like to remain on the outskirts of mainstream. After her initial albums, she actually gradually faded from view. Her latest album, Mata, from 2022, was released via the internet only. Truly, her albums aren´t that catchy anymore, although especially Mata is a good one, though also a nerdy one. After every album she claims that this would be her last one and the last music that she ever will want to make. It does not seem that M.I.A. is well known today. Recently she has announced that she has “found Jesus”. She is sure that this will annoy a good deal of her fanbase, which largely consists of progressives. It is however natural for individuals like Maya to be spiritual.
There is a place deep inside my heart for Maya Arulpragasam. And, notably, in my mind.