“London
Quiet down I need to make a sound
New York
Quiet down I need to make a sound
Kingston
Quiet down I need to make a sound
Brazil
Quiet down I need to make sound” – M.I.A., “Bucky Done Gun”

Although I knew that M.I.A.’s creative beats and abrasive yet flowing rhymes would be enthusiastically received by a mainstream audience if she ever got any radio play, a year ago I never would have bet that I would be hearing one of her songs on national radio stations incessantly.  “Paper Planes,” featuring a sample from the Clash’s 1982 song “Straight to Hell,” revolves around a cartoonish chorus filled with gun shots and cash-register rings, wrapped with verses that boast of manufacturing fake visas, selling drugs, and “making that fame.”  Ironically, the one M.I.A. song that has hit the “big-time” is also her first major attempt at mocking mainstream music’s dearth of political discourse. “Paper Planes” reveals just how ridiculous—and

"Paper Planes: Homeland Security Remixes"

ridiculously popular—guns, drugs, and money can be when they are not understood within a specific context, or when these things are used to stereotype immigrants and people of the “third world.”  Unlike “Paper Planes,” most of M.I.A.’s songs derive their political message from her capacity to place apparently “criminal behavior” within a global context, which inevitably belies the idea that the “crimes” that she rhymes about are indeed criminal acts.  But even as “Paper Planes” reached number one on “T.R.L.” and “MuchOnDemand Top Ten” and indie hipsters gleefully mimicked M.I.A.’s satirical dance moves (see her performance on the David Letterman Show), the corporate music giants judged that the song still needed to be “cleansed,” despite repeated objections from the artist herself.  UPDATE: “Paper Planes” has been nominated for both a Grammy and an Oscar.

And this gets to the heart of one of M.I.A.’s grand themes: representation, or who gets to portray who you are and how you can go about exerting influence on portrayals of yourself.  In a small yet telling example of her attitude towards representation, M.I.A.’s second album opens with a song that forcefully reminds her audience that she is not “Maya” (a girl’s name), but rather “M.I.A.”  She is not a name, or a signifier of a stable identity, but rather the absence of a stable identity—an identity that is apparently and continually missing in action.  She knows that she is not literally “missing in action,” but, instead, understands that hip hop artists who represent the “3rd world,” such as herself, are often underrepresented and/or misrepresented in Western cultural, political, and intellectual discourse.  She and many artists like her are often the presence of an absence in today’s hip-hop scene.

Born in the London suburb of Hounslow and raised in Sri Lanka, Mathangi Arulpragasam returned to London as the civil war between the Sri Lankan Army and the Tamil Tigers escalated.  Although images of the Tamil rebellion were pervasive in her early artwork, her early musical and visual compositions also revolved around an inner-conflict: a search for personal identity, which would be both English and Sri Lankan, both colonizer and colonized.

“I was sipping on a Rubicon
Thinking ’bout where I come
It’s all this for revolution
Cuttin’ up the coupon
Savin for a telephone
Can I call home
Please Can I go Home” – M.I.A., “Amazon,” Arular

As her music spread through the globe’s independent music scenes as rapidly as Tandoori chicken, she had to deal with male-dominated major record labels, which would soon profit immensely off of her self-cultivated underground popularity.  They would also attempt to control representations of Arulpragasm.  However, her albums, both of which are named after her parents, not only resisted the image-control of record producers and the music media, but also attempted to shed light on the lives of other women and men who continually find themselves being misrepresented by Western men and women.

In an interview with online-music-journalism giant Pitchfork Media, M.I.A. forced the interviewer to scrap his pre-made questions and proceeded to direct his attention to more pressing matters.  She immediately rejected the oft-touted notion that Diplo, a Philly-based DJ/Producer and self-described “white guy from Florida,” made Arular, her first full-length album.  Indeed, contrary to rumors of Diplo’s involvement in the making of both the music and politics of Arular, M.I.A. constructed the album on her own, in her basement, using relatively inexpensive equipment and—certainly—her own intellect and experiences.

Although she managed to clear up the rumors about Diplo, these rumors were only the tip of a far greater iceberg, which would continually rise to the surface throughout Arulpragasm’s career:

M.I.A.: So the whole time I’ve had immigration problems and not been able to get in the country, what I am or what I do has got a life of its own, and is becoming less and less to do with me. And I just find it a bit upsetting and kind of insulting that I can’t have any ideas on my own because I’m a female or that people from undeveloped countries can’t have ideas of their own unless it’s backed up by someone who’s blond-haired and blue-eyed. After the first time it’s cool, the second time it’s cool, but after like the third, fourth, fifth time, maybe it’s an issue that we need to talk about, maybe that’s something important, you know.

I admire M.I.A.’s patience, and I agree with her when she says that this is “an issue we need to talk about.”  So let’s connect M.I.A.’s experience, as a Sri Lankan/English female hip hop artist, to the larger story of (mis)representations of “3rd world” women.  But let’s do this on Friday.  In the meantime, please, if you haven’t yet, check out M.I.A.’s life story, music, and artwork.

M.I.A.'s album covers reflect her fascination with textiles, the woven products of learning and labor