M.I.A.

On a crisp, sunny day in mid-April in London, Maya and her publicist, Jennie Boddy, were in a car being driven to the home of a Sri Lankan wedding photographer. Instead of doing standard publicity photos to promote her still nameless album, Maya had the idea of using a photographer she found in the phone book who worked, as many Sri Lankan photographers do, in an almost Bollywood style, by inserting a simple picture, in this case of Maya, into dozens of fantastic, almost surrealistic tableaus. A few days ago, Maya hatched this plan, which like most Maya plans was inventive, artistic and, in an unsettling way, combined the high with the low. “I’ve had my eye on some jewelry from Givenchy forever,” Maya told me, as we inched our way in bumper-to-bumper traffic. “It is millions of dollars’ worth of gold jewelry. To wear it for these pictures, Givenchy had to send a bodyguard. I liked the idea of a photographer shooting me in his council flat in all this gold, knowing that the jewelry requires a bodyguard.” She paused. She was wearing opaque brown stockings, very small, tan leather shorts that laced up the front, high-heeled ankle boots and a fluorescent yellow bra that periodically flashed through a loose, open-knit Phat Farm sweater topped by an oversize dark brown jacket. Maya’s nearly black hair was pulled into a bun on top of her head, her nails were colored in an elaborate checkerboard pattern and she had applied a dark indigo powder to her eyebrows. It was an exotic mix: her body was downtown and her face was uptown. “All of what I’m wearing is American,” Maya said. “If I was a terrorist, I wouldn’t be wearing American clothing.” She paused. This may have been a joke, but Maya rarely laughs. She speaks carefully, slowly, with a kind of deadpan delivery. Like a trained politician, she stays on message. It’s hard to know if she believes everything she says or if she knows that a loud noise will always attract a crowd.

Diplo wasn’t allowed to work at the house (“Her boyfriend really hates me,” he said), so Maya and he recorded “Tell Me Why,” perhaps the closest thing to a pop-radio song on the record, at Red Bull Studios in Santa Monica. “It was my birthday; I was on mushrooms,” he recalled. “It was a special atmosphere: I found the sample” — a patch of music lifted from a song by the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers — “and Maya actually whistled. I did 15 demos for her before she finally chose that track. Even if she hates my guts, she knows that we can do crazy stuff together. The sound on her records is unlike anyone else’s, and we all take that very seriously.”

-Lynn Hirschberg for the New York Times, M.I.A.'s Agitprop, May 30th, 2010