In early May, the Believer sat down with M.I.A., a London-born Sri Lankan, former art-school student, and current Interscope recording artist, on the eve of her third album. Her new music seems to come from everywhere and nowhere, appropriately enough for an era when “pop” and “world music” are no longer opposed categories but increasingly one and the same. For the music biz, this is the meaning of “globalization.”

And yet the music also comes from a person: Maya Arulpragasam, slight, chattily articulate, intensely watchful. As we spoke, she referred frequently to images and sounds on her customized computer: a laptop in “M.I.A. colors” that her fiancé, Ben, had gotten her special, in anodized yellow gold with blue keys and a red trackpad. 

Like her music, M.I.A. has a paradoxical relationship to place, alternately wandering and being stranded throughout the world. At the time of this interview, she was fixed in London, unable to get a visa home, in this case to Brooklyn. This is a family tradition: her mother (ostensibly because of connections to Maya’s father, a significant Tamil figure in the Sri Lankan civil struggles) had been unable to travel for some time. 

This is not M.I.A.’s only contradiction. After releasing the no-samples-cleared bootleg Piracy Funds Terrorism—a title almost no other artist could say and mean—her breakthrough single, “Galang,” went on to sound track a Honda commercial, and consequently earn skepticism toward her politics. And yet her second proper album, Kala, managed to have the most thrilling political anthem of the decade, “Paper Planes.” Elsewhere on the album, hiding from nothing, she insisted she was “dogging on the bonnet of your red Honda.” 

Rioter or passenger, outsider or insider, revolutionary or sellout? The categories don’t work so well these days, if they ever did. This is the point, inevitably, of the music, and it is the music that matters. It is art for a moment when categories aren’t working very well, when things are falling apart and centers aren’t holding. It does not try to contain this situation but to register it, to give it a feeling, to get a sense of whether it might indeed be late in something—pop music, history, the U.S. empire. We discussed these matters, her family, terrorism, and, most of all, the Internet.

—Joshua Clover 

I. “THE DAY THAT ISRAEL AND PALESTINE SOLVE THEIR ISSUE IS THE END OF THE WORLD.”

M.I.A.: It’s a really interesting time for musicians because you really have to be a distraction now. You need to be ready to be exploited at all times, to be a distraction when there’s real shit going on. And that’s what Lady Gaga does so...