The latter's single, "Paper Planes", (co-produced by at-the-time partner Diplo) peaked at number four on the US Billboard Hot 100 and received a nomination for Record of the Year at the 51st Annual Grammy Awards.

Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam[6] was born on 18 July 1975,[7] in Hounslow, London, the daughter of Arul Pragasam,[8] a Sri Lankan Tamil engineer, writer, and activist, and his wife, Kala, a seamstress.

[18] Arulpragasam spent the rest of her childhood and teenage years living on the Phipps Bridge Estate in the Mitcham district of south London, where she learned to speak English, while her mother brought the children up on a modest income.

[11] While attending Central St Martins College, Arulpragasam wanted to make films and art depicting realism that would be accessible to everyone, something that she felt was missing from her classmates' ethos and the course criteria.

[18] From there, she developed an interest in hip-hop and dancehall, identifying with "the starkness of the sound" in records by Public Enemy, MC Shan and Ultramagnetic MCs; and the "weird, distinct style" of acts such as Silver Bullet and London Posse.

[35][36] In 2003, the independent label Showbiz Records pressed 500 vinyl singles of "Galang", a mix of dancehall, electro, jungle, and world music, with Seattle Weekly praising its a cappella coda as a "lift-up-and-over moment" evoking "clear skies beyond the council flats.

[49] The music video for "Galang" made in November of that year showed multiple M.I.A.s against a backdrop of militaristic animated graffiti, and depicted scenes of urban Britain and war that influenced her art direction for it.

The songs "Pull Up the People", "Bucky Done Gun" and "" were released as 12-inch singles and CDs by XL Recordings, which along with the non-label mashup mixtape of Arular tracks, Piracy Funds Terrorism, were distributed in 2004 to positive critical acclaim.

[71][73][74] "Paper Planes" is to date XL Recordings' second best selling single, and by November 2011 it had sold 3.6 million copies in the US, currently the seventh best-selling song by a British artist in the digital era.

and director Spike Jonze filmed a documentary in Woolwich, South London, in which they both appeared with Afrikan Boy, a Nigerian immigrant rapper and she disclosed plans to launch her own record label, Zig-Zag.

[33] She cancelled the final leg of her tour in Europe through June and July after revealing her intentions to take a career break and work on other art projects, go back to college and make a film.

[134][135][136] The first buzz track of her fourth album, "Bad Girls", taken from her Vicki Leekx mixtape, premiered on 30 January 2012, was released globally the day after, and was followed by a music video directed by Romain Gavras on 3 February 2012.

[32][35][46][178] She was a childhood fan of Boney M, composer A. R. Rahman and pop artists Michael Jackson and Madonna,[22][35] also she has cited Björk as an inspiration and has been influenced by The Slits, Public Enemy, Malcolm McLaren and The Clash.

[186] Similarly, Jeffrey H. Wallenfeldt writes in The Black Experience in America : From Civil Rights to the Present that no single artist may have personified hip hop in the 21st century better than M.I.A., in her "politically radical lyrics drawing from widely diverse sources around the world".

Her politically inspired art became recognised while she exhibited and published several of her brightly coloured stencils and paintings portraying the tiger, a symbol of Tamil nationalism, ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka and urban Britain in the early 2000s.

Lyrics on Arular regarding her experiences of identity politics, poverty, revolution, gender and sexual stereotypes, war, and the conditions of working class in London were hailed as new and unorthodox, setting her apart from previous artists.

a travel visa coupled with her brief presence on the US Homeland Security Risk List in 2006 due to her politically charged lyrics led to her second album Kala being recorded in a variety of locations around the world.

[33][64] The album's artwork was inspired by African art, "from dictator fashion to old stickers on the back of cars", which like her clothing range, she hoped would capture "a 3-D sense, the shapes, the prints, the sound, film, technology, politics, economics" of a certain time.

[211] I-D magazine described the "bleeding cacophony of graphics" on her website during this time as evoking the "noisy amateurism" of the early web, but also embodying a rejection of today's "glossy, professional site design" which was felt to "efface the medium rather than celebrate it.

"[213] Her third album, Maya, tackled information politics in the digital age, loaded with technological references and love songs, and deemed by Kitty Empire writing in The Observer to be her most melancholic and mainstream effort.

[214] Her genocide-depicting 2010 video for the single "Born Free" was deemed by Ann Powers writing in the Los Angeles Times to be "concentrating fully" on the physical horror of gun butts and bullets hitting flesh, with the scenes giving added poignancy to the lyrical themes of the song.

[196] Interpreted as a comment on the Arizona immigration law, America's military might and desensitised attitudes towards violence, others found that the video stressed that genocide still exists and violent repression remains commonplace.

[10][111][223] She went on to state, "It's just fake blood and ketchup and people are more offended by that than the execution videos", referring to clips of Sri Lankan troops extrajudicially shooting unarmed, blindfolded, naked men that she had previously tweeted.

She incorporated eccentric accessories in bold patterns, sparkle and "over-saturated" neon colour to fashion her signature style which inspired flocks of "garishly-clothed all-too-sassy" new-rave girls with bright red tights, cheetah-skin smock and faded 1980s T- shirts.

's hybrid style addressed a number of social and political issues including power, violence, identity and survival in a globalised world, while using avenues that challenged "traditional" definitions of what it meant to be a contemporary pop artist.

He continued that while swayed by her chutzpah and ability to deliver live, he "was also turned off by the stencil-sprayed projection imagery of grenades, tanks, and so forth (redolent of the Clash with their strife-torn Belfast stage backdrops and Sandinista cred by association)" while the "99 percent white audience punched the air", admonishing what he perceived as a "lack of local character" to her debut album.

[249] Critic Robert Christgau described Reynolds' argument as "cheap tack" in another article written in the publication, stating M.I.A's experiences connected her to world poverty in a way "few Western whites can grasp".

stated that international governments were privy to Sri Lanka's use of widespread censorship and propaganda on the rebellion during the island's civil war to aid its impunity in numerous atrocities on civilians, but had no will to end it.

[citation needed] She has been accused of being a "terrorist sympathiser" and "LTTE supporter" by the Sri Lankan government,[10][264] even by public figures such as Oprah Winfrey, as was stated in a Rolling Stone magazine article, where the singer recalled their exchange: "She shut me down.

's bloodline, politics and grievance meant that she was more informed than most and gave her "every right to be a partisan and were reason for caution," he praised her efforts for leading thousands of American writers including himself to know of the situation in Sri Lanka as "brilliant", noting her mainly humanitarian angle in her protesting of civilian casualties that had been vastly and disproportionately inflicted on Sri Lanka's Tamil minority and her courage in "putting her success and fame on the line to use every opportunity and avenue possible to remind Americans and people around the globe of this conflict" is pretty much the most admirable thing going in pop music.