Maya (M.I.A. album)

was one of M.I.A.'s collaborators on the album|alt=A white man with red hair and a slight beard manipulating the controls of a piece of music mixing equipment. He has headphones around his neck and a mask resembling a multi-coloured monkey pushed up onto the top of his head. English-Tamil musician M.I.A. (Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam) released her second album Kala in 2007, which achieved widespread critical acclaim, and was certified gold in the United States and silver in the United Kingdom. Six months after giving birth to her son Ikyhd in February 2009, she began composing and recording her third studio album in a home studio section of the Los Angeles house she had bought with her partner Ben Bronfman. Much of the work on the album was undertaken at her house in Los Angeles, in what she called a "commune environment", before it was completed in a rented studio in Hawaii. M.I.A.'s collaboration with Derek E. Miller of Sleigh Bells on the track "Meds and Feds" prompted her subsequent signing of the band to her label N.E.E.T., and according to Miller, this experience gave him the confidence to record the band's debut album Treats. Her creative partnership with the relatively unknown Rusko grew from a sense of frustration at what she saw as her now more mainstream associates suggesting sub-standard tracks due to their busy schedules. Diplo worked on the track "Tell Me Why", but at a studio in Santa Monica, California, rather than at the house. He claimed in an interview that, following the break-up of his personal relationship with M.I.A. some years earlier, he was not allowed to visit the house because "her boyfriend really hates me". Rusko has described M.I.A. as the best artist he has ever worked with, saying that she had "been the most creative and I really had a good time making music with her". ==Music and lyrics==

M.I.A. called the new project "schizophrenic", and spoke of the Internet inspiration that could be found in the songs and the artwork. She also said that the album centred on her "not being able to leave [Los Angeles] for 18 months" and feeling "disconnected". She summed up the album's main theme as information politics. During the recording of the album, she spoke of the combined effects that news corporations and Google have on news and data collection, while stressing the need for alternative news sources that she felt her son's generation would need to ascertain truth. Maya was made to be "so uncomfortably weird and wrong that people begin to exercise their critical-thinking muscles". M.I.A. said "You can Google 'Sri Lanka' and it doesn't come up that all these people have been murdered or bombed, it's 'Come to Sri Lanka on vacation, there are beautiful beaches' ... you're not gonna get the truth till you hit like, page 56, and it's my and your responsibility to pass on the information that it's not easy anymore". The singer revealed that going into recording the album, she had still not accepted that she was a musician, saying, "I'm still in denial, listening to too much Destiny's Child". With Maya, she stated "I was happy being the retarded cousin of rap... Now I'm the retarded cousin of singing." In a January 2010 interview with NME she spoke of being inspired by the film Food, Inc. and described the album as being about "exploring our faults and flaws" and being proud of them. The closing track, "Space", which was reportedly recorded using an iPhone app, and is based on the theme of the creation of a sex symbol. Kitty Empire wrote in The Observer that these conspiratorial government connections to Google and the thoughts of Dzhennet Abdurakhmanova, the Russian teenager who bombed Moscow's tube system in revenge for the death of her husband, were inner-world issues pondered in "Lovalot" with "a mixture of nonsense rhyme, militant posturing and pop-cultural free-flow; her London glottal stop mischievously turns 'I love a lot' into 'I love Allah' ". Ann Powers in the Los Angeles Times said that "M.I.A. turns a call to action into a scared girl's nervous tic. Synths click out a jittery, jagged background. The song doesn't justify anything, but it reminds us that there is a person behind every lit fuse". "Illygirl", a track found only on the deluxe edition of the album, is written from the point of view of an abused but tough teenager, whom critic Robert Christgau said could be the "kid-sister-in-metaphor" of the swaggering persona adopted by M.I.A. on the track "Steppin Up". Samples used on the album were taken from artists as diverse as the electronic duo Suicide and gospel choir the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers. "Internet Connection", one of four bonus tracks on the deluxe edition of the album, was recorded in collaboration with a group of Filipino Verizon workers. M.I.A. herself picked out "Steppin Up", "Space" and "Teqkilla" as her favourite tracks on the album. She said that she contemplated using only the sound of drills as the backing for "Steppin Up", but concluded that this was "too experimental" an approach. According to Jim Farber of New York Daily News, Maya is an avant-pop album that takes influence from "the most maddeningly catchy bits of electro-clash, hip-hop, Bollywood, dub and dance music". Farber also noted the significant industrial rock influence on the album, likening it to "the late-'80s work of Ministry". Julianne Escobedo Shepherd of The Fader commented on the increasingly industrial feel of the tracks made available prior to the album's release, a style which had not previously been incorporated into her music. On a similar note, Michael Saba of Paste believed the album was "a collection of sparse, industrial-influenced tracks that sound more like post-apocalyptic Nine Inch Nails than Arulpragasam’s trademark realpolitik rap". ==Release and artwork==

The album was originally set to be released on 29 June 2010, but in May M.I.A.'s record label announced a new release date of 13 July. In late April, the artist posted a twitpic of the track listing for the new album. She also commented that at the time she was "open to suggestions" regarding the album's title. Two weeks later, a blog posting on her record label's official website revealed that the album would be entitled /\/\/\Y/\, which spells out M.I.A.'s own forename, Maya, in leetspeak. The title follows on from previous albums named after her father (2005's Arular) and mother (2007's Kala). Some reviewers used the stylised title while others did not. The album was released in conventional physical and digital formats and as an iTunes LP. The album's cover features the singer's face almost completely hidden by YouTube player bars. MTV's Kyle Anderson described the cover, which was previewed in June 2010, as "a typically busy, trippy, disorienting piece of art" and speculated that it might be "a statement about 21st century privacy". Additional art direction for the album was provided by Aaron Parsons. Photographers for the album were Ravi Thiagaraja, M.I.A. and Jamie Martinez. The deluxe edition of the album features a lenticular slipcase. Music website Prefix listed it as one of the 10 worst album covers of 2010, likening it to a "child's first computer-class-assignment". When questioned about the difficulty of finding her album title on search engines such as Google, she noted that she chose to use forward slashes and backward slashes due to their ease at being typed and because she liked the way the album title looked on music players such as iTunes. She also suggested that it was a deliberate attempt to avoid detection by internet search engines. The Guardian Sian Rowe commented that M.I.A.'s deliberate "shrinking away from a mainstream audience" by the use of difficult, unsearchable symbols was part of a growing new underground scene perhaps trying to create a "generation gap", where only "the youngest and the most enthusiastic" would seek out such band names by reading the right online sources. ==Promotion==

On 12 January 2010, M.I.A. posted a video clip on Twitter, which featured a new song, but revealed no information about it other than the heading "Theres space for ol dat I see" (sic). The following day her publicist confirmed that the track was entitled "Space Odyssey" and had been produced in collaboration with Rusko to protest a travel piece about Sri Lanka printed in The New York Times. The track made it onto the final album under the revised title "Space". The film, directed by Romain Gavras, depicts a military unit rounding up red-headed young men who are then shot or forced to run across a minefield. The film, which also features nudity and scenes of drug use, caused widespread controversy and was either removed or labelled with an age restriction on YouTube. In the weeks following the release of the film, M.I.A. was the most blogged about artist on the Internet, according to MP3 blog aggregator The Hype Machine. M.I.A. found the controversy "ridiculous", saying that videos of real-life executions had not generated as much controversy as her video. In the run-up to the album's release, "XXXO", which Entertainment Weekly described as the "first official single" from the forthcoming album, "Steppin Up", "Teqkilla" and "It Takes a Muscle" were released online. On 6 July 2010 she made the entire album available via her Myspace page. On 20 September, "Story To Be Told" received a video, on its own website, featuring the song's lyrics in CAPTCHA formatting. In December, "It Takes a Muscle" was released as a two-track promotional single. in August 2010|alt=An aerial shot of a large gathering of people in a grassy area beside a lake. Several large tents are visible. The new album was publicised during Jay-Z's performance at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in April, when a blimp flew across the venue announcing that M.I.A.'s new album would be released on 29 June 2010. M.I.A. promoted the album with a series of appearances at music festivals, including the Hard festival in New York and The Big Chill in Herefordshire. Her performance at the latter was cut short due to a stage invasion by fans. She also performed at the Flow Festival in Finland, where she was joined onstage by Derek E. Miller playing guitar during her performance of "Meds and Feds", and the Lokerse Feesten in Lokeren, Flanders, Belgium, where her performance drew a crowd of 13,500, the biggest of the 10-day music festival. In September she announced a tour that would last until the end of the year. M.I.A. also promoted the album with an appearance on the "Late Show with David Letterman", during which she performed "Born Free" with Martin Rev of Suicide playing keyboards, backed by a group of dancers styled to look like M.I.A. In November 2010 she appeared on the British television show Later... with Jools Holland, performing "Born Free" and "It Takes a Muscle", the latter with members of The Specials. While promoting the album, M.I.A. became involved in a dispute with Lynn Hirschberg of The New York Times, who interviewed her in March 2010 and whose resulting article portrayed the singer as pretentious and attention seeking. Benjamin Boles wrote in Now that, while Hirschberg's piece came across as a "vicious ... character assassination", M.I.A's subsequent actions were "childish" and made her "the laughing stock of the internet". The paper later printed a correction on the story, acknowledging that some quotes had been taken out of context. The incident prompted Boots Riley of the band Street Sweeper Social Club to comment on how artists had access to media that allowed writers to be held accountable and that M.I.A.'s move was "brilliant". ==Critical reception==

Maya received moderately positive reviews from critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 based on reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 68 based on 41 reviews, which indicates "generally favorable reviews". Simon Vozick-Levinson of Entertainment Weekly called the album "surely the year's most divisive major-label release". Matthew Bennett of Clash gave a similar score, calling it a "towering work". Mojo writer Roy Wilkinson called it a "startling fusillade of to-the-moon pop music". Writing for the BBC Online, Matthew Bennett characterised the album as "loud, proud, and taking no prisoners" and also praised the album's lighter tracks, such as "Teqkilla", which he called "enjoyably demented but utterly catchy". Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield said the album was M.I.A.'s "most aggressive, confrontational and passionate yet", praising her "voracious ear for alarms, sirens, explosions, turning every jolt into a breakbeat" and her consequent lyrics as "expansive". Los Angeles Times writer Ann Powers commended the album as "an attempt by an artist who's defined herself through opposition to engage with the system that she has entered, for better or worse, and to still remain recognizable to herself" characterising Mayas foregrounded ideas as "a struggle worthy of a revolutionary". In his consumer guide for MSN Music, critic Robert Christgau gave the album an A rating and complimented its "beats and the spunky, shape-shifting, stubbornly political, nouveau riche bundle of nerves who holds them together". Other critics were not as complimentary towards the album. Charlotte Heathcote of British newspaper the Daily Express said that, while M.I.A. could "still lay claim to being one of our most imaginative, uncompromising artists", there were "only glimmers of brilliance" on the album. Chicago Tribune writer Greg Kot gave the album two and a half out of four stars and expressed a mixed response towards M.I.A.'s "[embracing] pop more fervently than ever. Entertainment Weeklys Leah Greenblatt was critical of the album, stating that it sounded "murky and almost punishingly discordant, as if the album has been submerged underwater and then set upon by an arsenal of exceptionally peeved power tools". She went on to state that nothing on the album sounded "truly vital", or as revolutionary as M.I.A. wanted the public to believe. Stephen Troussé, writing in Uncut, described the album as "anticlimactic" and "self-satisfied" and said that it suffered from "diminished horizons". Mehan Jayasuriya of PopMatters noted M.I.A.'s "self-aggrandizing" as a weakness, adding that Maya lacks "the focus and confidence of M.I.A.'s previous albums". Jesse Cataldo of Slant Magazine noted that the album "has the feel of a vanity project" and wrote "It may be an above-average album, but its aesthetic matches her persona only at its shallowest levels, in the thinness of its ideas and the often-forceful ugliness of its message". Chris Richard of The Washington Post called it "a disorienting mix of industrial clatter and digital slush" and noted "there isn't much to sing along to". Accolades In December 2010, NME named "XXXO" and "Born Free" the number two and number 11 best tracks of the year respectively. Maya appeared in a number of magazines' lists of the best albums of the year. The album was placed at number five on the "2010 Pitchfork Readers Poll" list of the "Most Underrated Album" of the year. Spin placed Maya at number eight in its list of the best releases of 2010, and Rolling Stone listed it at number 19 in its countdown. Legacy In 2013, in light of recently leaked NSA documents that revealed the agency had been surveilling US citizens' internet use through Google and Facebook, M.I.A. made a Tumblr post saying she had correctly predicted this sort of spying in her song "The Message". Carrie Battan of Pitchfork noted that the then-widespread "criticisms of M.I.A.'s politically charged words and alleged paranoia" could now "seem just as silly as her lyrics once might have". On Maya's tenth anniversary, journalists opined that the album's "internet aversion and overstuffed sound" aged well and could be considered a precursor to the industrial distortion of albums like Yeezus (2013) by Kanye West. ==Commercial performance==

Maya debuted at number 21 on the UK Albums Chart on first-week sales of 7,138 copies, 18 places higher than the peak position achieved by Kala, immediately making it M.I.A.'s highest-charting album in the UK. The following week it dropped out of the top 40. It also charted in a number of other European countries, reaching the top 10 in Finland, Greece and Norway. Maya fell to number 34 in its second week on the chart, selling 11,000 copies. As of September 2013, the album had sold 99,000 copies in the US. The album also topped Billboards Dance/Electronic Albums chart and reached the top five on two of the magazine's other charts. and "Teqkilla" reached number 93 on the Canadian Hot 100 on digital downloads alone. ==Track listing==

• Maya Arulpragasam • Christopher Mercer • Dave Taylor }} • M. Arulpragasam • Charles Smith • Cherry Byron-Withers }} • Blaqstarr • Rusko }} • M. Arulpragasam • Mercer • Taylor • John Hill • Byron-Withers }} • Rusko • M.I.A. • Switch • Hill }} • M. Arulpragasam • Taylor • Hill • Opal Josephs • Sheldon Pennicot • Sekou Davis }} • M.I.A. • Switch • Hill }} • M. Arulpragasam • Mercer • Taylor }} • Rusko • M.I.A. }} • Michael Mulders • Henri Overduin }} • M. Arulpragasam • Smith }} • M. Arulpragasam • Taylor • Martin Rev • Alan Vega }} • Switch • M.I.A. }} • M. Arulpragasam • Derek E. Miller }} • M.I.A. • Miller }} • M. Arulpragasam • Wesley Pentz }} • M. Arulpragasam • Mercer }} • Rusko • M.I.A. }} }} • M.I.A. • Blaqstarr }} • M. Arulpragasam • Smith }} • M.I.A. • Blaqstarr }} • M. Arulpragasam • Smith }} • M.I.A. • Switch }} • M. Arulpragasam • Smith }} }} Notes • "Lovalot" incorporates elements of "I Said It" by Opal. • "It Takes a Muscle" is a cover of "It Takes a Muscle to Fall in Love" by Spectral Display. • "Born Free" contains a sample from "Ghost Rider" by Suicide. • "Tell Me Why" incorporates elements of "The Last Words of Copernicus" by the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers. • "Internet Connection" incorporates a sample from Fonejacker. ==Personnel==

Credits adapted from the liner notes of the deluxe edition of Maya. • Maya Arulpragasam – mixing (tracks 1, 5, 12, 15); production (tracks 4–6, 9, 10, 12–15); art direction, creative direction, executive producer, photography • Ben H. Allen – mixing (tracks 3, 11) • Sugu Arulpragasam – production (track 1) • Blaqstarr – production (tracks 3, 8, 13, 14, 16); mixing (tracks 13, 14, 16) • Diplo – production (tracks 7, 11) • Robert Gardner – mix assistance (tracks 3, 11) • John Hill – production (tracks 4, 5) • Jaime Martínez – photography • Derek E. Miller – mixing, production (track 10) • Aaron Parsons – art direction • Neal Pogue – mixing (track 2) • Rusko – production (tracks 2–4, 6, 12) • Shane P. Stoneback – mixing (track 10) • Switch – mixing (track 2); production (tracks 4, 5, 9); vocal production (track 15) • Ravi Thiagaraja – photography ==Charts==

Weekly charts Monthly charts Year-end charts ==Release history==