Prince.Skeletor
Don’t Be Like He-Man
MIA: 'Half the time people think I'm high, but I'm not.' Photograph: Jason Evans for the Guardian
MIA is having none of it. "I am not a conspiracy theorist," she says.
"Yes, you are," I say.
The great pop contrarian also known as Mathangi Maya Arulpragasam huffs. "What I said about the internet is what's happening now. It's on the front of your own newspaper. It's not a conspiracy theory, is it – unless your paper is supporting a conspiracy theory? Conspiracy theory is too much of a small pond for me to swim in." I feel suitably admonished.
It's been three years since MIA released her last studio album, Maya. Its first track was The Message, a 57-second discordant rap suggesting that social media companies were working hand-in-hand with the world's governments to spy on us ("Connected to the Google, connected to the government," she chanted repeatedly). A lot of people accused her of being politically naive. Now, following the Guardian's revelations about the spying capacity of America's NSA and Britain's GCHQ, it looks as if she was stating the obvious. Does she feel vindicated? "I do. I love it." She grins.
But after that third album, MIA decided she had had enough. She was bored with music, so made the gloriously titled mix-tape Vicki Leekx (a play on WikiLeaks) in two days, just to show she could, then quit. She moved to India with her baby son, Ikhyd, and wasn't heard of for ages. Now she's back, post-retirement, with a new album, so she can tell us about her retirement. Hard to get your head around? Welcome to Planet MIA.
We meet in east London, where she now lives. At 38, she still looks like a little girl: beautiful, garish, loud, a handful. She arrives with Ikhyd, now four, a sweet boy with huge brown eyes. The fact that he is here with her is a story in itself. For the past couple of years, MIA has been fighting a custody battle. Until recently, it looked as if she would lose her son to her former fiance, Benjamin Bronfman, unless she agreed to bring up Ikhyd in the US. As she says, tranquillity in her life tends to be transient at best, "the calm before the storm".
MIA prides herself on her normality. Her publicist tells me that she is one of the few stars who will turn up by herself, no fuss, just a regular civilian. But appearances can be deceptive. Sure, we're not far from the council flat where she grew up, but this is a fancy members' club with a pool on the roof and hipsters perched on sun loungers, cocktail in one hand, iPhone in the other. And she fits in perfectly: floral silk shorts, face-dwarfing shades, numerous bracelets, bags of confidence.
Within seconds, Ikhyd is crying. He has been told he can go swimming, but the pool has been divided into lanes for adults. She mops his tears and they strike a deal. Her mini entourage takes him off for a treat, while we're left to chat conspiracies, terrorism, even music, as if she's never been away.
MIA emerged on the music scene in the mid-2000s, the perfect antidote to confection pop. For a start, she wrote much of her own music, an unlikely, often inspired mash of rap, nursery rhymes, bhangra, electronic dance and punk. Music writers created a whole new lexicon to describe her sound, including the fabulous "gangsta shoegaze". But she railed against commercial success, and at the first sniff of a big hit – Paper Planes, which sampled the Clash's Straight To Hell, and made the US and UK top 20 – she recoiled. Yet she couldn't resist making headlines, whether for performing at the 2009 Grammys in a transparent dress when nine months pregnant, or giving the audience the finger at the 2012 Super Bowl. She is so much the perfect anti-pop star that sceptics have suggested her story is too good to be true: that in her own radical way MIA is as much of a brand as Madonna is. And, to an extent, this is true.
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/oct/19/mia-interview-super-bowl-google?CMP=twt_gu
