Earlier this month, M.I.A. addressed the possibility of leaking her forthcoming album. “I would love to leak it,” the London-based artist also known as Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam said in a Periscope response to fan questions. “I wake up every day and think I’m gonna leak it.” She said she ultimately sides against it—at least for now, knowing her history—but both the medium and the message were classic M.I.A.: embracing new means of communication while verbally sparring with the powers-that-be.
“If I carry on making music, then I would [leak it], but I also want to find an album where I can actually make my label work for me,” she continued. “Maybe I can’t lie enough, which is why I can’t be making a mainstream record. But my songs on this album are pretty non-offensive, and if they get offended by this, then I give up and I’m gonna go back to saying whatever the fuck I want wherever I want to, even on Periscope. I can put a beat on every day and just chat over it.”
Days earlier, M.I.A. tweeted that she was giving her American label, Interscope, her “last LP.” She added that it would be up to the label whether to release the album, given that she doesn’t have a visa allowing her to promote it in the United States. More recently, in a separate Periscope chat, M.I.A. said that she plans to release the album in July.
Whenever and however the follow-up to 2013’s Matangiarrives, it will be difficult for M.I.A. to find a new way of provoking the record industry and beyond. She's not only consistently released her music outside of traditional channels, she's challenged the pop-star hierarchy while finding her own place in it. Sometimes the results have been near-universally celebrated (her New Year’s Eve 2010 surprise free-mixtape, Vicki Leekx). Sometimes they have been personally and professionally costly (see: M.I.A.'s unique place in Super Bowl history). Whether triumph or trainwreck, M.I.A.’s challenges to the music business and the broader media infrastructure that surrounds it have usually been must-watch events, so we figured it was time to roll back the tapes all the way to the beginning.
2004
Summer 2004: M.I.A. releases “Sunshowers,” the second single from her then-upcoming debut album, Arular, following her viral breakout “Galang.” In a pre-YouTube era when music videos are harder to see, MTV bans the Rajesh Touchriver-directed “Sunshowers” clip. The ban is reportedly because M.I.A. refused to remove the lyrics “You wanna go? You wanna winna war? Like PLO, I don’t surrendo.” It’s an early premonition of how M.I.A.’s radical music and politics would spur media controversy.
Late 2004: M.I.A. and Diplo’s unofficial Piracy Funds Terrorism mixtape makes the rounds for free at shows and online. It contains many of the vocals from the long-delayed Arular. So one of the public’s first big impressions of M.I.A. came through, essentially, a self-leak.
2005
Early 2005: An M.I.A. discussion thread on the online forum I Love Music veers from anticipation of Arular to political debate. As Robert Christgau later recounts in a big Village Voice piece on her politics, steering the discussion were “two Sri Lankans exiled by ethnic conflict.”
Now, some crucial backstory: In a 25-year civil war that ended only in 2009, Sri Lanka’s minority Tamil community fought to create an independent state. By one count, as many as 100,000 people died. M.I.A.’s father Arul Pragasam—Arular’s namesake—was active in the Tamil cause, and M.I.A. grew up in Sri Lanka’s predominantly Tamil northern region. Her father co-founded a group that was later absorbed into the so-called Tamil Tigers, a rebel group that pioneered suicide bombing. M.I.A. tells The Guardian her father was never a member of the Tigers: “People write it because it's easy.”
All the while, M.I.A. plays with the perception of this, using tiger imagery in the artwork for “Galang,” splashing tanks and guns on the cover of Arular, and declaring on “Pull Up the People,” “I’ve got the bombs to make you blow.” The way M.I.A.’s politics, biography, and art all mix together will become a crucial frame for her ongoing interactions with the media. And she’ll be forced to deny accusations of supporting terrorism again and again.
2007
August 2007: M.I.A. opens up an interview by reiterating that occasional collaborator Diplo “didn’t make” Arular. She says, “I find it 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.” The music press, if it wasn’t already, is on notice.
2008
June 2008: M.I.A. says at least three times at Bonnaroo that it’s her last show. “And I’m glad I’m spending it with all my hippies.”
2009
May 2009: Sri Lanka’s civil war officially ends. M.I.A. accuses the BBC of understating the number of people killed in the conflict. She tweets, “THE WAR IN SRI LANKA IS NOT AGAINST THE TIGERS, IT’S AGAINST THE TAMIL PEOPLE!” M.I.A. also criticizes clothing companies that manufacture in Sri Lanka.
PPL sayin how can we help? maybe we start here http://bit.ly/14Glp5
— M.I.A (@MIAuniverse) May 22, 2009
2010
April 2010: M.I.A. disses Lady Gaga. “People say we’re similar, that we both mix all these things in the pot and spit them out differently, but she spits it out exactly the same,” she tells the NME. “None of her music’s reflective of how weird she wants to be or thinks she is. She models herself on Grace Jones and Madonna, but the music sounds like 20-year-old Ibiza disco, you know? She’s not progressive, but she’s a good mimic. She sounds more like me than I fucking do!”
April 2010: M.I.A. posts the video for her new song “Born Free.” Directed by Romain Gavras, it’s extremely graphic and violent, and is initially taken down by YouTube.
May 2010: M.I.A. disses the Biebs. She jokes to the NME, referring to the “Born Free” video, “I find the new Justin Bieber video more violent and more of an assault to my eyes and senses than what I've made.”
May-June 2010: Who could forget “Trufflegate”? The New York Times Magazine profiles M.I.A. in an extensive cover story. The writer Lynn Hirschberg, who in a 1992 Vanity Fair profile alleged Courtney Love shot heroin while pregnant, meticulously portrays M.I.A. as a bourgeois phony. The takedowns aremany. The one that will be most remembered, though, is an anecdote that involves M.I.A. eating—the horror!—a truffle-flavored French fry. M.I.A. strikes back by tweeting Hirschberg’s phone number. Hirschberg tells The New York Observer the incident is “infuriating and not surprising,” plus “fairly unethical.” M.I.A. then posts audio recordings from her Times interview on the blog of her record label N.E.E.T., appearing to show Hirschberg ordering the fries and misquoting M.I.A. about her attempts to raise awareness of the Sri Lankan civil war. She also posts a new song, inevitably called “Haters.” Hirschberg, reached again by the Observer, defends her reporting and downplays the importance of the truffle episode. The Times belatedly posts a correction, which address the misquotation but, alas, skimps on the fries.
NEWS IS AN OPINION! UNEDITED VERSION OF THE INTERVIEW WILL BE ON neetrecordings THIS MEMORIAL WEEKEND!!! >>>>
— M.I.A (@MIAuniverse) May 27, 2010
December 2010: After covertly teasing new music for months, leaking a video and unfinished music via custom URLs like http://yesthelittlepeoplewillneverwinbuttheycanfuckshitup.com, M.I.A. releases her new mixtape Vicki Leekx for free, by surprise via a dedicated site, just in time for New Year’s Eve. Almost exactly three years before Beyoncé’s stealth release of her self-titled album, this was still an unusual move and came as almost a magnanimous gesture on this festive night. The quality of the music, and a return to dance floor-ready material after only months after her abrasive / \ / \ / \ Y / \ album, didn’t hurt. The title is the beginning of M.I.A.’s relationship with WikiLeaks, the nonprofit known for publishing classified information from anonymous sources.
2012
February 2012: M.I.A. shares the Super Bowl Halftime Show stage with Madonna and Nicki Minaj. According to NBC, 152 million people are watching the big game. The crossover potential is huge. M.I.A.’s verse in Madonna’s then-new song, “Give Me All Your Luvin’,” ends with her saying, “I'mma say this once, yeah, I don't give a shit.” In the video, M.I.A. makes a gun with her fingers while a gunshot sound-effect blares like in her hit “Paper Planes.” But on Super Bowl night, the finger M.I.A. raises instead is her middle one. The NFL, NBC, and a member of M.I.A.’s camp all apologize, with the M.I.A. source blaming“a case of adrenaline.” If NBC is fined by the FCC, M.I.A. will reportedly have to pay. Is there more about the Super Bowl, the NFL, and the accompanying commercials that’s “obscene” than M.I.A.’s clumsy gesture? Of course. But whatever message she was trying to convey to the masses, it didn’t break through all the negative publicity this action generated. It’s just a middle finger, after all.
March 2012: M.I.A. gets into a Twitter spat with TV news personality Anderson Cooper. She points out that Cooper’s blog once inaccurately called her a “Lady Tamil Tiger” and suggested she supported terrorism. Cooper responds: “You are mistaken. I never called you a terrorist. I don’t even know who you are other than the lady who sang at Super Bowl. By the way, I defended your finger pointing at the Super Bowl, so check your facts." More kindly, he adds: “I can understand your frustration if someone wrote untrue things about you. The brutal war in SL has not gotten enough coverage in the US.”
April 2012: M.I.A.’s music appears on the first episode of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s TV show. WikiLeaks had drawn controversy in November 2010 when it published U.S. State department diplomatic “cables.” Around that time, Assange was also wanted for questioning over sexual assault allegations in Sweden. When the show, “The World Tomorrow,” airs, on Russian TV, Assange is under house arrest in London. “M.I.A. is the Julian Assange of pop music,” WikiLeaks tweets.
August 2012: M.I.A. tweets that she will be releasing her fourth album, Matangi, in December 2012. Among other artistic endeavors, she also mentions her planned documentary. “No one in the industry collected blows in the last 3 years as much as me,” she writes. “[Matangi] is a fuck you to them and a thank you to you.” The producers on the album, she says, are “ones that don’t act like fame whore coloniser.”
2013
January 2013: M.I.A. says Interscope has delayed Matangi, for being “too positive,” She tells Australian website Gold Coast: “They’re like, ‘You need to darken it up a bit.’ It’s like, ‘We just built you up as the public enemy no. 1, and now you’re coming out with all this positive stuff.”
February 2013: M.I.A. tweets that the Grammys ripped her off. She also says she will be “KEEPING A STEAL LOG” on Tumblr. “MIA VS THE SYSTEM,” she writes alongside an image juxtaposing a previous M.I.A. concert-stage backdrop with the one that stood behind Rihanna, Bruno Mars, Sting, and Damian and Ziggy Marley during the 2013 Grammys’ Bob Marley tribute. “My set was based on Tamil Hindu temple,” she writes. “Not Bob Marley." She adds, "If u wanna see the real thing or get it first, come to a M.I.A. show!”
June 2013: M.I.A. posts a collage of quotes from critics calling / \ / \ / \ Y / \’s “The Message” politically naïve. “Who said this three years ago?” she writes on Tumblr, shortly after the Edward Snowden leaks.
July 2013: M.I.A. retweets several people pointing to a teaser of the documentary about her, directed by Steve Loveridge. Along with archival footage of M.I.A. and Diplo, the teaser features interviews with Kanye West, Spike Jonze, XL’s Richard Russell, and Interscope’s Jimmy Iovine. But then the teaser is taken down despite being uploaded by Loveridge, who says Interscope and Roc Nation have put the project on hold. Loveridge also posts an email exchange in which a Roc Nation rep appears to say that uploading the teaser “screws with everything we've been working on setting up Matangi.” Loveridge’s colorful reply? “I really couldn’t give a flying fuck. Count me out. Would rather die than work on this... nothing personal :)”
im gonna need @kickstarter and my fans to help make this exsist , ive been black listed through normal channels !!!!!!!
— M.I.A (@MIAuniverse) July 7, 2013
August 2013: M.I.A. threatens to leakMatangi if Interscope doesn’t release it soon. A day later, the album gets a November release date.
If interscope takes longer i can always leak this next week and make a new one by the time they are ready.
— M.I.A (@MIAuniverse) August 9, 2013
September 2013: It emerges that for 18 months, the NFL has secretly been demanding $1.5 million from M.I.A. over the Super Bowl middle finger. In legal filings, the NFL has called the bird an “offensive gesture” that was in “in flagrant disregard for the values that form the cornerstone of the NFL brand and the Super Bowl.” M.I.A.’s lawyer tells The Hollywood Reporter, “We encourage people to submit their examples of how the actions of the NFL, its stars, coaches, advertisers, broadcasters, team doctors and owners have damaged or destroyed any vestiges of any reputation for wholesomeness ever enjoyed by the NFL.”
Later, M.I.A. calls the NFL’s claims against her “completely ridiculous.” In a statement, she says, “It’s a massive waste of time, a massive waste of money, it’s a massive display of powerful corporation dick-shaking.”
November 2013: Assange opens M.I.A.’s New York show via Skype. “We have a EPIC guest speaker,” she writes. M.I.A. previously told BBC News that he helped her with Matangi's lyrical ideas, as well. For controversial online innovators, it seems, two is company.
December 2013: M.I.A. tweets that she’s leaving Roc Nation. Given her apparent rift with Roc Nation over that M.I.A. documentary (“blacklisted,” remember?), this is a declaration of independence—or a middle finger raised, whichever you prefer.
2014
March 2014: The NFL demands $16.6 million from M.I.A. over her Super Bowl bird-flipping. She tweets, “@madonna ummm ..... can i borrow 16 million ?”
June 2014: M.I.A. tweets that the BBC won’t broadcast her Glastonbury set because the shirts worn by her dancers and band members are, she writes, “too political.” The BBC responds that M.I.A.’s set was in fact broadcast live.
2015
May 2015: M.I.A. tweets that she can’t release a planned video due to charges of “cultural appropriation.” She writes, “I’ve been told I can’t put out a video because it’s shot in Africa.”
2016
January 2016: M.I.A. shares what she claims is a letter from the Paris Saint-Germain F.C. soccer team demanding that she take down the video for her song “Borders” and pay compensation. She travels with refugees in the self-directed clip, and in one scene, she wears the PSG jersey, with the logo of PSG sponsor Fly Emirates replaced by the words “Fly Pirates.”
M.I.A. says the reference to a PSG jersey in the “Borders” video has “gone over their head.” She tells Democracy Now!: “Wearing football tops has been the uniform, or wearing tracksuits in Palestine, you know, throwing stones has been the uniform of the—I guess, the underprivileged people of the world, because that is the cheapest thing we can find. It’s bootleg stuff. We bootleg the biggest brands.”
February 2016: M.I.A. posts a new song taking on the NFL. “Boom ADD,” an extended version of Matangi’s “Boom Skit,” begins with what sounds like a message from her lawyer explaining the NFL’s lawsuit against her. “They’re suing you for damaging their fantastic reputation by flipping the bird,” the voice can be heard saying, and the understatement is delicious.
March 2016: M.I.A. posts two new songs on SoundCloud, including “MIA OLA,” which features a sample from The Lion King. She tweets: “pirates! throw that shit on dj sites WORLDWIDE no borders - b 4 Disney shut it down!” A couple of months later, she says on Periscope that “she had to take the Disney thing off. I put ‘Galang’ on it instead. I sampled myself. I wanted to say, ‘Whatever, I can’t get Lion King, I'm gonna use my own song!’ That way no one can stop it.”
April 2016: M.I.A. answers a question about Beyoncé’s Super Bowl halftime show performance: "It’s interesting that in America the problem you’re allowed to talk about is Black Lives Matter,” she tells London's Evening Standard magazine. “It’s not a new thing to me—it’s what Lauryn Hill was saying in the 1990s, or Public Enemy in the 1980s. Is Beyoncé or Kendrick Lamar going to say Muslim Lives Matter? Or Syrian Lives Matter? Or this kid in Pakistan matters? That’s a more interesting question.”
May 2016: M.I.A. tweets that she has handed in her “last” album to her U.S. label. “Can't tour the US without a visa—might have to start writing songs 4 DJ Khaled and Selena Gomez to get heard,” she writes. Several days later, she says on Periscope she’d “love to leak” her album but always ends up reconsidering, partly out of label concerns and partly because the album might be her last. A couple of weeks after that, she tweets, “Everyone has a biographer—it's called NSA.” In her very next tweet, one hour later, she writes, “My LP is a break up LP—with music.” Say it isn’t so. The history collected here, at least, suggests that M.I.A. may not be done with music, just with the music industry’s traditional channels.