M.I.A. has announced she’s taking an extended break from music, saying she feels her content is being buried in the internet world and therefore can’t give weight to the issues that matter to her. Her last album, AIM, was released in 2016 and spoke about her concerns over censorship from the music industry. In a recent interview (below) with House Of Strombo, she mentioned she was not motivated to put her music out in this current system, emphasizing “For me, I have to find another way.” She mentioned the feeling of not fitting into the diversity of America, and how she had to battle not having a genre for 15 years. She added, “If I want to be bigger, I kind of have to say nothing.”
M.I.A. made a point about marketing versus her own artistry in saying, “I might have to make an anti-Trump record, but if I make anything else, it’s not going to wash…But if I want to talk about Tamil women wearing uniforms and eating cyanide pills because they didn’t want to be raped by the Sri Lankan army…I know that both of these extremes of women exist.” She later on implied she was sidelined by the music industry due to her political views.
The M.I.A. documentary “MATANGI/MAYA/M.I.A.” was released last month in select movie theaters.
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