Missing In Action

There’s an urban myth that goes something along the lines of: ‘You’re never more than 10 metres away from a rat.” I’ve never been sure whether or not this is a real statistic or just a rumour spread about to terrify those of us with a Winston Smithian fear of the dirty little animals. In any case, in London , it’s equally true that you’re never more than 10 meters away from somebody that produces music. You literally can’t breathe in the UK for these people, most of them (if they’re to be believed) on the brink of ‘making it big.’ If you throw a rock in a London bus it’s sure to bounce off a rapper, a Nu-Jazz producer and a minimalist composer before it hits the floor. And if you’ve ever travelled on public transport in London , I’m sure you’ll appreciate that throwing rocks is something you often have to restrain yourself from doing.

In order to make any kind of impact in the music industry, to stand out from all of the utterly pedestrian groups who sound like Coldplay cover-bands, all of the mediocre schoolyard rappers, all of the Hip Hop kids who make beats during their work breaks, you need to be doing something special. You need to have an edge.

Sometimes, an artist comes along that captures the contemporary zeitgeist so perfectly that you can’t help but imagine that they’re manufactured. Somebody, it seems, must be pulling the strings to create a package so damn saleable. MIA (real name Maya Arulpragasamis) exactly this kind of artist.

So you want to stand out from the other bands, the other rappers, the other producers? First, it helps if you’re working class. Nobody likes a posh kid pretending to have street cool, which is one reason why the group Kula Shaker (all impeccably posh) became such a figure of fun. The people who have the money to purchase music (the middle classes) and the people who write reviews (the middle classes) want to be told how it ‘really is’. Growing up in a rough council estate is good. Being a refugee is even better. Coming from war-torn Sri Lanka is perfect. And if you’re dad’s a freedom fighter with the ‘Tamil Tigers’, I can guarantee that the media is going to sit up and take notice, almost regardless of what kind of music you make. You’ve just got yourself a marketable product.

MIA is all of these things. She fled Sri Lanaka at just 10 years old, her father being a freedom fighter in the civil war in that country. Finding herself in a refugee living in a rough South London housing estate, she was one of just two Asian families in the area, and suffering at the hands of that age-old tradition - Great British Racism. Not only does she make music, she’s also a visual artist, designing her own artwork for her record sleeves. And, to top it all off, she seems to have all the right connections - Electroclash queen Peaches has taken a particular interest in her musical development. It all adds up to impeccable credentials for a kind of street credibility to impress the kind of people who read The Guardian newspaper.

Am I being a little cynical? Not really. Because to top it all off, as well as being a journalist’s wet dream, MIA just happens to make the most jaw-droppingly exciting music that you’ll hear this year. Her multicultural background shines through in her songs, combining Jamaican Ragga and Dancehall with Electro, Punk and Hip Hop. Though she also writes her own music, MIA is primarily a rapper, her half-spoken half-sung lyrics having a kind of nursery-rhyme quality to them, reminiscent of the dirty rhymes that kids sing to each other in the playground. Teenage prostitution, hostage-taking, terrorism and growing up as a refugee all provide the subject matter for her songs. Her lyrics are full of images halfway between London and the tropics – wet palm trees, mangos and London slang all make it into the mix. What’s more, you could never accuse her of not being political. Sample lyric: ‘Like PLO, I don’t surrender’. Indeed, having escaped her war-torn home country, the spectre of war never seems to be far from her work. Her name – MIA – actually stands for Missing In Action. And if you needed any more confirmation of the high-octane political content of her work, it’s been said that the US government has been taking a particular interest in her website…

Released just a few months back, her debt album Arular has been causing waves on both sides of the Atlantic . With beats to make the kids dance and lyrics to give journalists like myself something to write about (she recently featured on the cover of style bible ‘i-D Magazine’) it’s already one of the albums of the year. Beg, borrow or steal a copy. That’s an order.

© Tom Wilson / Business Magazin 2005