M.I.A. – GRAFFITI ART BOOK

“DEAF EARS
DEATH NEARS”

Years before Maya Arulpragasam ever picked up a microphone or a drum machine she studied fine art, film, and video in London.

Here, for the first time, she began to piece together some of the different strands of her life experience. In an early incarnation of what was later to become M.I.A., she learned how to play off her different cultural personae against each other; layering rap iconography with the warfare pictures from her youth, Asian Britain with American new-wave film making style and St. Martin’s fashion sense with refugee outlooks.

A successful art career beckoned and, for a while, seemed to be Maya’s destined path. Her first-ever public exhibition of paintings in 2001 at the Euphoria Shop in Portobello, London, featured candy coloured spray-paint and stencil pictures of the Tamil rebellion movement. Graffitied tigers and palm trees mixed with orange, green and pink camouflage, bombs, guns and freedom fighters on chip board off-cuts and canvases. The show was nominated for the Alternative Turner Prize, every painting sold and a monograph book of the collection was published by Pocko (which was simply entitled M.I.A.).

“From a long-forgotten region of endemic conflict comes a project to challenge your ethical core. The art of warfare is sprawled across these pages transforming bloodshed into beauty and raising the phoenix of forbidden expression – The real war is in us.”

Maya’s work reflects her strong cultural roots with Sri Lanka. Like a DJ, she mixes, samples and scratches contemporary urban themes with powerful political messages and imagery. The aesthetic is simple and direct, reminiscent of propagandist art.

A commission from Elastica’s Justine Frischmann to provide the artwork and cover image for the band’s second album, The Menace, led to Arulpragasam following the band on tour around forty American states, video-documenting the event, and eventually directing the music video for Elastica’s single, “Mad Dog“. The support act on the tour, electro-clash artist Peaches, introduced Arulpragasam to the Roland MC-505 sequencing machine and gave her the courage to take on the one artform she felt least confident in: music.

Back home in London, Arulpragasam and Frischmann got hold of their own 505 and, working with the simplest of set-ups (a second-hand 4-track, the 505 and a radio microphone), Arulpragasam worked-up a series of six songs onto a demo tape which became her calling card to the industry.

This tape included the first track she had ever composed, “M.I.A.”, the second track she had ever composed, “Galang”, and “Lady Killer”. The tape found its way into the hands of Steve Mackey and Ross Orton who then re-worked the track “Galang” into the diverse meld of influences that would eventually propel M.I.A. into the limelight.

M.I.A.’s graffiti artwork is animated and comes to life in her “Galang” music video.

M.I.A. is available for only $10 at Floating World Comics.