M.I.A. : The /\/\/\Y/\ [R/\re]_ Interview _ MTV News (2010)

In 2010 M.I.A. gave a rare and candid interview for MTV News to promote /\/\/\Y/\ , her third and most controversial album, in the interview Arulpragasam talked about working with her frequent collaborator Blaqstarr, sketching /\/\/\Y/\ with Rusko, Diplo and Switch; her experimental "drill" song "Steppin' Up", the glitch aesthetics of "Space", and "Teqkilla"; the environment set up for her creative process; the difference between Kala and /\/\/\Y/\ , her newborn baby listening to Rye Rye; giving an insane song for Jay-Z; recording in USA and taking time out to record, singing more in "It is What It Is", discussing "It Takes a Muscle" as her love song, and Love-ing-alot Justin Bieber; /\/\/\Y/\ as a 3D album and the controversy and censorship of her Romain Gavras directed music video "Born Free", and the future of internet censorship and mainstream media.


Ten years later, this album sounds more 2020 than her contemporaries.
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"It’s instructive to look back on how deeply M.I.A.’s and Kanye West’s paths diverged as the 2010s took shape. Both were cutting-edge royalty beginning in 2004, pulling just about every musically inclined person into their worlds for several awe-inspiringly cosmopolitan works: Kanye took inspiration from Daft Punk, Jamie Foxx’s big-screen stint as Ray Charles, even Maroon 5’s Adam Levine. M.I.A. showed up on Missy Elliott’s final pre-hiatus album, got sampled by Vampire Weekend, and turned the Clash into the biggest audio dynamite of all with “Paper Planes.” She worked with Timbaland and Diplo and quoted “Where Is My Mind?” and “Road Runner” on a record that brought Tamil gaana music and indigenous Australian preteen rappers to a worldwide audience.

As with most artists who have been dubbed geniuses, they’ve frayed a bit as people; in 2020 one’s an anti-vaxxer and one’s a Trump-admiring, Megachurch-style born-again. But it’s not hard to tell how long Kanye was given a free ride (his line about eating “Asian pussy” with sweet-and-sour sauce hails from this very publication’s 2013 Album of the Year) while M.I.A. lost her procession of adoring critics almost overnight. Enter Lynn Hirschberg.
"At the time, most (though not all) reviewers charged that her whole system was breaking down, aurally melting into incoherent distortion and politically even more inchoate. That view had its legs in 2010, but after Death Grips, Oneohtrix Point Never’s Garden of Delete, the rise of speaker-blowers like Machine Girl, and countless unmastered SoundCloud rappers — not to mention the politically fucked industrial racket of Yeezus itself) — we owe her a damn apology. It shouldn’t have been too much to chew on that she sampled Suicide and tried on Auto-Tune at the same time." - Dan Weiss , 2020
https://www.spin.com/2020/07/the-reve...