The Final Rebellion?

M.I.A. claims that her latest album ‘AIM’ will be her last. Emily Mackay meets Mathangi Arul pragasam to talk refugees,controversies and retirement, and encounters a person with a lot more still to say and do.

- Emily Mackay

Every M.I.A. Album seems to arrive in a storm of public controversies – and ‘AIM’, the fifth album from Mathangi ‘Maya’ Arulpragasam, 41, is no different. There’s her run-in with the black lives Matter movement, when she suggested that US celebrities were less keen to say Muslim or Syrian lives matter; the threat of a lawsuit from the Paris Saint-Germain football team, when she doctored their shirt’s emirates Airlines sponsor logo to read “Fly Pirates” in the ‘borders’ video (in which she joins crowds of refugees boarding an overcrowded boat and scaling barbed wire); her spat with MTv, which she accused of “racism, sexism, classism, elitism” after ‘borders’ missed out on a VMA nomination; the Twitter tongue-lashing she gave her label Inter scope for under promoting and delaying her work; and, of course, there’s the fact that every album she releases she claims will be her last.

So what is it about the process of making new music that leads one of the decade’s greatest pop provocateurs to feel like giving up just at the point she should be most triumphant? In 2016, in particular, you’d think she’d be loudest and proudest, when the things she’s always focused on – the refugee experience, corporate control of culture and the internet – are more talked about than ever.