Celebrity Biographies
MIA (Rapper) Biography, Husband, Family, Son, Albums, Songs & Lyrics
MIA BIOGRAPHY
MIA born Mathangi Arulpragasam is a British rapper, songwriter, singer, record producer and activist. Her stage name is a pun on her name as well as a reference to the abbreviation Missing in Action.
His compositions include elements of alternative, electronic, dance, hip hop and world music. She went to Catholic convent schools, including the Holy Family Convent, Jaffna, where she developed her artistic skills, especially painting.
MIA AGE
She was born on July 18, 1975 in Hounslow, United Kingdom. She is 43 years old.
MI A FAMILY
She was born to Arul Pragasam, an engineer, writer and activist, and Kala, a seamstress. Her family moved to Jaffna when she was 6 months old, the political, cultural and economic capital of Tamil-dominated northern Sri Lanka, where her brother Sugu was born. His father adopted the name Arular and became a political activist and founding member of the Eelam Revolutionary Organization of Students, a Tamil political group affiliated with the LTTE.
MI One photo
M I AM HUSBAND/SON
She first dated American DJ Diplo. The two met at the Fabric Club in London, and five years before their separation. She then met Benjamin Bronfman, member of the Bronfman family and the Lehman family, environmentalist, founder of Green Owl and musician. The couple got engaged and she gave birth to their son, Ikhyd Edgar Arular Bronfman, on February 13, 2009. The two separated in February 2012.
MI A CAREER
In 2000, she began her career as a filmmaker, visual artist and designer in West London before embarking on her recording career in 2002. She rose to fame in early 2004 for her very popular singles Sunshowers and Galang. charting well in Canada and the UK, she reached No. 11 on the Billboard Hot Dance Singles Sales in the US, she was nominated for an Academy Award, three Grammy Awards and the Mercury Prize.
In 2005, she released her first album Arular. She then released her second album Kala in 2007, both to critical acclaim. Arular, charting in Belgium, Norway, Japan, Sweden and the United States, reached No. 16 on the Billboard Independent Albums chart and No. 3 on the Dance/Electronic Albums chart in the United States. Her debut album Kala was certified silver in the UK and gold in Canada and the US. It has also been charted in several countries in Europe, Japan and Australia. The album’s lead single, “Boyz”, reached the Top 10 in Canada and at the Billboard Hot Dance Singles Sales in 2007, becoming her first Top 10 single.
ALBUMS BY MIA
- Kala
- Matangi
- AIM
- Arular
- Maya
- Vicki Leekx
- Hacking funds terrorism
- How many votes set the mix
- paper planes
- XXXO (The Remixes)
MIA MUSIC / SONGS
- bad girls
- paper planes
- Limits
- xxxo
- Galang / MIA
- Double bubble problem
- bring the sound
- Boyz
- POWA
- Sexodus
- YET THE.
- Leave
- jimmy
- Bucky Done Gun
- freedun
- O… me
- Sunflowers
- ATTENTION
- come walk with me
- born free
- To finish
- Bird’s song
- Warriors
- swords
- Banga bamboo
- The new international sound
- come around
- Bird flu
- Internet connection
- foreign friend
- IT TAKES A MUSCLE
- Teqkilla
MI A DOUBLE BUBBLE PROBLEM
‘Double bubble problem’
MIA PAPER AIRPLANES
MI AARTWORK
MIA became known for incorporating its imagery of political violence into its music videos and cover art. Her politically inspired art became recognized as she exhibited and published many of her vividly colored stencils and paintings depicting the tiger, a symbol of Tamil nationalism, ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka and urban Britain in the early 1900s. 2000s.
MIA TWITTER
I HAVE AN INSTAGRAM
Updated: Feb 26, 2018
Together, we discussed everything from “trendy activism” and being labeled “rude” to a few select words Madonna’s manager shared with MIA after the Super Bowl.
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How did you feel the first time you saw “Matangi/Maya/MIA”?
MIA.: I was empty, I didn’t get an answer, but the second time… I was crying.
Steve Loveridge: You looked really angry!
MIA.: I was just impressed that no one was outside of the cinema trying to arrest me or put me in jail. That was the main thing for me…I was like, even if Steve made a movie about me shopping for an hour, it would be controversial in America.
How do you think people’s perception of you might change after seeing this movie in America?
MIA.: I’m not sure. I think they need it in this age of Instagram and the kind of brilliant X-Factor people who are constantly in a public space. There are some parts of my family and my story that are really hard to watch, but you almost have to. It’s like doing it for the culture… Maybe now people’s attention span can stretch a little six seconds and skip something for 90 minutes.
SL: I didn’t do [ Matangi/Maya/MIA ] with the idea of convincing people or that people who didn’t like it would come out of the cinema and be like, ‘That completely changed their minds.’ Make a movie open enough for people to decide it’s important. [TO MIA] Why are you a problematic popstar? I think part of that comes from you and part of how the music culture and industry is created. It’s no longer an easy place to be political.
MIA.: Even though right now it’s the marketable thing – the revolution. Everyone who spoke at the Grammys is like, “OMG, so powerful” about things that are still in a sphere of acceptability, but when I’ve said things like that before… it felt like the most important thing.
SL: There are really strict rules about how to be an activist in America and how to talk about issues like race and feminism. I think MIA is an explorer who goes to the edge and tests the limits. Sometimes it doesn’t go well.
MIA.: Also, I think there’s a cultural difference in how you understand things. For Americans and American musicians, they only have to deal with [these issues] on one continent. The concept of problem and the objectives of the problem are defined in the West. They are not defined on a global platform.
SL: Even having a major film of a white person about a brown person, friendship and all, the first reaction was like “A man making a film about a woman, a white man, a brown woman… It doesn’t does not work. You can not do this. The job was to put together things that MIA had shot and said. It’s not like I’m telling this story from my perspective. It was more a curation of material, finding a thread, a story and honoring that story, rather than projecting my own opinions onto it.
Why did you start shooting these images of yourself?
MIA.: I was filming the Sri Lanka stuff to make a documentary…Before that, my family stuff, I was just shooting because I had access to a camera and filming everything. I wanted to explore how to solve my family’s problems. My father was away and my brother had been in trouble. He was in an institute for young offenders at 16, so I was really using the camera to show him “him” and see how he understood himself.
I understood that when you bring a camera into a room it changes things, but I did it so many times that eventually everyone forgot about it. I think I was pushing them into therapy… I didn’t know that was going to be in the movie at the time because I felt creativity was what we were making a movie about.
What did you learn about yourself by watching the film?
MIA.: I don’t know. I am still processing. I learned a lot about my friendship with Steve [Loveridge] actually… It’s not the movie I would have done, because mine would have been more about the art and less about the personal, but Steve was very kind to my early family affairs. It has the fewest shots to get the point across, as there were only hours and hours of that early stuff.
Before, in 2011, we were thinking of doing a documentary about the live shows, all the aesthetics of my works and stuff like that… When [Steve] got all my footage… he showed me ten minutes of it in 2013 and I was sick . I vomited for four days. I had a fever, I was sick… I was in depression for so long and I was like, “No, you can’t do that!” It was just terrible.
Do you ever worry about losing the immense drive we saw you display early on in “Matangi/Maya/MIA”?
MIA.: I thought that when I watched it. What do you do after the bones of your life are somehow there? I think now maybe I can be a creator without people judging me on all these complicated things that I’ve never been very good at explaining without this movie. I’ve always had trouble because it’s too hard to explain these things.
Music videos are a powerful form of expression for you, MIA
MIA.: Yeah, when I had that moment in America after the civil war [in Sri Lanka] ended and ‘Born Free’ came out, it was just trying to talk about the pictures and videos of execution. It’s on the same smartphone next to this Lady Gaga video. I’m like that person, but also that person… Those are the issues I was dealing with at the time.
SL: We would bring music videos [to art school] and say, ‘This is important’ because it meant something to us. I am gay, MIA is a Sri Lankan immigrant… Seeing people portrayed really meant something to us. There is power in pop culture. It was like food to make you feel better, and it was really important to have icons to hang on to.
Do you have any regrets about your Super Bowl performance in 2012? And you’ve spoken to Madonna since?
MIA.: I never regret anything. But no, we haven’t stayed in touch. Guy Oseary [Madonna’s manager] called me and he said I was like ‘the drunk person at the wedding who crashed the wedding’ and we never spoke after that.
How do you continue to be politically active while becoming more and more famous? Is it something you know better now?
MIA.: This is the battle, and it’s a battle that isn’t being addressed in the music right now for some reason… I didn’t do anything wrong, hurt anyone, or shoot people. or whatever. I just said things about what is happening. I find the scale of capitalist achievement quite crude and yet, because I didn’t, that’s why I was disgusting. The whole cultural entertainment system was so disgusted by me.
When I was trying to settle down and be normal and get married and have a baby, they were like ‘WTF, do you? Why are you in Beverly Hills? ”And then the year after, when I’m completely kicked out of this whole system and I’m poor, everyone says, ‘You’re a shitty artist and nobody likes you because you’re not not a billionaire… Nobody watches your videos and you don’t have a sports brand and you don’t have your own hair shampoo.
You failed as a person, so they’re never happy. I can never make them happy. Whether you succeed and succeed on this side or are a complete activist on this side, no one will be happy. It’s the contradiction, you know? But at the same time, they say it’s totally cool to be like this in America right now. How not to address this issue at a time when activism has become fashionable and where it markets the biggest brands in the world?