IN "PULL UP the People," M.I.A. raps "slang tang, that's the M.I.A. thang / I've got the bombs to make you blow / The beats to make you bang."
Which turns out to be both an encapsulation of the London-based singer's style and a source of controversy among some listeners who appreciate M.I.A.'s multicultural mashups (a pastiche of hip-hop, electro, Jamaican dancehall, reggaeton, garage rock, Brazilian baile funk, grime, Bollywood bhangra and video game soundtracks) and her penchant for slang, slogans and nursery rhyme couplets, even as they question the provocative political underpinning of her music, dismissing it as ditsy disco dressed up as revolutionary chic.
The thing is, M.I.A. embodies such contradictions -- culturally, politically and musically -- and it's probably what made her debut album, "Arular," one of the year's most hyped releases. Almost a year before its official March release, M.I.A.'s music was a hot Internet currency through the politically charged singles and videos for "Galang" and "Sunshowers," and New Yorker magazine, compelled by her back story, profiled her months before anybody in America could access the album.
M.I.A.'s father, a Sri Lankan intellectual who had moved to London in 1971 to work as an engineer, helped found the Eelam Revolutionary Organization of Students (EROS) in 1975, just three years before she was born Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam. EROS was one of the first Tamil political organizations -- Tamil Hindus being the ethnic minority in Sinhalese Buddhist-dominated Sri Lanka -- to seek the creation of an independent state (Tamil Eelam), and it evolved into one of several militant groups engaged in a civil war now into its third decade (the most notorious group being the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, better known as Tamil Tigers and regarded as the inventors of suicide bombing as a political tactic, though a disowned one since Sept. 11, 2001).
A.R. Arulpragasam reportedly trained in Lebanon with Palestinian militants before taking his family back to Sri Lanka when M.I.A. was 6 months old. Not surprisingly, he was constantly on the move, and M.I.A. saw her father only sporadically. Still, M.I.A. was surrounded by violence -- a school she was attending was destroyed during a government aerial bombing campaign -- and as the civil war worsened, she, her siblings and mother fled to India, while her father remained in Sri Lanka. After returning briefly to Sri Lanka, the family, without Arulpragasam, resettled in a London public housing project. M.I.A. was 11.
"I came to England with the understanding that he didn't really play a part in my life anymore," M.I.A. says of her father, now a writer. "And that's how I survived and why I've been really independent and getting on with life. I don't really stop to think about what it would be like if I met him again or had conversations with him."
Though she hadn't seen her father since 1990 -- about the time he was trying to mediate a peace process in Sri Lanka -- M.I.A. named her album "Arular," after his name within the Tamil independence movement, and her mother complained it was the only thing he'd ever given her. The title led to some rare communication: After reading about M.I.A. in the Sri Lankan Times, Arulpragasam sent her a note saying, "I'm very proud of you, but you have to change the name of the album. Dad."
She didn't.
"What can you do?" she asks pointedly. "There's many things I'm not pleased about that he 's done, so hey. . . . "
Arriving in London in 1986, M.I.A. knew only four words in English, two of them "Michael Jackson."
"I was really obsessed," she laughs, "but so was the whole nation. There were a lot of little Michael Jacksons walking around Sri Lanka."
She improved her vocabulary listening to the radio and watching television and soon fell under the sway of hip-hop.
