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"FacebookPinterest\n\nIn Los Angeles visiting with M.I.A., the London-born, Sri Lanka-reared, art-school-educated hip-pop supernova. Google&amp;#39;s satellite imagery reveals a house of sturdy proportions up in the city&amp;#39;s privileged canyons, a nice change from her grungy former digs in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn.\n\nI want to see the house, maybe write some smack about how M.I.A. is risking her street cred now that she&amp;#39;s traded the leaks and mice for a touch of posh. But the singer, better known to the eagle-eyed guys at the immigration counter as Mathangi &amp;quot;Maya&amp;quot; Arulpragasam, has another idea. Why don&amp;#39;t we pick up her fianc\u00E9, Ben, and head for Las Vegas, where she&amp;#39;ll get married on the spot? Yeah, why not! I&amp;#39;m game, but Ben talks her down on the phone, telling her they should at least wait for his mom, who&amp;#39;s visiting in a few days. Instead we do two hours of vintage shopping at a massive L.A. thrift emporium with her friend, the British fashion designer Cassette Playa, whose hair sports many pretty colors, her large purple-framed glasses reflecting the world.\n\nThis is life on the M.I.A. Express: improvised to the point of being slightly insane. In a $150,000 appearance for HM and Jimmy Choo in November, Maya stopped after a few songs to lecture Paris Hilton and the rest of the select audience on corporate America&amp;#39;s involvement in war-ravaged Sri Lanka. She&amp;#39;d been planning to wear a costume made &amp;quot;out of loads of blown-up body parts and go as an explosion. But they told me I couldn&amp;#39;t, because I had to wear something from HM or Jimmy Choo.&amp;quot; Um, yes. That&amp;#39;s HM for you. A few months later, in March, she&amp;#39;ll tweet her fans to meet her at a London club and hear her latest tracks in exactly thirty minutes. Impromptu Las Vegas wedding with me and Cassette Playa as witnesses? Bring it on.\n\nM.I.A. is perhaps the preeminent global musical artist of the 2000s, a truly kick-ass singer and New York-Londony fashion icon, not to mention a vocal supporter of Sri Lanka&amp;#39;s embattled Tamil minority, of which she&amp;#39;s a member. Her father was a key player in the Tamil separatist movement, and his links to the Tamil Tigers would later contribute to Maya&amp;#39;s rep as a terrorist sympathizer. She also has a 1-year-old son and a third album on the way. When asked about the new rec\u00ADord, Cassette Playa (real name: Carri Munden) says simply, &amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s sick.&amp;quot;\n\nShopping with Maya is fun. &amp;quot;I like this Sade hat#133;. That doesn&amp;#39;t suit me#133;. My head&amp;#39;s too small.&amp;quot; She&amp;#39;s wearing a vintage Louis Vuitton sweatshirt, black tights, and ankle boots, looking disarmingly hipster-suburban. Her moods vary from slightly pissed off to go-fuck-yourself-already, but today she&amp;#39;s bubbly and engaged, doing a sexy-tired southern-ing\u00E9nue walk. From her song &amp;quot;Hombre&amp;quot;: My hips do the flicks as I walk, yeah. We work our way through reams of &amp;#39;70s and &amp;#39;80s shit that reminds me of my own immigrant past. (My parents and I emigrated from the former Soviet Union in 1979.) Taupe-colored &amp;quot;refugee coats.&amp;quot; EZ Spirit. Focus 2000. A Gitano denim coat. We get on the trendy subject of avoiding meat, and Maya says, &amp;quot;What are you gonna do, you know? We don&amp;#39;t have the luxury to even think about being vegetarians or meat eaters. We&amp;#39;re refugees. We&amp;#39;ve been dealing with normal shit, like how to stay alive.&amp;quot;\n\nI think to myself, The refugee is strong in this one.\n\nShe buys a king&amp;#39;s ransom of thrift for $178.72 but still hasn&amp;#39;t found her perfect wedding dress. &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;ve always wanted to get married in a white suit,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I used to work at a Kodak lab in England, cutting photos after they&amp;#39;d come out of the wash, and in one I saw this couple getting married on a beach in white suits, and their kid was there.&amp;quot;\n\nLike many people in their midthirties, rock stars included, a part of her wants to grow up, soften up. She misses Brooklyn but chose L.A. for her son. &amp;quot;I wanted an environment where I could have a lot of friends and family come and stay. That was the important part for me. And in New York I wouldn&amp;#39;t have been able to afford someplace where I could have, like, all my friends come and crash out and where I could still have a baby.&amp;quot;\n\nOver lunch at India Sweets and Spices in Silver Lake, a Bollywood wedding streams on the giant TV next to a statue of Ganesha. She shows me a video of her son, Ikhyd, a cute curly-haired bruiser of a boy, dancing with his jovial papa, Benjamin Brewer (a.k.a. Benjamin Bronfman), a musician and an heir to the Bronfman beverage fortune. She picks up my digital recorder and starts to rap: I don&amp;#39;t want to live for tomorrow. I push my life today. / I throw this in your face when I see you, because I got something to say. I don&amp;#39;t realize it then, but she&amp;#39;s giving me a preview of &amp;quot;Born Free,&amp;quot; a new song that will generate controversy a few months later, when YouTube restricts access to the hyperviolent nine-minute video, a dystopian parable in which redheaded men and boys are rounded up and ecuted by government thugs. With the recorder&amp;#39;s tiny mike next to her face, her body in motion and the words just pouring out, she seems as happy and natural as I&amp;#39;ve seen her yet.\n\nWhen GQ asks me for a 7,000-word piece on M.I.A., I agree quickly. (M.I.A.\u2014what fun!) The next day, I wake up with buyer&amp;#39;s remorse. Did they say 7,000 words?\n\nThe problem with writing about Maya is that it&amp;#39;s like writing about the air. I&amp;#39;ve heard her drop-what-you&amp;#39;re-buying-and-listen-to-me-fucking-,  now voice in every hipster boutique on both sides of the Atlantic (and the Pacific and, I&amp;#39;m sure, the Arctic Ocean by now), and then, after she&amp;#39;d blasted past the urban cognoscenti, in the cheesy bars of second-rate airports, in the cheesy bars outside Columbia University, in the cheesy bars of my native Russia (the kind of bars where someone with Maya&amp;#39;s skin color might get more than a passing look). Wherever you go\u2014there she is. Bjrk also managed to pull off this omni\u00ADpresence in the 1990s, but it&amp;#39;s hard to sing along to a Bjrk tune unless you happened to be born on her faraway planet. By contrast, M.I.A.&amp;#39;s hooks and jingles sort of wend their way into what&amp;#39;s left of your half-electronic subconscious (Pull up the people, pull up the poor!), so that by the time &amp;quot;Paper Planes&amp;quot; hitched a ride on the global jet stream, it pretty much became Earth&amp;#39;s anthem of 2008.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nMaya&amp;#39;s music has been described as a combination (it&amp;#39;s always a combination) of world beat, hip-hop, punk rock, baile funk, techno beat, Jamaican dancehall, whirring sonics (whatever the fuck those are), Indian bhangra, blah blah blah\u2026 In other words, she sounds like absolutely nothing you&amp;#39;ve ever heard before. And like everything you thought you&amp;#39;d heard before, too. She also drops finer lyrics than just about anyone with a gold chain knocking against his chest. Indeed, she can craft a story better than scores of novelists out there, her tunes somehow conveying the pain of losing one&amp;#39;s family and homeland in the most joyous way possible. And with this third album, she&amp;#39;s attempting to get huge without sacrificing any of the drooling critical adoration that put her here.\n\nSeven thousand words, though. Holy shit.\n\nOne thing you should know before we proceed together is that my taste in music isn&amp;#39;t very good. For me, listening to contemporary hip-hop is just a way to summon an attitude, to blend in with a more powerful person&amp;#39;s sense of himself and to pretend that I also possess some of that ineffable power. M.I.A.&amp;#39;s music certainly fits the bill, not to mention that she also confers easy cred upon her listeners. If I were single, I&amp;#39;d be pumping her new album on every date, all the while talking up a trip I took to Brazil a few years ago, the time I met these kids who might have come from a favela or something. Anyway, they were poor.\n\nI stopped seriously listening to music when Ice Cube began appearing in the Friday movies. When I was a kid at Oberlin \u00ADCollege, somewhere in Ohio, one of the whitest and crunchiest institutions in America, our obsessions focused on Ice Cube and Kurt Cobain, who managed to die my junior year abroad as I was flying Olympic Airways from Athens to Zurich. The pilots found out midflight, and the young stewardesses began to cry in unison as they tried to pour us our glasses of cloudy retsina. Back then, you see, musicians were still gods who walked among us. But it was the beefy gentleman emerging straight outta Compton, a self-described crazy motherfucker named Ice Cube, who provided our daily soundtrack as we jacked up my roomie&amp;#39;s Saab and aimed it at Oberlin&amp;#39;s sole \u00ADMcDonald&amp;#39;s, located in the most \u00AD&amp;quot;urban&amp;quot; part of this sad village of 8,000 crushed souls. Ice Cube&amp;#39;s music\u2014racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic (full disclosure: my roommate Mike &amp;quot;the Zap&amp;quot; Zapler and I were both nominally Hebrews)\u2014rocked our little black Swedish convertible all the way down College Street as we dreamed of a Big Mac as hot and rancid as Cube&amp;#39;s funky lyrics. The Zap and I were both political-science majors with a lot to lose, but Ice Cube seemed like he came from a world where the apocalypse had already wiped clean any vestige of hope\u2014an exciting, existentialist posture for a 20-year-old cracker still unsure of how to play the opposite sex. Since its East Coast inception and up to its recent blinged-out downfall, hip-hop has always been an exhilarating form of tourism for privileged young Americans, a journey into that shit-stained part of the country that always seems so near and yet so far. Bitch, you shoulda put a sock on the pickle, Ice Cube rapped firmly as he educated two guys in a Saab about the correct uses of birth control in a tone no Oberlin woman would ever tolerate. And your pussy wouldn&amp;#39;t be blowing smoke signals. Uh, yes, I&amp;#39;ll take that with fries.\n\nAfter Cube had completely sold out, it was pretty much downhill for me. I fell under the influence of the Detroit ghetto-tech rapper DJ Assault, whose lyrics I actually paid to use in my last novel (Aw, shit, heah I come / Shut yo mouf and bite yo tongue = $500). And then, like many men and women stumbling headlong into middle age, I just stopped giving a shit about music.\n\nMy first meeting with Maya takes place one day last fall in the lobby of the Bowery Hotel in New York&amp;#39;s East Village, a dark, moody depot for transatlantic wankers of a certain caste. She&amp;#39;s rock-star late to the interview, and Maya&amp;#39;s publicist has been trying to call up to her room. &amp;quot;Maya Arulpra\u2014&amp;quot; she begins telling the desk clerk. &amp;quot;Who?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;M.I.A.&amp;quot; No response. Despite her ubiquity on every iPhone in Williamsburg, there&amp;#39;s clearly still some brand-building ahead for Maya and her label.\n\nSix hours later, she approaches my table with a just-got-out-of-bed look, resembling one of the sloe-eyed Israeli girls who sleepily haunted my Hebrew school. She tells me she doesn&amp;#39;t want to do the usual kind of interview, where she enlightens the reader about what it&amp;#39;s like to be Maya and I ask her questions about her past. No, she wants to come up with something creative. Maybe we should look at artwork together and discuss. Or maybe we can challenge the jerk who made her sound like a terrorist-loving Tamil Tiger groupie in The New York Times by holding a panel with the guy from The Village Voice who defended her. Or maybe this whole piece could be about the cell-phone videos of innocent Tamils, Guineans, and others being killed and raped\u2014a truly ghastly video of Sri Lankan soldiers laughing while shooting bound, naked Tamil men has been making the rounds on YouTube. Or maybe &amp;quot;It shouldn&amp;#39;t be about Sri Lanka; it should be about truth. It should be why, when things are changing so fast, journalism&amp;#39;s not changing as fast as the world is changing, and no one seems to be independent enough to just be like, &amp;#39;I&amp;#39;m going to go look into this.&amp;#39; Every little thing just needs to be so whitewashed on the bigger scale. I think it&amp;#39;s really interesting to focus in and say, &amp;#39;Right, we&amp;#39;re just going to take ten fucking cell-phone footages from around the world that didn&amp;#39;t become an outrageous piece of proof that stands up in the U.N.,&amp;#39; which makes the U.N. really redundant, you know what I mean?&amp;quot; She pauses. &amp;quot;But all that footage crushes so many things that we stand for. It crushes art. Like, I can&amp;#39;t look at any art right now, &amp;#39;cause I just think it&amp;#39;s all bullshit.&amp;quot; A few beats later: &amp;quot;In the future, I want to move more into art.&amp;quot; A little later: &amp;quot;I think [art is] good for my ADD, my music.&amp;quot;\n\nHer attention deficit disorder is endearing. She&amp;#39;s razor smart while somehow managing to be warm, stando?sh, and suspicious. She wants to be in charge, controlling the interview, challenging her critics, crushing the United Nations once and for all. I get the sense she&amp;#39;s not completely aware of her own psychology, which may be an aid to her artistic work, where it all just comes pouring out like an uncapped volcano in the Philippines. Itching to get away from the interview and back to her music, she tells me the studio is where she talks her shit out. &amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s like therapy, seeing journalists for me,&amp;quot; she says.\n\n&amp;quot;I&amp;#39;ll send you a bill,&amp;quot; I tell her.\n\nThe inevitable Robert Christgau, self-proclaimed dean of American rock critics, has called M.I.A. &amp;quot;the brown-skinned Other now obsessing Euro-America,&amp;quot; and Maya&amp;#39;s biography could be summed up in one of her own lyrics: I got brown skin but I&amp;#39;m a West Londoner / Educated but a refugee still. When she talks about her past, one thinks partly that she&amp;#39;s making it up as she goes along, not just because the stuff is so fantastical but because she&amp;#39;s such an effortless storyteller, explaining complicated events with small details, like the time her mom locked her in a room in her grandmother&amp;#39;s house in Sri Lanka to keep her from filming a potentially dangerous protest, or the gruesomeness of life on a Liberian rubber plantation she recently visited. &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m sad I come from a country like this,&amp;quot; she says of Sri Lanka, &amp;quot;full of racism and hatred.&amp;quot; Although maybe L.A. and New York aren&amp;#39;t quite the ticket, either. &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m ready to go to Ohio,&amp;quot; she says, sort of kidding. &amp;quot;I would love to move next door to Dave Chappelle. That&amp;#39;s my dream. If I stick around America, that&amp;#39;s what I&amp;#39;m doing.&amp;quot;\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nIf you had to invent the person of the future, you could do worse than to start with Maya as a baseline. She&amp;#39;s the Third World refugee who lost her teeth to malnutrition as a child but later bagged a film degree from London&amp;#39;s Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, alma mater of artist \u00ADLucian Freud and Clash singer Joe Strummer. (Funnily enough, the basis of &amp;quot;Paper Planes&amp;quot; is pretty much a straight loop of the Clash&amp;#39;s &amp;quot;Straight to Hell,&amp;quot; with the guitar maybe smoothed out a little.)\n\nMaya isn&amp;#39;t so much self-made as self-sampled: She&amp;#39;s an assemblage of what it takes to be relevant, with a profound understanding of just how fucked-up and unglamorous it is to grow up at the bottom of both First World and Third World societies. No one on the corner had swagger like us / Hit me on the burner prepaid wireless, goes &amp;quot;Paper Planes,&amp;quot; and it&amp;#39;s the prepaid wireless that&amp;#39;s genius: the tiny sociological detail of the immigrant buying prepaid minutes as opposed to the monthly plan, the daily calculations amounting to an extra fifty bucks a month sent back to Chiapas, Mexico, or Lom\u00E9, Togo, that rings true to those of us who came to the West from more dysfunctional parts of the world. Like a fine novelist mixing motifs and sentiments to produce the kind of unplugged stream of consciousness that Holden Caulfield or Alexander Portnoy would be proud of, M.I.A. in a song like &amp;quot;Sunshowers&amp;quot; posits a universe of perceptions all at once. A personal assertion like I salt and pepper my mango may please the liberal mango-biters of Park Slope, Brooklyn, but it soon slides into Like P.L.O., I don&amp;#39;t surrendo, which causes many of the above to choke on their mango pits. Educated but a refugee still may be just the ticket as the West swoons into decline and the East prepares itself for dominance. She&amp;#39;s proud that her son&amp;#39;s first words were in Tamil, not English. &amp;quot;He said Ammaa and Appaa, which is like Mom and Dad.&amp;quot;\n\nWhatever Maya Arulpragasam is, her music and her rather fast-moving mouth have made her some serious fans and some pretty serious detractors. Drinking my way through brownstone Brooklyn, where the Worldwide Media lives and opinionates, mention of her name unleashes a flood of commentary. &amp;quot;For two different interviews, she gave me two different ages.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;She wouldn&amp;#39;t tell the Times how old she is.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;She&amp;#39;s prickly.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;She&amp;#39;s like the popular girl in art school.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Everyone&amp;#39;s afraid of her.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Honestly, I think she&amp;#39;s prone to embellishment, and this is one big art project for her.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;ve interviewed a million musicians. No one&amp;#39;s struck me as being as dishonest as she is.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Goddamn, is she a pain in the ass.&amp;quot; And then there are her political views. As one Sri Lankan rapper put it: M.I.A., you represent terrorism in the worst way. When it comes to a singer with this complex a background, everyone wants to shape the story, which pisses Maya off to no end. &amp;quot;If I can&amp;#39;t tell people what happened to me,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;if I&amp;#39;m denied my own history, yeah, I&amp;#39;m gonna say something about that.&amp;quot;\n\nAnyway, this much is likely true: Maya was born in 1975 in Hounslow, London, to Kala and Arul Pragasam. Her father, Arul, adopted the nom de guerre Arular, and when she was 6 months old, he dragged the family back to Sri Lanka. Arular was a founding member of the Eelam Revolutionary Organization of Students (yes, EROS), a group devoted to establishing an independent Tamil state in Sri Lanka&amp;#39;s north and one of about thirty that sprang up during this period in response to increasing oppression by the Sinhalese-majority government. (The Sinhalese are Buddhists, the Tamils predominantly Hindu.) Her father&amp;#39;s revolutionary r\u00E9sum\u00E9 is legendary\u2014schooling in Moscow, training with the PLO\u2014but his tenure as a parent was somewhat less distinguished. He all but abandoned his young family in favor of the struggle and to this day does not have regular contact with his daughter.\n\nKala, however, is still at the center of Maya&amp;#39;s life. &amp;quot;She&amp;#39;s this 62-year-old Sri Lankan seamstress,&amp;quot; she tells me. &amp;quot;She&amp;#39;s like one of those Puerto Rican women you see here.&amp;quot; I&amp;#39;m sort of getting an image, but that doesn&amp;#39;t begin to explain the fortitude it must have taken for Kala Pragasam to get her family through what happened when they returned to Sri Lanka. Violence was a constant. With her father effectively an enemy of the state, the child endured questioning by soldiers. She witnessed shootings and government raids. Her uprooting continued, from Sri Lanka to mainland India&amp;#39;s Tamil Nadu state and back to Sri Lanka, with malnutrition and disease hot on the heels of her and her two siblings. Her sister contracted typhoid. In past interviews, Maya described having her gums cut open with rice grain after losing most of her teeth. It would be one of her last memories of Sri Lanka. In 1986, the family escaped the teardrop island and boomeranged back to a life of Western poverty in South London.\n\nThe first ten years of Maya&amp;#39;s life read like a textbook case of what not to do to a child. I was born in Leningrad, the son of Soviet parents who did everything possible to airlift my ass out of the motherland first chance they had. The idea of Maya&amp;#39;s father dragging two young children back into the conflagration suggests a man of monstrous self-regard at the level where the political becomes the personal. Her childhood gave Maya an insight into the world that few of her artistic peers would have, but it also left her with an inexhaustible sense of anger and resentment. Of the plight of her people she told me: &amp;quot;Every single Tamil person who&amp;#39;s alive today, who&amp;#39;s seen how the world does nothing, has to find a way to exist that isn&amp;#39;t harboring bitterness and hate and revenge.&amp;quot; To her Sinhalese detractors, her music is precisely that form of revenge.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nLife for a brown-skinned refugee in a London council estate (the PJs) was shit, but early hip-hop acts like N.W.A. and Public Enemy gave Maya a lift out of the quotidian, filling her head with dreams of a new life as a gangsta&amp;#39;s bitch in South Central L.A. (Is there anyone of our generation N.W.A. didn&amp;#39;t inspire?) By the time she managed to get into Central Saint Martins\u2014she told the head of the art department she would become a hooker if she wasn&amp;#39;t admitted\u2014the violent childhood and missing father were channeled into canvases run wild with armed militants and tigers, the same wild, bright, tropical graphics that would eventually make it into her epilepsy-inducing videos. The tiger was not an incidental animal. It would be seen as an endorsement of Sri Lanka&amp;#39;s Tamil Tigers, a group perceived as liberators by some and as terrorists by many others. (The Tigers, for example, pioneered the use of suicide bombers.) Her father&amp;#39;s dealings with the organization helped fuel M.I.A.&amp;#39;s terrorist-sympathizer moniker, an allegation she has yet to live down in some quarters. &amp;quot;You have all this shit going on in the publication world,&amp;quot; she tells me unhappily. &amp;quot;They&amp;#39;re calling me a terrorist and a liar.&amp;quot; The singles came first, &amp;quot;Galang&amp;quot; in 2003 and &amp;quot;Sunshowers&amp;quot; a year later. The wonderfully foulmouthed Canadian electroclash musician Peaches taught her to program electronic beats on the Roland MC-505, an all-in-one drum machine and keyboard unit, and the resulting music was DIY honest. &amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s unpretentious, stuck together with Scotch tape,&amp;quot; the critic and musician Sasha Frere-Jones tells me. &amp;quot;So many people have tried to copy that style since.&amp;quot;\n\nMaya has always viewed her art as a collaborative process, an outgrowth of the communal nature of growing up in Sri Lanka. Hooking up with Peaches was only the beginning. She found her ultimate collaborator in Diplo, born Thomas Wesley Pentz, a middle-class white kid from Florida whose thing was to take all kinds of pop music\u2014a classic-rock instrumental here, a rap a cappella there\u2014and seamlessly blend it, jumping recklessly from Dirty South hip-hop like Three 6 Mafia to Bjrk, Missy Elliott, the Cars, and the Cure without pause. Maya grabbed on to this aesthetic, bringing her own London and Sri Lankan sensibility to the mix. (Cue the bhangra, the Jamaican dancehall, et al.) With Diplo as her producer\u2014and for a time her lover\u2014she kept three steps ahead of everyone, stitching all this noise into a new sound that was as exciting as it was disorienting. Together they redefined what smart popular music could mean with the release of M.I.A.&amp;#39;s &amp;quot;Piracy Funds Terrorism&amp;quot; mixtape\u2014worth the trouble of locating just for the &amp;quot;Galang&amp;quot; remix (featuring the irrepressible Vicious) as well as Maya&amp;#39;s hilarious grand larceny of the Bangles&amp;#39; &amp;quot;Walk Like an Egyptian.&amp;quot; DJs on both sides of the Atlantic went ape for the redefined grooves, and &amp;quot;Galang&amp;quot; went viral across the Internet before anyone was even using the word viral.\n\nThe rest was a well-aimed bottle rocket to the top. The albums Arular (2005) and Kala (2007), named after Maya&amp;#39;s father and mother, respectively (make what you will of the fact that Dad came first), wet the pants of our nation&amp;#39;s music critics, a slow drip that continues to this day. Although it sold only 139,000 copies in 2007 (it&amp;#39;s now up to about 520,000), Kala was named record of the year by Rolling Stone and ended up on forty-five year-end &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; lists, including some by publications I for one have never heard of, such as Drowned in Sound and The Sacramento Bee. But as far as the hoi polloi were concerned, it was &amp;quot;Paper Planes,&amp;quot; pumping up the trailer of Pineapple Express and sending the scenery flying in Slumdog Millionaire, that made M.I.A. There&amp;#39;s something almost sweet and old-fashioned about what happened to Maya with that song. All the praise in the world, a zillion pages in magazines, but when it came down to it, it took a hit single.\n\nOnstage M.I.A. is nonpareil, a stunning performer. I fly out to the San Diego Street Scene music festival to see her show. Maya has talked about &amp;quot;how the First World is collapsing into the Third World,&amp;quot; and San Diego, with its goofy-looking street rickshaws and omnipresent condo foreclosures, feels Third World these days. The festival is hot and stupid. All evening long I&amp;#39;ve been running into people who resemble the Family of Early Man, but things get noticeably better when M.I.A. hits the stage. Here&amp;#39;s a true m\u00E9lange of humanity: white hippie chicks, some wayward Vietnamese young ladies, a woman wearing tight shorts with the legend girls don&amp;#39;t poop on her ass. Maya is rocking it in sunglasses, a tiny woman dominating a big venue, shooting off imaginary air guns as out-of-date dorks in porkpie hats shoot them right back. &amp;quot;Let&amp;#39;s pahr-TAY,&amp;quot; she shouts, and even though she&amp;#39;s tired (this gig was a last-minute thing), she&amp;#39;s just the best fucking dancer out there, and the chances of taking your eyes off her grinding form are nil. When it&amp;#39;s time for &amp;quot;Paper Planes,&amp;quot; the crowd has a collective seizure; even San Diego&amp;#39;s blonde navy-brat girls know every single word, follow every ka-ching, every bang!, every and take your money.\n\n&amp;quot;We outie. Peace. We love you,&amp;quot; Maya says as she gets the hell out of there.\n\n\n\nM.I.A.&amp;#39;s new album is titled ///Y/, which kind of spells her first name. The record represents a big moment for her, a chance for more breakout singles in addition to the cerebral political stuff that excites the master&amp;#39;s-degree crowd. And for a rock star who&amp;#39;s accustomed to flying United Economy Plus instead of business, it&amp;#39;s also a chance to make serious bank.\n\nMaya is in London visiting her mum when I get the call to roll with her people and listen to the album. A white Escalade stretch limo pulls up with Maya&amp;#39;s publicist inside, along with a bottle of Jose Cuervo and some low-fat Alpine Lace cheese. (What planet does the music industry still live on?) &amp;quot;This is not M.I.A.-sanctioned,&amp;quot; the publicist says, referring to the tacky flashing party lights and overall Jersey Shore feel of the Escalade. And then she pops the disc into the player. As we crawl through the staid streets of midtown Manhattan, Maya&amp;#39;s new beats come out as a rebuke to everything around us. The album fronts a bassy, epic quality. It&amp;#39;s aggressive when it needs to be (&amp;quot;Born Free&amp;quot;), but a dance track like &amp;quot;XXXO,&amp;quot; co-produced by Rusko and Blaqstarr, the Baltimore club DJ, is as pop as you can expect from M.I.A., breezing up the manufactured stupidity of Lady Gaga or Christina Aguilera with that global-funky Maya touch. The fan base&amp;#39;s reaction to &amp;quot;XXXO&amp;quot; was swift and predictable. &amp;quot;R u disappointed by MIA&amp;#39;s new pop song?&amp;quot; tweeted hipsterrunoff. &amp;quot;Is she trying 2 crossover by sounding like Brit Spears/Rihanna?&amp;quot; Maya doesn&amp;#39;t seem concerned. &amp;quot;I just wanted to tell my story,&amp;quot; she tells me in a late-night e-mail. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#39;t care who&amp;#39;s listening.&amp;quot;\n\nAnd make no mistake, Maya has fun recording her music. Her home in L.A. is like an open house for creative refugees from around the world, and her studio sessions are a potluck dinner. Back in November, she updated me on the progress of the new album: &amp;quot;Then I go to Baltimore, and we&amp;#39;re just gonna spend a week letting everyone come through the studio, and whoever&amp;#39;s got something is gonna get on the album.&amp;quot; When Blaqstarr was recording with her in L.A., &amp;quot;he caught a tarantula, and he kept it in the studio and got it really stoned for days,&amp;quot; she tells me. &amp;quot;A killa turned, ta ran fuckin&amp;#39; chilllllla.&amp;quot;\n\n///Y/ is more polished than Arular or Kala, but it still sounds unfinished in a good way, and there remains a Maya compulsion to go in as many directions as possible. The track &amp;quot;Teqkilla&amp;quot; emphasizes the singer&amp;#39;s need for some sticky-sticky-icky-icky weed and a shot of tequila in me, whereas &amp;quot;The Message&amp;quot; tells the listener expecting nothing but a good ass-shaking time that the Google&amp;#39;s connected to the government. And then there are songs like &amp;quot;Space,&amp;quot; which rock a gentler, more contemplative beat than almost anything she&amp;#39;s done. But if there&amp;#39;s another &amp;quot;Paper Planes&amp;quot; on this album, it&amp;#39;s &amp;quot;Tell Me Why,&amp;quot; a Diplo-produced ditty that has probably the most instant catchphrase\u2014Start throwing your hands up like you&amp;#39;re mad at the ceiling!\u2014since Andr\u00E9 3000 told us to shake it like a Polaroid picture. The accolades will come. Maybe the bank will follow.\n\n\n\n&amp;quot;I think this is the happiest I&amp;#39;ve been for a long time,&amp;quot; she tells me over lunch at the Indian place in Silver Lake. What I hear is more mid. That she&amp;#39;s taken the recent collapse of the Tamil forces and the complete victory of the Sri Lankan army personally. That she&amp;#39;s having a hard time reconciling her revolutionary politics and comfortable life. She refuses to buy the restaurant&amp;#39;s pickles, curry paste, and cashews because they come from Sri Lanka. That segues into another of her hard facts: &amp;quot;Fifty percent of the money that the Sri Lankan government makes, it all comes from Victoria&amp;#39;s Secret.&amp;quot; I&amp;#39;m scribbling down &amp;quot;FACT CHECK: Does 50% of all Sri Lankan gov. revenues really come from Victoria&amp;#39;s Secret?&amp;quot; (It does not.)\n\nShe is relentless, single-minded, sometimes bordering on the naive. During a televised appearance with Bill Maher, she said, &amp;quot;You have to understand that in Sri Lanka, not a single Sinhalese person has been convicted of a crime for sixty years.&amp;quot; A Tamil-American artist I know tells me that Maya &amp;quot;was nervous, clearly, and I know she meant to say that no Sinhalese has been convicted of their role in the pogroms against the Tamils in 1983,&amp;quot; but that&amp;#39;s an awfully big leap. And the truth is that measured, considered statements, instead of emotion-fueled hyperbole, would have helped her cause.\n\nAnd in its essence, her cause is just. The Tamils in Sri Lanka have been screwed since the country won its independence in 1948, and the Sinhalese have gone out of their way to make them into second-class citizens. Philip Gourevitch has written that in the 1960s, half the students admitted to medical and engineering schools were Tamils, whereas by the end of the 1970s the figure was closer to 20 percent. As a Soviet Jew, an ethnicity that is as obsessed with higher education as the Tamils, I am aware of just how painful these quotas can be. (They helped to put my family on a plane bound for JFK.) Even the Tamil Tigers&amp;#39; outrageous behavior of recruiting child soldiers cannot excuse the anti-Tamil pogroms and the government&amp;#39;s vicious handling of the war. As Aravind Adiga, the Booker Prize-winning author of The White Tiger, wrote about the West&amp;#39;s attitude to the conflict since September 11: &amp;quot;The world has issued the Sri Lankan government a blank check in its fight against the [Tigers], and it is time now to tear up that check.&amp;quot;\n\nAgreed. But one feels that for Maya the struggle can never end. She knows so much about the world, she has an idiosyncratic vision of it that makes for the most exciting music in decades, but she&amp;#39;s so rooted in the past hurts of her biography and the humiliations of her people that the bigger picture sometimes floats out of view. (Deep in her Maya-ness, she don&amp;#39;t surrendo.)\n\nAnd still, at the heart of her personal and political struggles is Arular. As with so many absent fathers, his absence makes him a larger figure than he need be. Maya tells me that he has been working as a mediator with the Sri Lankan government, which to her rings as yet another form of betrayal. &amp;quot;England gave me a free education,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;but my grades suffered because I didn&amp;#39;t have my dad to help me. I&amp;#39;ve paid the price. I&amp;#39;ve had the cause and effect, all that shit. I feel like I don&amp;#39;t have anything to do with my dad.&amp;quot;\n\nI&amp;#39;m thinking of an image from Maya&amp;#39;s childhood: her father, on the run from the authorities, sneaking through the window of their house in Sri Lanka and being introduced to her and her sisters as their uncle. (This was a safety precaution\u2014the children would be regularly questioned by government soldiers about their father&amp;#39;s whereabouts.) When you&amp;#39;re a child, the world around you terrifying and new, and you&amp;#39;re told that your father is your uncle, how much else can ever be real? Where does the political end and the personal begin? It&amp;#39;s a question Maya&amp;#39;s music has addressed with relentless sadness.\n\nBut sometimes with joy. Because this is a childhood memory, too:\n\n&amp;quot;I lived on a street, a dead-end street. There were like seven or eight houses, and then you turn the corner and there was another seven, eight houses. But my whole family lived on the street. So it was amazing. I grew up with about a hundred of my cousins, playing hide-and-seek all over the village and the temples.&amp;quot;\n\nAnd then there&amp;#39;s her own son: &amp;quot;Today he climbed out of the pen, had to take the door kind of off the hinges and move it aside to get around. And that&amp;#39;s amazing, that he&amp;#39;s figured it out already\u2014and that he&amp;#39;s strong enough to do that.&amp;quot;\n\ngary shteyngart&amp;#39;s third novel, Super Sad True Love Story, will be published on July 27."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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