Full story and images here:
http://niralimagazine.com/2004/10/not-so-missing-in-action/
""I salt and pepper my mango,” sing-songs 28-year-old Maya Arulpragasam at the beginning of her infectious, dancehall-inspired song, “Sunshowers.” A remix of “Sunshowers” is the second track on the London-based artist’s debut single featuring the even more pulsating “Galang,” released in the United States on September 28. The song’s drum-pattern beat is catchy, quirky, crazy—it’s so good, you almost don’t want to bother to decipher the mish-mash of words she’s rapping spliced between an airy, soprano-sounding chorus. But something about the song forces you to lean in a little closer, pay attention—and that’s when the lyrics jump out: “You wanna go? / You wanna win a war? / Like PLO I don’t surrendo … Semi 9 and snipered him / On that wall they posted him / they cornered him / and then just murdered him.” The dichotomy between the party beat and heavy message forces a double-take—what is this music, anyway?
“Nobody wants to be dancing to political songs … Every bit of music out there that’s making it into the mainstream is really about nothing. I wanted to see if I could write songs about something important and make it sound like nothing. And it kind of worked.
“Nobody wants to be dancing to political songs … Every bit of music out there that’s making it into the mainstream is really about nothing. I wanted to see if I could write songs about something important and make it sound like nothing. And it kind of worked. It sounds like a pop song, but if you really listen to the lyrics, it’s about what I see on the telly and news and what’s going on,” says Arulpragasam matter-of-factly, as if sniper killings are, indeed, a part of “what’s going on” in her world. But then, this Sri Lankan transplant to Britain has had a bit more going on in her life than most.
A rough start Arulpragasam relocated from her native Sri Lanka to London with her mother, sister and brother at the age of 10—but hers isn’t a typical tale of South Asian immigration to the West. Arulpragasam’s life in war-torn Sri Lanka was one of constant secrecy and scraping by. She never knew her father, one of the founding members of Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a militant guerrilla group formed in 1976 with the goal of gaining political independence for Sri Lanka’s minority Tamil population. “We saw him once a year, for 10 minutes at a time. My mum said, ‘That’s your uncle—your dad is dead.’ It was to protect us,” she explains, from the police interrogations at school.
Sri Lankan M.I.A. is a force to be reckoned with. "
This girl gets all my love tomorrow afternoon - big up Ryerson... bet your school ain't bringin down Maya Arulpragasam
