May 24, 2005 @ 4:56 am

VIBE Magazine: NEXT >> M.I.A. - Front Line

Hattie Collins

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Maya Arulpragasam, aka M.I.A., strolls out onto the stage of an intimate venue in the U.K. university town of Cambridge. With her long silky hair and olive skin, she has the look of a Bollywood headliner, which may be why her curious sing-rap fusion initially confuses the gathering of students. “When people see me, they think, ‘Ah, sweet Indian girl, she’ll give us a lovely Indian hook.’ But no,” says M.I.A., 27, of her mishmashed, electro-ragga grooves and conscious couplets. “I want to give people another point of view.”

Maya Arulpragasam, aka M.I.A., strolls out onto the stage of an intimate venue in the U.K. university town of Cambridge. With her long silky hair and olive skin, she has the look of a Bollywood headliner, which may be why her curious sing-rap fusion initially confuses the gathering of students. "When people see me, they think, 'Ah, sweet Indian girl, she'll give us a lovely Indian hook.' But no," says M.I.A., 27, of her mishmashed, electro-ragga grooves and conscious couplets. "I want to give people another point of view." That perspective was shaped by her childhood. When she was 8 months old, M.I.A.'s parents left England for their homeland of Sri Lanka, where her father joined the Tamil Tigers, a group of militant revolutionaries who fought for independence from the ruling Sinhalese population. "I'm as much about survival as any rapper," says M.I.A., whose name is an acronym for a soldier who's Missing in Action. "But my thing isn't the street. It goes beyond that to the jungle and a mud hut. Having bullets fly past my head was no big deal. By the time I was 10, I had seen people get killed and my school had been burned down." As the war worsened, her family fled back to the U.K., where M.I.A. became hooked on hip hop. "Hearing Public Enemy gave me a sense of self," she remembers. "Listening to other people's oppression stopped me from thinking about what I had been through." In 2001, while attending Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, M.I.A. poured her experiences into graffiti-based pictures illustrating Sri Lankan life. She then turned her striking images into music, which attracted radical rapper Nas. "Her sound is the future," he says. "She'll be a star in the States." Her first patchwork single, "Galang," was made on a crude Roland MC-505. Then M.I.A. shaped her expressive tales of teenage prostitution, kidnap, and rebellion into the powerfully politicized album Arular, an alias her father uses. "I had no formula, but when you feel it, that's a universal thing." Audio: M.I.A. - "Galang"

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