Can’t Stereotype My Thing: M.I.A.’s Arular Turns 20

Despite her controversies then and now, the British singer/producer’s debut feels like a relic of a more innocent age in pop.

By Daniel Bromfield  |  March 21, 2025 | 12:30pm
Music Features M.I.A.
Can’t Stereotype My Thing: M.I.A.’s Arular Turns 20

Early press around the M.I.A. who made Arular tended to paint her as a sort of human moodboard, a graphic designer with an eye for provocation and more connections than musical talent. That narrative would seem to ignore the fact that her idle experiments with the Roland MC-505 groovebox yielded some of the beats of the century, but if even the low-tech polyglot splutter of this now 20-year-old record didn’t give the lie to this narrative, the qualities that made her detractors skeptical early on are now pretty much a given in today’s pop industry. As the web democratizes the making of music, it’s not as shocking as it was 20 years ago that a serious and important musician could function as much as a curator of ideas, sounds and aesthetics as a performer or instrumentalist. In assembling both the skeletons of her songs and the roster of collaborators that would sketch them out—most famously Diplo, her then-boyfriend—Maya Arulpragasam tapped into everything that was exciting about pop music in its freaky, free-for-all 2000s.

M.I.A. was among the first generation of performers to find fame chiefly through the Internet, and her music has mirrored the seasons of the web in an uncanny way. In the 2000s, there was a sort of pervasive optimism about the ease with which music could be disseminated, legally and otherwise, and what it could mean for the development of pop. Arular and its predecessor, Piracy Funds Terrorism, which wedded that album’s unreleased vocal tracks to beats recycled from pop hits past and present, embodied this fuck-all mashup spirit. 2008’s sharper, stranger Kala took this angle even further, but by 2010’s em>Maya, concerns about surveillance and violation of privacy in the Facebook age were seeping into her work. M.I.A. is a tinfoil Trumpist now, leading to embarrassing appearances in the news followed by choruses of commenters saying that “Paper Planes” was the only good thing she ever did. That’s not true, but like Justin Timberlake and Drake, she seems fated to live out the rest of her career as someone vaguely lame.

I’ve played M.I.A.’s older music for a lot of people, and the most common reaction is shock: not necessarily that they didn’t know that she had a ton of great music other than her contribution to the Pineapple Express soundtrack, but that they didn’t know how anti-pop she was, how outré she could be sonically. Small wonder she was so often compared to Missy Elliott, whose collaboration with Timbaland on 1997’s Supa Dupa Fly helped kick open the door for arguably the most sonically experimental era of chart pop ever. The music on Arular is a barrage of videogame lasers, grime polyrhythms, girl-group chants and cheap synth horns, with Arulpragasam pattering in a slangy and knowing London deadpan. The idea is for it to sound like something you’d hear issuing from a boombox in a foreign country. It sounds like some kind of regional dance music you might stumble across in the most fervent music-nerd corners of the Internet, without being especially regional at all (save for its reflection of London’s multicultural nightlife).

Her music experiments playfully with what pop might sound like in a post-hip-hop, post-genre world. “U.R.A.Q.T.” is like a manifesto for the rising virtual pop era, with M.I.A. rapping about ringing her boyfriend on his “mo-bile phone”, eventually stumbling across a chorus that brilliantly ties together the singer’s fetish for illegality with her wry streak of pop classicism: “Is your daddy a dealer? / ’Cause you’re dope to me.” She and her comrades pillage from wherever they can; “Sunshowers” chops up a song from Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, a NYC disco band beloved by crate-digger types; while “Bucky Done Gun” borrows from Deize Tigrona’s “Injeção,” a song from an earlier generation of Brazilian funk than the one currently blowing people’s minds on YouTube rabbit holes. “Amazon” might boast the album’s best beat, a lumbering industrial funk monster that Maya is keen to emphasize was “made in London,” using the city as a byword for the kind of metropolitan post-everything fusion she made her own on Arular.

M.I.A. was usually described as a rapper in her time. She’s not really that, but she’s not really a singer, either. Maybe the slightly antiquated term “MC” gets closer to what she does than either of those more catch-all words: She’s the voice on her own songs, her London multilect as much a vehicle for hooks and lyrics as the overall impression of a global melange. There are a few bars on “Pull Up the People” where her voice seems to slip out of time with the beat, as if someone nudged the file slightly out of line during mixing. Consider that a lot of the vocal takes dropped a year earlier on Piracy Funds Terrorism and it’s easy to hear voice and music as separable. When Drake put out Honestly, Nevermind in 2022, a common jab was that it sounded “posthumous.” There are times when the beats and the vocals sound disconnected enough on Arular that you could swear you were hearing some kind of editing-room Frankenstein in the vein of Biggie’s Born Again, but its treatment of her voice as just another file to be nudged around is totally consistent with its scrappy anti-orthodoxy.

In order to bring a sense of borderlessness to her music, M.I.A. drew heavily from the imagery of insurgencies around the world, including the Tamil Tigers. M.I.A. is a Tamil of Sri Lankan descent, whose father co-founded the Tigers-aligned EROS militant group but was never a Tiger. As a graphic designer, M.I.A. plastered her screenprints with insurgent imagery long before she carried it over into her lyrics and music videos, in which tiger motifs became a running theme. Her use of these signifiers pissed a lot of people off, especially as the Tigers are known for using suicide bombers and child soldiers. Commentators like the Sri Lankan rapper DeLon contended that she was playing with imagery that was over her head, but her taste for controversy endeared her to music-industry types like Jimmy Iovine at Interscope, a veteran exec who understands as well as anyone how a little moral panic can shift units, and who put out Arular jointly with star-making UK indie XL.

Given how many feathers Arular ruffled in its day, it’s odd that 20 years later, it sounds like a postcard from a more innocent world, one where the Internet still felt vaguely utopian. The ease of access to any music in the world with just a few clicks still felt like it would burst open the floodgates for an infinity of new ideas rather than eventually smudging into the interchangeable dullness of the Spotify era and its model of pop as a lifestyle accessory for passive consumption. It’s telling that Drake, the most globally-minded star of his era, called his strongly Afro-diasporic 2017 album More Life a “playlist” just as that mode was beginning to replace the “album” as listeners’ longform music-consumption method of choice—and that unlike M.I.A.’s brain-melting masala, Drake was prone to synthesizing his influences into a soporific sound that paired well with gene-spliced legal super-weed and pickleball games with coworkers.

It’s practically taken for granted now that you can queue up music from anywhere on Earth, so the radical selectorism of DJ/rupture, Danger Mouse, the Very Best, Girl Talk and the young Diplo feels a little less like a threat to the pop social order. (The last masterpiece of this era was 2011’s The Perfect Lullaby by Nguzunguzu, which included M.I.A.’s tour DJ Asma Maroof.) If anything in the current mainstream reflects the spirit of Arular, it’s the more fried corners of Internet rap: weirdos like OsamaSon and the Opium stable, who want to sound like a torrent of information coming through a cheap transistor. The then-maligned Maya seems like the more prescient work today, reflective of the more begrudging relationship with the Internet most of us have, but it’s easy to long for the climate that produced Arular, when a more connected age felt like cause for celebration.

Daniel Bromfield is a writer, editor and musician from San Francisco, CA. He currently works as Calendar Editor at the Marin Independent Journal and is a prolific freelancer, with bylines at Pitchfork, Atlas Obscura, Resident Advisor and local media in the Bay Area. He runs the popular @RegionalUSFood Twitter account, highlighting obscure dishes from across the US. Find him on Twitter at @bromf3.

 
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