MIA

Robin has posted about Maya Arulpragasm a few times in the past, including here. As he has noted, her politics seem a little sketchy, what with the seeming romantics around the rather nihilistic tactics of the famed Tamil Tigers. But her music is pretty damned good. Go figure.

Here's a new interview from The Observer.

'The Tigers killed two groups off, leaders and kid soldiers included. When it came to my dad's group he said, "I don't want to kill off all these boys for the sake of an ideal." He gave up and walked away, and Eros eventually disintegrated.'

Though she remembers the soldiers in their house, bouncing her on their knee, saying: "Tell me where your dad is," she remembers little of her father himself. He has been in contact recently but, says Maya, 'I don't want to start that relationship and then have to go on tour. I've read about what he did and people come out at Tamil conventions to tell me how great he was. But because I was raised by my mum, I got to see behind the scenes of a person like him.' Far from falling in love with an activist, her mother met her father through an arranged marriage, having been told he was an engineer. 'Ever since she was a baby she was raised to be the housewife that all Sri Lankan women are meant to be. She couldn't play out the fantasy 'cos she didn't have a husband. Him going away was worse for her. All the women were like, "He didn't even die? He just left you with two children, what's wrong with you? Fuck him starting a revolution, he isn't at home!"' When Maya reached womanhood herself, she decided, like Marianne Faithfull reading William Burroughs and deciding to become a drug addict, that, having fallen in love with hip-hop, she was going to move to South Central LA and become a gangsta's bitch. It was a move both rebellious and reactionary.