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M.I.A.: World Party :: M.I.A. took a cornucopia of international beats to help create the crossover club scene we now enjoy. URB finds out that kick starting the party was only the beginning

By Si Hawkins   Photography by Nick Ballon

05/17/07 :: URB 147

A sultry, sleepy monday evening in April and the owner of The Fenerbahçe Social Club looks a little bewildered that the force of nature called M.I.A. has chosen to blow a whirlwind through his less-than-glamorous premises. As Maya Arulpragasam drapes herself over a pool table, pulls shapes, prances around and generally distracts the table of middle-aged Turkish guys who are trying to get on with some low-stakes gambling, the proprietor prowls around us in a progressively more agitated fashion until, finally, he snaps, barking something undecipherable but clearly unpleasant and unceremoniously pushing us all out onto the East London street.

It’s been 18 months since URB last hung out with M.I.A., having appointed her our joint Artist of the Year in 2005 (along with Bloc Party), but she’s hardly been idle since then. The remainder of her world tour was followed by a similarly jet-setting, though slightly less-regimented, reconnaissance mission, as she flew to various bits of Asia and the Caribbean to find inspiration for Kala, her second album. A comparably in-your-face but less inflammatory experience than her breakthrough record Arular, it looks set to launch her onto a different plane of public consciousness, or so her new major label is quietly predicting. Maya’s days of being thrown out of places may soon be at an end, and so, tonight, we more than make up for it.

In all fairness, the Fenerbahçe owner presumably thinks Maya is just another of the garishly clothed all-too-sassy new-rave girls he has seen sauntering past his joint over the last year or so, with her bright red tights, cheetah-skin smock and faded ‘80s T-shirt. It’s a look she pretty much invented three years ago but which every clued-up teen in the UK seems to be sporting now. That boundary-free paint-splash of fashion, music and partying, M.I.A. was way ahead of the curve. Not that she gets much credit for it:

“Of course I don’t, because they’d much rather give it to Lily Allen, because it’s safer and easier,” she says, amused rather than angry. “All the things that I got criticised for in England, all the things I was saying about how, ‘I wish it was more colorful and I wish there were clubs playing more versatile music,’ all those things are happening now.”

It’s not just England that has embraced her party aesthetic. America has proved particularly susceptible to M.I.A.’s baile-B’more charms. But like all pop music exchanges since the British Invasion, it was a two way street. “I went to America to find that Hollotronix scene,” she explains, referring mainly to Philadelphia DJ Diplo, who was already blending sounds as far flung as Brazil and Brick City at his soon-to-be-legendary Philly parties when he and Maya met. It was Diplo who gave the U.S. its first listen to his future ex-girlfriend on the pair’s Piracy Funds Terrorism mixtape. Since then, it’s been a near straight shot, not just for M.I.A., but for the eclectic party sound she strove for. A style of party jams so colorful and diverse, that even the media’s best attempts have failed to peg it with a suitable name.

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