M.I.A. Global warrior
M.I.A. travels the world to bring you her new album.
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M.I.A.'s staggering 2005 debut album, Arular
It was art, though, that became her first love. She studied at Central St. Martin's College and became a respected graphic designer and documentary filmmaker before she started tinkering around with a Roland 505 beat-making machine.
Autumn sees the release of Arular's follow-up, Kala. Named after her mother, the album is a tribute to her in many different ways – because she came up with some of the initial musical ideas when they were watching cheesy Tamil soaps together in London, but mostly because the subtext of the record is about being female.
Kala is even more of a hotch-potch than Arular but differs because the tracks are mostly built on sounds she's been collecting this past year from around the globe, particularly India. Where Arular was synthetic, Kala is organic. It's a distinctly M.I.A. record, but she's worked again with a series of producers, including Switch, Diplo, Baltimore's DJ Blaqstarr, and even high priest of the modern beat, Timbaland, who she did one song with.
During this interview, M.I.A. plays track after track from the new album. Initial impression: superb.
HUCK Tell us about the producers you worked with for Kala.
M.I.A.: I felt like I could A&R myself with this album and that I knew more about beatology than most people. By the time I got off my tour I felt really arrogant. I was like, 'I'm gonna make this track because there are things I'm gonna find on this planet that no one has ever heard before!' It was true to an extent, because I was getting my influences from so many different places – places off the map that I'd seen first hand – and I wanted to dig more and more into their culture. When I was on tour, people were saying, 'You should go back to Brazil and do another track like 'Bucky',' or, 'You should go back to the grime scene and do more stuff there'. But I was like, 'No, I'm just gonna get a whole new set of rules and sounds'. I took Switch on as my technician-type person, although he was definitely over-qualified because he's an amazing producer. That wasn't exactly his role – I just didn't know what to call it. What I wanted to do was make a deal with him where I was like, 'I want to take you around the world and introduce you to things that have been a part of my life, and all you have to do is be there and technically document it'. If I wake up at four in the morning in the jungle and hear something amazing out the window I wanted him to be there to do something about it. I went to India on my own first – well, my brother was with me – and recorded drums and did all the prep work for 'Bird Flu' [the first song from the LP to get released] and then I met Switch in Trinidad and he came out on the second trip.
Were you only recording drums?
No, no – strings too, anything. I wanted to get real traditional musicians to be a part of the record. With Arular, I think I proved that I could sing over anything. The question that people were asking me, and I was asking myself, was whether I was actually musical. I wanted to work with people in India who had come out of the womb knowing how to play strings and drums that are 2,000 years old and in ways that are passed down through countless generations. They look at me in really weird light – like I bastardise music – but to go to them for help was really cool. I went to see what I could learn.
Your first record did well in the UK, but it seems like it took off better in America. Were you surprised that the UK struggled with it?
I think I understand it better now. At the time I said the UK might find it hard because there weren't many clubs playing that kind of music. Everything was really segregated – you had grime clubs, you had this, you had that – but you couldn't find a common place where you could hear anything from baile funk to Baltimore club to hip hop. Now you can. That's what's going on.
So the Americans were more open-minded?
Different things applied. In America, politically, it was the right time to say the things I said and do the things I did. I met Tim Robbins, the actor, who's very political, and when he spoke to me I kinda realised what it meant to people like that and what it stood for. I think in America, people wanted somebody other to come along and spout some shit. In England, it wasn't about that – from a musical point of view it seemed like people here weren't ready at the time. It was too weird. But it's different now – you can go to places and hear loads of people doing music like me.
The record seemed quintessentially London – a perfect condensation and product of the cross-cultural sounds you can hear in the city daily. You must have imagined that people would have found it natural, not weird.
That was my point and it's still my point: this is what we can do over America. But people were so busy making fake R&B and fake hip hop. It was bullshit. The only thing we can do is the multi-cultural stuff, and it's an amazing time to do it, and it's a sensitive time to do it – and what you appreciate in people like The Clash back then is exactly stuff like that: that was what was punk. I'm not saying I'm punk and I'm not saying I'm as good as The Clash, but it's a clash of cultures that made a band like The Clash happen. If you don't celebrate that, and that's what London has got to give the world, then things get pretty shit. There's no point in us walking around with loads of bling. We look stupid.
Put all this in the context of your new record. Will it be different because you've been living in the States?
It's got nothing to do with the States – nothing at all. I had these thoughts straight away – right after I finished touring – and I started thinking that I'd make this album about everywhere else: everywhere outside America. Everyone was like, 'Yeah, yeah, Timbaland, Timbaland, Timbaland,' and I kinda waited around for him for a bit, but I couldn't get in, so I was like, 'You can come and meet me in Africa, but I don't think they've got a helicopter pad or a mansion [laughs]'.
This album is named after your mum, Kala; Arular was after your dad. What should we read into that?
Well, the first album, lyrically, was about big ideas – politics, my dad's thing. This one is more about the minutia – being at home and thinking the little things around you are more important. You know what I mean? You can have grand ideas and want to be the leader of the planet or be a revolutionary, but it's also very, very important to pay attention to the little woman at home with the three children on her own trying to keep it together, especially if she's married to someone like my dad who was never there. That situation – being a single parent with three kids in a council flat – everyone can identify with. It's just about trying to be a good human being. So, content-wise, the record's not very political – it kind of goes everywhere.
So no grand concept for the record?
I started off thinking that it might, but everything was changing so quickly. One moment I was sitting with Timbaland and hanging out in Beverly Hills with someone else's credit card to go on a shopping spree with, and then I was in India sleeping on the floor with cockroaches. I was trying to make sense of everything – how my friends relate to me now and things like that. I think probably I was getting more mature and trying to find a balance. It hit me how my art and how I live had become so compartmentalised. My friends come from so many different places and, before I started making music, my life was so bitty and all over the world. Then everyone knew how to check up what I was doing all the time [laughs], and it was hard to make everyone feel a part of what I was doing. It's really hard to explain, except to say that I had to find a balance and keep everything oiled and everyone in the same context. And I had to do that without a house and on tour the whole time...
The cliché about your first record was that it was about identity – and how you were searching for who you were...
...and then I became all those people! It's fucked. I shot myself in the foot. I became the person all those people thought I was. I was the thing people said I was, but they narrowed it down to such a specific thing, like, 'Oh, she's just such a wanderer of the planet'. And that's exactly what I've been doing for the last two years [laughs]. And all I want is the same bathroom and the same toothbrush, but I don't – I have a different toothbrush every week, and it's not because I've got a bit more money now [laughs].
Any contact with your dad recently?
He contacted me to tell me he wasn't happy about me calling the record after my mum.
Didn't he do the same thing when he found out you were calling your debut after him?
Yeah [laughs]. And now he's like, 'It was great you named it after me, but don't name it after her’. But I want to include her and I think that's one of the values that's fast disappearing in the West, and it's getting worse.
Have you thought about what you want this record to do – for you, and for other people?
To me, it was really important to have opinions and be a girl in music who was as good as the boys. I want to be able to say that here's a Timbaland track and here's mine and it involved twenty Indian musicians and real experience. This record is my life and people haven't made a record like that for a long time. It's not a studio record – I lived it for a year.
Kala
This story originally appeared in Huck #006.
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M.I.A. (text) by Phil Hebblethwaite is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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