M.I.A.’s New Book Documents Her Greatest Work of Art: Herself

by Cedar Pasori (@cpasori), Complex Art + Design, New York, October 24, 2012

When I first met M.I.A., it was at her birthday party in Los Angeles in the summer of 2011. By birthday party, I mean a gathering in the back room of a club that her younger brother arranged a few hours before. In attendance were his girlfriend, my two best friends, and six of M.I.A.’s friends, mostly filmmakers and creative types, including the director of her “Born Free” and “Bad Girls” videos, Romain Gavras. It was a school night, so I had to decide whether going to Paul and André’s in Hollywood would be worth the next day’s potential hangover in my Postmodernism class.

It was definitely worth it.

Though she is best known for her electro-dance songs, Mathangi Maya Arulpragasm is really the ultimate 21st century artist—arguably one of the first pop stars of the digital age. Her new book, M.I.A., published by Rizzoli, puts Maya in a new light by examining her roots as a fine artist. The book contains original drawings, collages, photographs, and digital artwork, with intermittent textual commentary, detailing the political and artistic evolution that led her to pursue music as a more publicly accessible, aggressive medium.

M.I.A. has discussed her childhood repeatedly in interviews, having escaped the civil war and Tamil rebellion in Sri Lanka with her mother, sister, and brother. These experiences also inform her music and her videos, but they haven’t been fully put into context until the arrival of M.I.A., which is both a book about her art and about her artistic persona—arguably her greatest creation.

Since her first forays into fine art, which included filmmaking, screenwriting, photography, printmaking, and graphic design, Maya has challenged what it means to be a creative individual in a globalized society, where social media and file-sharing technology allow information to flow freely across national borders, defying governmental attempts to stop it. Her work across mediums uses storytelling, much of it personal, to talk about injustices that often go undocumented and unsolved around the world (or as she calls it, World Town).

M.I.A.’s work speaks for the many people whose lives and stories are “missing in action,” which is partly the source of her pseudonym, M.I.A. It’s also a pun on Acton, the West London neighborhood where she was living when she started making music in 2001. For a time she considered herself “Missing In Acton,” before finding her voice and vision.

The book’s foreword, written by her college friend, Steve Loveridge, details her dissatisfaction as a student at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. “Students at the art school were exploring apathy, dressing up in some pigeon outfit, or running around conceptualizing,” she writes in the Introduction, and thus “missing the whole point of art representing society.”

Maya was never one to wear a “pigeon outfit.” While the other film students dressed in black and dreamt of getting their art films shown in galleries, she was in skintight pink jeans and stilettos making work that was, according to Loveridge, “always influenced by rap and hip-hop, which set it apart from everyone else’s.” Her time in school showed her everything she didn’t aspire to be, and her frustration with uninspiring lectures made her eager to prove that she could do more with less.

Maya’s resourcefulness wasn’t just a means to get by in school, it allowed her to form the basis of her aesthetic—which included teaching herself Photoshop, stealing clothes, and befriending artists like Justine Frischmann, the lead singer of Elastica, who encouraged her creativity and introduced her to the West London scene of British indie musicians. She was also generous. Loveridge writes, “When I ran out of food, I asked her to steal me some. She came back with a bottle of Champagne and a tin of rice pudding.” After she graduated, she photographed and art directed album artwork for Elastica and wrote a screenplay called Gratis about youth offenders based on her brother’s time in jail—he was in a correctional institute for eighteen months while Maya was in college. She took the script to Los Angeles, to no avail, and waited outside Channel 4 in London until she could get the attention of a features director to read her script. “She waited outside the building for hours, trying to bump into someone who could get her in. She took Gratis to a features director, and he stole the whole idea and lifted scenes directly from it,” Loveridge writes.

The combination of Elastica breaking up before she could finish her documentary with them and frustrations with her script left Maya momentarily disillusioned. “She turned away from what fashion and art was doing in West London and started to make completely different work about her childhood and Sri Lanka,” Loveridge writes. This turning point was painful but important; it made her reconnect with her roots after becoming immersed in the frivolous West London art scene. It made her isolate herself from the crooked London media, which she saw repeatedly privilege those less talented than her.

She had been telling the stories of others—Indians in London, Elastica, and her brother—and it was time for her to turn inward. After fleeing Sri Lanka as a child, she disconnected from her father’s Tamil rebel cause, but as an adult trying to figure out her artistic identity, it became imperative that she return to it. “I decided to go back to Sri Lanka for the first time in a long time,” she writes, “because up until that point, I was so in denial I didn’t want to deal with anything to do with that country.” Her creative vision became clearer once she started examining her refugee past—making art with guns, grenades, and bloodshed while realizing she could spark a bigger conversation by confronting violence musically.

But back to the birthday party.

I stuck close to my friends, not wanting to expose the depth of my admiration. It became pretty obvious that M.I.A. was the coolest person in the Western hemisphere, with newly bleached blonde hair, a relaxed British accent, and a sharp smile. But she also seemed approachable. I went up to wish her a happy birthday, and she offered me a cigarette. I obliged, despite having never smoked before, and soon felt extremely lightheaded. To this day, I have never smoked another. I imagined she would be difficult to talk to, maybe argumentative or something, but she had a soft, welcoming demeanor and was OK with small talk. She said how nice her skin and nails were when she was pregnant, and I admitted to being a nervous, nail-biting college student. Her baby and fiancé weren’t around, but she seemed happy and at peace in the company of her friends.

In my limited experience, meeting someone who you admire (and have idealized into some sort of superhuman) is a deeply unfulfilling experience. At the time I was just a kid who spent my time aimlessly driving around Los Angeles, blogging, and going to shows. In fact, I only met her brother because he was hiring me to make a website. Neither he, nor his sister, knew that two years before, I had been an intern at Universal Music Group, who stumbled upon 30 posters of the Arular album cover and tiled them on my apartment wall like works of art. I had discovered “Galang” through an iTunes “free download of the week” in 2005 and instantly connected with it on a visual level.

At the time, I didn’t think about the violence she was talking about in songs like “Sunshowers” or “Fire, Fire,” but I loved what I imagined in pop lyrics juxtaposing “razor blades” and “purple haze.” Swiping the posters at UMG felt like collecting art more than it did an album cover, but over time, and through the book, I’ve learned that her artwork and music are intrinsic to one another. Little did I know that the Arular print started in her bedroom as well, and as she writes in M.I.A., “Arular went from jungle to street to wall…It went from my bedroom to whoever was looking.”

Before Arular, M.I.A. did an unofficial release of a mixtape titled Piracy Funds Terrorism Volume 1, produced by Diplo, which mashed up her vocals with uncleared samples from Jay-Z, Salt-n-Pepa, Missy Elliott, Ciara, and LL Cool J. Since she couldn’t legally sell the record, 2000 were distributed hand to hand. It became a document of her influences, a precursor to Arular, and the foundation for the way her music would permeate and be reacted to, working in the same way her art did—from the street to whoever would listen. It was both a political statement against piracy and terrorism and a hip-hop influenced pop mixtape that spread like wildfire on the Internet. Songs like “Galang” and “Sunshowers” went from the mixtape to Arular to dancefloors and fashion runways. They went viral before people were really using the term “viral,” and suddenly lyrics like “It’s a bomb yo/So run yo/Put away your stupid gun yo” were being celebrated and danced to.

On all her albums, from Arular to Kala, /\/\ /\ Y /\, and the VickiLeekx mixtape—a twist on Julian Assange’s subversive WikiLeaks project—Maya has been hands on with her album art, knowing that it’s an essential part of the total experience. I learned this while I was an intern at Interscope Records’ creative department in the summer of 2010. We never planned or produced her photo shoots or art direction, we’d just receive the final product and the occasional invoice for people she would hire herself. It wasn’t unusual to have multiple photo shoots for other artists as we figured out what would work best for the album and single covers. It was unspoken but obvious why M.I.A. controlled the visual presentation of her music—she knew it was an integral part of her artistic statement.

M.I.A. the book reveals the ways Maya used her art and music to elevate one another. Over time, she had to factor in the role of technology in both the world and her practice, writing that Kala reflected digital changes in the third world, and /\/\ /\ Y /\ “was about the Internet itself becoming your medium.” The aesthetic of her later work, which was already spray-painted in Arular and pixellated in Kala, eventually became digitally corrupted and distorted, incorporating screenshots from applications like YouTube, iTunes, and iChat.

“Everything I did as an artist or everything everyone does an artist comes down to these two things: people or money,” Maya writes in the Kala chapter. “And as 2006 turned into 2007 then 2008, this concept became bigger and bigger, finally crashing with the financial crash and ‘Paper Planes’ making radio.”

“Paper Planes,” also produced by Diplo, was the single that catapulted her into the mainstream beyond music. It became the title track of the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack, and it was used in the trailer for stoner comedy Pineapple Express. For his 2008 Paper Trail album, T.I. sampled the line, “No one on the corner has swagga like us,” for a song named “Swagga Like Us,” produced by Kanye West and featuring ‘Ye, Jay-Z, and Lil Wayne.

A very pregnant M.I.A. sang the hook live at the Grammy Awards on February 8, 2009— which also happened to be her baby’s due date. Five years after Piracy Funds Terrorism came out, and two years after releasing “Paper Planes,” there she was on worldwide television singing alongside four of the biggest names in music, who were all rocking to an anthem she originated about impossible swag. Jay-Z went from an uncleared sample on her first mixtape to a fellow artist, and the song went from being a story about refugee struggle to an unforgettable moment in hip-hop.

Days after her birthday party, a few of us met at the Shangri La in Santa Monica for drinks. She was going back to London the next day. The conversation went from Britney Spears and Kreayshawn to stories of her mother, a commissioned seamstress for the British Royal Family. But when Maya decided to speak, in her mellow yet matter-of-fact tone, everyone stopped talking, and no one would dream of interrupting her. Between her brother’s admiring gaze and the wide eyes of her friends, it was clear that I wasn’t the only one who was a little bit starstruck.

I didn’t see her again after those two days, so I didn’t really get the chance to find out if there is much of a distinction between M.I.A., the artist, and Mathangi Maya Arulpragasm, the person. What I do know is that I started to understand her as a total artist, and not just a musician. Reading this book only confirms that. Constructing M.I.A. from her early days in college to her trips to Sri Lanka and all around World Town has been an art form in itself.

When I went to Postmodernism class the next day, the coursework seemed pretty irrelevant compared to the real-life meeting I had the night before. No amount of Barthes or Foucault could match the stories about her mother sewing the blue sash for Prince William’s wedding, or her plans to make videos in Africa. I realized I had already met the quintessential Postmodernist. The best of art exposes both the artist and the viewer, and there is no one doing it better than Maya.

All images © MIA by MIA, Rizzoli New York, 2012

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Two Views: Inward and Outward

by Jon Caramanica, The New York Times, November 27, 2012

A couple of years ago M.I.A. and Pharrell Williams got into a tiff.

In M.I.A.’s telling, Mr. Williams, the hip-hop producer, fashion designer and bon vivant, told her she needed to spend more energy cultivating friends and less time antagonizing people. You get more flies with honey, he told her. Getting flies isn’t the point, she insisted.

This took place, naturally, at the Met Ball, the annual gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that is the fief of Anna Wintour and has become the homecoming party of new society. That just goes to show that despite their wildly different approaches, M.I.A. and Mr. Williams often end up at the same places. Both have been signed to the same major record label, both have leapfrogged from musician to polyvalent brand, and both have new books from Rizzoli — catalogues raisonnés, more or less — that document this evolution.

The books are beautiful and indulgent, more a record of fame than an analysis of it — none of Jay-Z’s “Decoded”-style exegesis here. You’ll learn a little about what motivates M.I.A., and almost nothing of why Mr. Williams loves the sounds he does. Both M.I.A. and Mr. Williams are now finding success in multiple arenas, and these books, while static, exist to capture it all, flatteringly.

But that said, they couldn’t be more different. Mr. Williams’s, “Pharrell: Places and Spaces I’ve Been,” is the product of open embrace, capturing someone moving ever forward, guided by curiosity and fame. “I am only as fast as the wind that’s blown into my sails,” he wr patites.

By contrast, M.I.A.’s self-titled book is a document of isolation and resistance, clearly the product of one person following an idiosyncratic path.  Of her first album, “Arular,” she writes, “It went from my bedroom to whoever was looking.”

This contrast can be partly traced to their beginnings in music: Mr. Williams started his career as one-half of the production duo the Neptunes, who in the early 2000s were the most desired collaborators in hip-hop, and as part of the band N.E.R.D. Though he would later have some success as a solo artist, he began by working with others.

M.I.A.’s career has always had more of a DIY feel, taking the materials and technologies at hand, creating something fast and dirty, then moving on to the next thing. Her book contains barely any text: M.I.A. has some words at the beginning of the work’s sections, which coincide with each of her albums. Steve Loveridge, a longtime collaborator who is making a documentary about her, has more to say about her in his opening essay than she does throughout.

But that’s presuming that words are her best medium, which they very much aren’t. The most vivid parts of this book have to do with image and politics. She has a keen grasp of iconography, a phenomenal color sense and a provocateur’s instinct for hot buttons.

Some of the most moving works here are stencils of Tamil fighters. M.I.A. made them from photographs taken of videotapes that were used by Tamil rebels to report on fighters who had died in the Sri Lankan civil war. (M.I.A. is of Tamil heritage.) Elsewhere she’s playful with context, as in the graphic with a Chanel logo turned on its side, the opposing Cs used as the U and N in United Nations.

During the past decade she’s gone from handmade music and art to thinking harder about technology and its casualties. “Kala,” her second album, was about “the digitizing of third-world taste and the cheap, gritty production of third-world goods for first-world consumption,” she writes. Sometimes, but not often, she acknowledges her own privileged ability to move through multiple worlds, borrowing from and participating in other cultures; it’s refreshing to hear, even briefly, about the price of these cultural exchanges.

In a couple of places here M.I.A. talks about her shortcomings in self-merchandising. Even with such a facile gift for branding, she is almost comically bad at selling things. Maybe that’s what Mr. Williams should have been haranguing her about at the Met.

Mr. Williams’s art is capitalist collaboration. There are sections of his book devoted to his design team-ups with Louis Vuitton and Moncler, and some of the sharpest layouts are of the stores that sell his Billionaire Boys Club and Ice Cream clothing lines — especially one in Hong Kong where images of the lunar surface cover some of the floor.

Mr. Williams gives good picture, and isn’t shy about including several photos of himself from editorial fashion shoots. But even still, this book doesn’t feel vain. That’s because of the interviews Mr. Williams conducts with his peers and heroes, often the same people. They’re loose and haphazard and wide-ranging and occasionally hit pay dirt — Jay-Z talking about speaking with the Notorious B.I.G. the night he was killed, or Mr. Williams asking Zaha Hadid if she will collaborate with him on designing affordable prefab houses.

Throughout is the sense of Mr. Williams as student. He speaks with Buzz Aldrin about the Drake equation, which is used to estimate the number of detectable extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy, and then turns and tries to get Kanye West to unpack his perfectionism.

It doesn’t all stick, but Mr. Williams displays bravura range, even if he comes off as someone who sold a book idea just for the chance to get some of his well-placed friends and colleagues in a room to talk; it’s like his own personal Interview magazine.

The notable exception is a conversation with Chad Hugo and Sheldon Haley, Mr. Williams’s band mates in N.E.R.D. (Mr. Hugo is also the other half of the Neptunes), who are, bizarrely, interviewed by Mr. Williams’s manager. But maybe that’s because they represent Mr. Williams’s past, and he faces only forward.