M.I.A.

[teza]

Looklet Mag feature on her: http://looklet.com/article/126

 

[V|Bruce]

M.I.A at Style.com; Opening Ceremony Fêtes Alexander Wang With a Dinner Party

 

[KasiaPL]

rollingstone

 

[KasiaPL]

New promotional pictures!

M.I.A. is back in full effect. Her new album is out June 29 (thanks, blimp!), and she's got some hott new images to promote it. They're by Jaime Martinez, an artist signed to M.I.A.'s N.E.E.T. imprint. Check 'em out.

Here you can watch pictures in 3D!
pitchfork

 

[KasiaPL]

New video for 'Born Free'.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEX8...A0V7WnRMniQwNPrZPBL2kyfcQqovZ8B8BqoRP15oEe208

 

[last waltz]

@ Met Gala

getty

 

[OMIFAN9]

New promotional pictures!

Here you can watch pictures in 3D!
pitchfork

Great photos they are! She looks amazing!

 

[EasyCool]

That born free video is something else, Wow!

 

[KasiaPL]

We were truly wowed by the unexpected and gorgeous Alexander Wang for Gap dress M.I.A. wore to the gala. The intricate column is made from hand-crocheted metallic gold yarn worn over a leather corset bodysuit: wow! The singer/songwriter/social activist also sported Alexander Wang for Repossi jewelry from the designer's F/W 10 show—truly covetable accents for this visionary look.

HQ

whowhatwear

 

[KasiaPL]

Celebrity Sightings In New York City - May 3, 2010


wireimage

 

[melfreya]

she was hands down the prettiest and best dressed at the MET

 

[Over the Sea]

^ I agree. she always looks so beautiful.

 

[Scott]

i finally saw the born free vid and indeed....wow. it's definitely hard hitting and thought provoking. the song itself i'm still not sure...i like that she's experimenting with a newer sound but i do question the very obvious ghost rider by suicide sample. she couldn't get somebody from say add n to x or .adult to help create an original overlying sound?

 

[maxlinden]

the entire Born Free video

BE ADVISED THERE IS NUDITY

 

[LuLover]

I have loved MIA for so long and I cannot express how much I respect her for making music and videos like Born Free. The sound is fantastic and raw...she is actually one of the few artists that sounds like a human being on her recordings, not auto tune.
The video is something else....wow. Only she would have the nerve to make a real statement about the absurdity of descrimination. Mad props!

 

[Over the Sea]

I can't wait for her album to come out

 

[angelfish]

truly a groundbreaking video.
she's not getting the best press right now but i respect the fact that she has the guts to speak her mind and not be afraid to contradict herself.

it's good to see her looking happy in the candids :-)

 

[last waltz]

actualidea.com, fashioncopious.typepadcom

 

[last waltz]

Dazed & Confused July 2010



fashioncopious.typepad.com

 

[misscheriedior]

GQ July 2010
Photography by Miguel Reveriego | Text by Gary Shteyngart

Maya's music has been described as a combination (it's always a combination) of world beat, hip-hop, punk rock, baile funk, techno beat, Jamaican dancehall, whirring sonics (whatever the **** those are), Indian bhangra, blah blah blah… In other words, she sounds like absolutely nothing you've ever heard before. And like everything you thought you'd heard before, too. She also drops finer lyrics than just about anyone with a gold chain knocking against his chest.

M.I.A. is perhaps the preeminent global musical artist of the 2000s, a truly kick-*** singer and New York-Londony fashion icon, not to mention a vocal supporter of Sri Lanka's embattled Tamil minority, of which she's a member. Her father was a key player in the Tamil separatist movement, and his links to the Tamil Tigers would later contribute to Maya's rep as a terrorist sympathizer. She also has a 1-year-old son and a third album on the way. When asked about the new rec*ord, Cassette Playa (real name: Carri Munden) says simply, "It's sick."

Her moods vary from slightly pissed off to go-****-yourself-already, but today she's bubbly and engaged, doing a sexy-tired southern-ingénue walk. From her song "Hombre": My hips do the flicks as I walk, yeah. We work our way through reams of '70s and '80s **** that reminds me of my own immigrant past. (My parents and I emigrated from the former Soviet Union in 1979.) Taupe-colored "refugee coats." EZ Spirit. Focus 2000. A Gitano denim coat. We get on the trendy subject of avoiding meat, and Maya says, "What are you gonna do, you know? We don't have the luxury to even think about being vegetarians or meat eaters. We're refugees. We've been dealing with normal ****, like how to stay alive."

I think to myself, The refugee is strong in this one.

When talking about a truly ghastly video of Sri Lankan soldiers laughing while shooting bound, naked Tamil men has been making the rounds on YouTube she said "It shouldn't be about Sri Lanka; it should be about truth. It should be why, when things are changing so fast, journalism's not changing as fast as the world is changing, and no one seems to be independent enough to just be like, 'I'm going to go look into this.' Every little thing just needs to be so whitewashed on the bigger scale. I think it's really interesting to focus in and say, 'Right, we're just going to take ten ****ing cell-phone footages from around the world that didn't become an outrageous piece of proof that stands up in the U.N.,' which makes the U.N. really redundant, you know what I mean?" She pauses. "But all that footage crushes so many things that we stand for. It crushes art. Like, I can't look at any art right now, 'cause I just think it's all bull****." A few beats later: "In the future, I want to move more into art." A little later: "I think [art is] good for my ADD, my music."

The first ten years of Maya's life read like a textbook case of what not to do to a child. I (the writer) was born in Leningrad, the son of Soviet parents who did everything possible to airlift my *** out of the motherland first chance they had. The idea of Maya's father dragging two young children back into the conflagration suggests a man of monstrous self-regard at the level where the political becomes the personal. Her childhood gave Maya an insight into the world that few of her artistic peers would have, but it also left her with an inexhaustible sense of anger and resentment. Of the plight of her people she told me: "Every single Tamil person who's alive today, who's seen how the world does nothing, has to find a way to exist that isn't harboring bitterness and hate and revenge." To her Sinhalese detractors, her music is precisely that form of revenge.

Onstage M.I.A. is nonpareil, a stunning performer. I fly out to the San Diego Street Scene music festival to see her show. Maya has talked about "how the First World is collapsing into the Third World," and San Diego, with its goofy-looking street rickshaws and omnipresent condo foreclosures, feels Third World these days. The festival is hot and stupid. All evening long I've been running into people who resemble the Family of Early Man, but things get noticeably better when M.I.A. hits the stage. Here's a true mélange of humanity: white hippie chicks, some wayward Vietnamese young ladies, a woman wearing tight shorts with the legend girls don't poop on her ***. Maya is rocking it in sunglasses, a tiny woman dominating a big venue, shooting off imaginary air guns as out-of-date dorks in porkpie hats shoot them right back. "Let's pahr-TAY," she shouts, and even though she's tired (this gig was a last-minute thing), she's just the best ****ing dancer out there, and the chances of taking your eyes off her grinding form are nil. When it's time for "Paper Planes," the crowd has a collective seizure; even San Diego's blonde navy-brat girls know every single word, follow every ka-ching, every bang!, every and take your money.

gq.com