Summary: Since her 2005 debut album Arular, Maya Arulpragasam -- the procative rapper known as M.I.A. -- has been a dominant creative force in music and pop culture. With her 2007 world-wide hit single "Paper Planes," the English-Sri Lankan native was catapulted to international fame, and was later nominated for an Academy Award and a Grammy Award in the same year. With her blend of hip hop, choppy electronics, world music influences, M.I.A.'s diverse music is infectious and wholly unique. It's also fair to say that her off-stage personality and outspoken political views have often trumped her recordings. She once performed at the Grammys while nine months pregnant; she had a very public Twitter conflict with a New York Times journalist after an unflattering profile. And she raised her middle finger during a live performance with Madonna at the Super Bowl -- which is still in ongoing litigation. And most recently, M.I.A. threatened to leak her latest album, Matangi, after a year of delays from her record label. Her long-anticipated fourth studio album is now coming out, and as one might expect with such a singular artist, it's is another genre-defying album full of inventive production, grinding and serrated beats and a lot to say. Where M.I.A.'s first three albums were named for her father (Arular), mother (Kala), then her own nickname, (Maya), Matangi draws from the name she was given at birth. But it's also the name of a Hindu goddess. In an interview with Soundcheck host John Schaefer, M.I.A. talks about the Hindu mythology that has shaped the album, why she didn't want to leak the album early — "I just thought it was too cliched" — and collaborating with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on the track "AtTENTion." Interview Highlights M.I.A., on the title of her new record: [Mantangi]'s the goddess of spoken word, which is really good cause I'm dyslexic, so I was like "Ah this is cool." It's like putting someone on the map that doesn't write things. So it's not like discussing Jesus Christ or Muhammad where it's more about the written text and writing on the stone and stuff like that. This goddess was about words and the meaning and power of music. On her father's reaction to early music: He didn't really say anything about it. I don't think anyone — any of my family took it seriously that I was a musician until maybe five years after [the first album release] I remember bringing my first demo home, which was "Galang," and I played it in my house and my brother literally took it out of the CD player and put it in the bin. He was like, "This is crap." On working with Julian Assange: I don't know what he did, but I basically had to write that song to think of every word that had "tent" in it, and I must have had about 40 or something, maybe not even that many. And so he came in to work on the theme song for his TV program, The World Tomorrow, and so I explained the concept of the song which he liked, 'cuz he's smart, and he was like, "Oh, I can get these words for you" and then he took my computer. I was like, "Mmm, what's he doing?" And I don't know what he did to my computer exactly.
