Tigress Beat

M.I.A. Photo by David Titlow.

A pre-recorded drumbeat double-dutches through the sound system at Toronto’s Drake Hotel. Maya Arulpragasam, a 27-year-old Sri Lankan Tamil raised in England from age nine, grips a microphone beneath pulsing stage lights. Arulpragasam, professionally known as M.I.A., bounces in place, wide smile jangling on her face. She is wearing swinging gold earrings and a one-of-a-kind, broke-the-mould teal pantsuit with lightning stripes. The crowd surges to catch her energy.

M.I.A. begins, voice taut as a slingshot:

I bongo with my lingo, and beat it like a wing yo
From Congo to Colombo, can’t stereotype my thing yo
I salt and pepper my mangos; shoot, spit out the window
Bingo, I gotta get ’em in the thing yo; never, I’m doing my thing yo
Quit bending all my fing-o, quit beating me like your ring-o
You wanna go? You wanna win a war? Like P-L-O, I don’t surrend-o!

This is Sunshowers, a megaton bomb built from hip-hop, electro and dancehall reggae. It is rhythm as riddim – a grimy, swirling heap of sound that is anthem to underground scenes in India, England, Brazil, Canada and points between. Sunshowers appears on Arular, M.I.A.’s first studio album, titled to honour her father’s rebel code name: he is a founding member of Sri Lanka’s Eelam Revolutionary Organization of Students (EROS), a militant group akin to the country’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Arular’s easy blend of vague threats (“I got the bombs to make you blow / I got the beats to make you bang”; “Growin’ up, brewin’ up, guerilla gettin’ trained up / Look out, look out from over the rooftop”) with schoolyard choruses (“Blaze to blaze, galang a lang alanga / Purple haze, galang a lang alanga”) has triggered wide-ranging music-crit speculation that M.I.A. is a rebel fomenter, some secret weapon of dance destruction in terrorism’s war on freedom.

She is charmingly elliptical about her politics – her website contains smiling photos of gun-toting Tamils, but no explicit endorsement of their rebellion – a mystery that makes her seem dangerous in these edgy times. What’s known for fact, though, is that Arular is a bold opening step, a 12-song statement that, much like Run-D.M.C.’s Run-D.M.C. or Björk’s Debut, announces the arrival of a new and boundless sound to the global music fabric. Sasha Frere-Jones, writing in the New Yorker last November, said M.I.A.’s voice comes “from a place where kids throw rocks at tanks, where people pull down walls with their bare hands. It could be the sound of a carnival, or a riot.” She makes music like nobody who came before her; a clutter of copycats should trail her path.

Questions about M.I.A.’s politics, though, only increase her cachet with the 150 hipsters crammed inside the Drake’s basement bar. This is her lone Canadian appearance on a North American press tour that includes similar showcases in Los Angeles and New York. M.I.A. is performing with Diplo, the Philadelphia DJ who along with the singer co-authored last fall’s Piracy Funds Terrorism, Volume 1, a self-released CD that mashes early versions of Arular’s vocals with body-rocking beats like Jay-Z’s Big Pimpin’, The Bangles’ Walk Like An Egyptian and Salt-N-Pepa’s Push It. M.I.A. and Diplo cleared none of PFT’s samples, making their disc ineligible for record-store sales. It instead passed hand to hand, modem to modem, but seems to have reached the audience in full: the Drake mouths every word M.I.A. sings.

Close to midnight, she bounds behind a curtain to change into a yellow T-shirt and matching skirt for a one-song encore, PFT’s Pop. Diplo drops his needle on Hip-Hop, an old and banging beat by current rap hero Kanye West. M.I.A.’s voice comes slow and sly: “You can watch TV, you can watch the media / President Bush doing takeover / ... You can be a follower, but who’s your leader? / Break that circle or it will kill ya.” Behind and beside her, video screens overflow with fast-moving graphics of military jets and explosions.

Pop ends. M.I.A. exits the stage less than 60 minutes after taking it. It is concert as blitzkrieg.

M.I.A.'s new album, Arular. Cover art by M.I.A. and Steve Loveridge.

The day before the Drake, M.I.A. arrives at the CBC’s Toronto mothership near 6 p.m. Coming in from the cold, she is dressed in an untucked army jersey, dark pants, pink-and-black Reeboks made from patent leather or plastic and a blue coat that keeps spilling off her shoulders. She is small and stunning, soft eyes flashing behind long and wavy hair.

An hour later, settled in on the second floor, M.I.A. confronts her ambiguous reputation. North American hip-hop culture, she begins, has a long history of glorifying gun violence. She grew up listening to the battle hymns of Public Enemy and N.W.A., then watched artists like 2Pac, 50 Cent and a hundred others cash in telling fictional, horror-core stories of street crime. When the time came to make Arular, M.I.A. chose to sing about her own – all too real – life experiences. She claims the record does not promote violence, but merely reflects the warring state of her homeland. “The whole media network – MTV, everything – embraces gangsta culture.” she says. “Yet, [everyone panics when] somebody comes along going, ‘Pffft. Guns? So last century. Let’s talk about bombs.’ If you really think all [that music is] about is how aggro you can be, how well you can diss people and how big your gun is – well ... let’s step it up a gear.”

Arulpragasam’s back story parses like a Bollywood blockbuster: her family is Tamil, a people with a half-century history of conflict against Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority. Maya was born in a London hospital, but moved to Sri Lanka as a baby, when her engineer father returned home to help lead EROS. Maya’s experience of her homeland was sharp and deadly. Saboteurs burnt her house and school; people in her village were “disappeared” by government forces; thousands in the country were murdered.

Maya fled for England with her mother and two siblings in 1986, settling in a council estate 20 minutes south of London. The locals were racist and hostile; all efforts to fit in failed. “When I was 13, I wanted to look like Neneh Cherry,” M.I.A. says. “I was really, really poor. So ghetto. I got this perm at a shitty hairdressers that was for old women. Pensioners. [My hair] went so wrong, even my mum stopped talking to me. I didn’t go out of my house for a year, I totally fell out of the loop.”

Post-perm life near London came no easier. Maya found nothing to like about her new country’s regimented, class-conscious society. “I have my British passport and everything, but it doesn’t mean I lie down and take what England has to offer,” she says. “The idea of an unspontaneous life that lasts for 60 years is like, bloody hell. Why the hell would you pay taxes and have a hospital to save you and live that out? Why would you?”

Maya grew into M.I.A. She earned a film degree from London’s Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design at age 22, and was nominated for an alternative Turner Prize for a sold-out, spray-painted art exhibition that combined candy-coloured camouflage with graffitied palm trees and Tamil iconography. In 2001, she hit the road with the Britpop band Elastica to shoot film for a documentary about their 40-city U.S. tour. (M.I.A. welcomed the escape: “When you’re in England, you have to travel. Dark brown doesn’t look good against gray. I’m constantly badly lit.”) Between shows, she learned how to make music on a Roland MC-505 Groovebox, an all-purpose drum machine and keyboard sequencer that is well suited to making quick and dirty electronic beats.

Home again in London, where she shared an apartment with Elastica singer Justine Frischmann, M.I.A. roughed out a six-song demo on her 505. When she finished, Frischmann brought her flatmate’s CD to Elastica’s management offices and asked for several copies to be made, thinking M.I.A. could then mail them to prospective labels.

Someone pressed play instead of record. Frischmann’s manager rang her phone seconds into the opening crush of Galang – a full-blown party monster, and now the anchor of Arular – demanding to know who the singer was. A record deal with London’s XL Recordings followed in short order.

XL paired M.I.A. with a cast of well-skilled producers (Richard X, Steve Mackey, Switch) to make Arular, honing her 505 ideas into diamond-tipped club killers. She laboured to make each song – and the processes that created them – unique. “Everything is made up on the spot,” she says. “I can’t repeat anything – half the time because I don’t remember what I did, half the time because I get bored. My attention span is quite bad. ”

M.I.A. shrugs off suggestions of evil intent in her songwriting, describing the genesis of some of her most discussed lyrics – it’s the bit about blindfolded ransom – from Arular’s Amazon:

Painted nails, sunset on the horizon
Palm trees in the wet smells amazing
Blindfolded under homemade lanterns
Somewhere in the Amazon, they’re holding me ransom
Hello, this is M.I.A. Could you please come get me?

“I was into fingernail art for a second,” she says, rocking sideways in a swivel chair. “I went and shot loads of photos in nail shops around the world. One of them has a sunset with a couple kissing on a palm tree. It’s really elaborate. Beautiful. So I looked at that, and Amazon just kind of happened straight away.” This is M.I.A.’s last in a long line of interviews. She has been in Toronto for close to 24 hours, but has yet to find a second’s peace to call her relatives living in the city. She lifts a phone and dials. “It’s me,” she laughs into the receiver. “I’m here!”

Arular is out March 15 on XL/Beggars Banquet.

Matthew McKinnon writes about the arts for CBC.ca.