#AMILFACTS
#35 TOP FEMALE RAPPER LIST
ACTIVE: 1994 TO PRESENT
Amil Kahala Whitehead (born September 19, 1978) more commonly known by her stage name Amil, is an American female rapper, singer, and songwriter from New York City.
She was prominent in the late 1990s as aJay-Z protégé, most notably on the single "Can I Get A..." from theRush Hour soundtrack.
Early life
Amil was born September 19, 1978 in New York, New York. She is of African American, Native American (specifically Cherokee), and Caucasian descent.
Early career
In 1997, Amil was involved with an all-female group called "Major Coins". The group met Jay-Z, who was looking for a woman to provide vocals on his third album,Vol. 2... Hard Knock Life. The part for the female rapper was really for her friend, but when Jay-Z asked Amil to freestyle and liked it, he decided to put her on the song instead. Amil, wanting to remain loyal to her friend, did not prefer to be put on the song, but Jay-Z allowed them both to do a version of the song.
Soon after Major Coins broke up, Amil decided to follow a solo career with Jay-Z's label, Roc-A-Fella Records, joining the 1999 Hard Knock Life Tour. After the tour, she appeared on songs with Mariah Carey, Beyoncé, Jermaine Dupri, AZ, DJ Kay Slay, LL Cool Jand Funkmaster Flex.
Throughout her career, she has appeared on many songs with Jay-Z including "Nigga What, Nigga Who" which also featured Jay-Z, the hit-single, "Can I Get A..." that featured Ja Rule and othercollaborations with him including "Hey Papi", "Do It Again (Put Ya Hands Up)", "S Carter", "Heard It All", "You, Me, Him and Her", "That's Right", "Playa" and lastly, "4 Da Fam" and "For My Thugs" that both featured Memphis Bleek andBeanie Siegel.
On September 19, 2000 Amil released her debut solo album, A.M.I.L - All Money Is Legal.
All Money Is Legal
Her solo debut, A.M.I.L - All Money Is Legal, was released in 2000. The album featured the hit single "I Got That", a duet with Beyoncé (singer of R&B group Destiny's Child), and All-Star Roc-A-Fella single "4 Da Fam". The album features Memphis Bleek, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Carl Thomas, Eve, and Beanie Sigel. Amil is a practicing Black Hebrew Israelite and her affiliation is evident on songs such as "Quarrels" Album sales were disappointing, and the singles did not sell well either.
After that album, her last Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam single was released: "Hey Papi", a song from the soundtrack to the feature film The Nutty Professor II. Due to the fact that she was featured in the video only briefly, it was expected that she had already been dropped by that time. In 2002, Amil had a small role in State Property along with other Roc-a-Fella members such as Dame Dash and Jay-Z.
Later career
In 2005, Amil temporarily re-formed "Major Coinz" and released songs on the mixtape circuit including the single "Glamorous Life" which was featured on MTV Mixtape Monday.
In a 2006 interview, when asked whether female MCs are forced to meet standards that male MCs are not, she said: "Oh, yeah. Definitely. You have to be picture-perfect and you have to meet the standards of the perfect woman. That's unreal to me. Real women do not have plastic-looking bodies. The average woman is not a size 0. You can do what you have to do to keep yourself looking like that or you could just be you. Me, I choose to just be me." She went on to say that she holds no grudges against her former labelmates, though she has no communication with them.
In 2008, Amil released mixtapes entitled Az Iz and Amil Returns The Lost Classics Edition delivering lyrically with songs such as the emotional "Tears of a teenage mother" and the Caribbean vibed "Don't worry".
In August 2011, Amil spoke out through Vibe Magazine and gave the following statement about Jay-Z: "I haven't spoken to Jay in years but I really wish I could talk to him because that would just really bring closure to me. But he knows I love him," she says. "People think there was bad blood between us, but there never was any bad blood. Things happen and I wasn't ready for where my career was going at that time. It was really overwhelming."
In July 2012, off of her forthcoming mixtape A time to kill, Amil released new music "Stop" Amil released new music “Remember" in 2014 off of her forthcoming mixtape Another Moment in Life.
Personal life
Amil has three children and was previously involved with rapper Killah Priest, a close affiliate of the Wu-Tang Clan. She is a practicing Hebrew Israelite currently living in North Carolina.
Sunday, July 12, 2015
Friday, July 10, 2015
YOON MIRAE FACTS
#YOONMIRAEFACTS
#33 TOP FEMALE RAPPER
ACTIVE: 1997 TO PRESENT
Natasha Shanta Reid (born May 31, 1981), known by her Korean name Yoon Mi-rae, is an American-born South Korean rapper and singer.
She is part of the Korean hip hop crew The Movement and current member of MFBTY.
She is married to Tiger JK, and has one son with him. She was selected the 12th best new female emcees dominating mics worldwide by MTV IGGY in 2011.
Early life
Reid was born in Fort Hood, Texas to a Korean mother and an African American father. She often faced discrimination because of her mixed heritage.
Her father, Thomas J. Reid, was a DJ when she was young, so she naturally became acquainted with music. Because her father was also in the military, Reid lived in multiple locations, including Fort Lewis, Washington, Washington DC and Germany.
Career
In 1995, she accompanied a friend to a World Records audition for a group which would later becomeUptown. She did not audition herself, but a World staff member heard Tasha singing the lyrics to songs outside of the audition room, and casted her immediately.
Uptown debuted in South Korea in early 1997, when Reid was just 16. Tasha was one of the first mixed race artists in Korean music, causing much criticism in a homogeneous society.
Tasha later revealed her struggles in her 2007 single, "Black Happiness", which spoke of how industry executives told her to deny her African American heritage.
In 1999, she also formed Tashannie, a hip-hop and R&B project for which she was the primary vocalist, alongside Annie Lee, who was also a member of Uptown. Uptown broke up in 2000 after a scandal proved two members to be involved in drugs. A year later, Tasha debuted as a solo artist, under the moniker T.
In 2002, she released her 1.5 album, Gemini. It was the first Korean hip-hop album to debut in the Japanese market. Tasha later left World Music to join Jungle Entertainment, a label founded by now husband Tiger JK.
In February 2012, Yoon became the face of Hewlett-Packard by signing a one-year contact to appear in their print media and radio advertisements.
She was one of four judges for the third season of Superstar K, and as of October 2012, was also judge for the fourth season.
On January 2013, Yoon, together with husband Tiger JK and Bizzy as members of MFBTY (My Fans Better Than Yours), were selected as representatives of Kpop for Korea at the International Music Tradeshow on Midem, in Cannes, France. They performed in their own showcase 'K-Pop Night Out at MIDEM 2013'.
In September 2013, Yoon earned the #1 spot on Billboard's Korea K-Pop Hot 100 list with her song "Touch Love" from the South Korean drama Master's Sun.
In December 2014, her groupMfbty was rebranded under her name. Their first single under that name "Angel" hit no. 1 on the Gaon charts.
Also in that month she revealed that the American film The Interview used her song "Pay Day" without permission, and that she will be taking legal action.
Personal life
Reid speaks Korean and English fluently.
She is an advocate against child abuse as seen by her participation in Vogue Korea's Stop & Love Campaign in 2011 and performing at the 2011 Child Abuse Awareness Concert. Together with Tiger JK, she received a commendation from South Korea's Ministry of Health and Welfare for her efforts in promoting child abuse prevention.
She also promotes awareness with multicultural families as seen with her seven month volunteer commitment in a multicultural youth camp in 2008. This is probably a result of her own history as a child of mixed ethnic origin where she experienced prejudice in Korean society against her racial background.
In June 2007, she married Tiger JK (member of Drunken Tiger) in a private ceremony. The wedding occurred a month before the death of Tiger JK's grandmother who had wanted to see them wed before her passing. Yoon became pregnant with son Jordan, the same month Tiger JK's grandmother died in July 2007. Jordan was born later in March 2008.
#33 TOP FEMALE RAPPER
ACTIVE: 1997 TO PRESENT
Natasha Shanta Reid (born May 31, 1981), known by her Korean name Yoon Mi-rae, is an American-born South Korean rapper and singer.
She is part of the Korean hip hop crew The Movement and current member of MFBTY.
She is married to Tiger JK, and has one son with him. She was selected the 12th best new female emcees dominating mics worldwide by MTV IGGY in 2011.
Early life
Reid was born in Fort Hood, Texas to a Korean mother and an African American father. She often faced discrimination because of her mixed heritage.
Her father, Thomas J. Reid, was a DJ when she was young, so she naturally became acquainted with music. Because her father was also in the military, Reid lived in multiple locations, including Fort Lewis, Washington, Washington DC and Germany.
Career
In 1995, she accompanied a friend to a World Records audition for a group which would later becomeUptown. She did not audition herself, but a World staff member heard Tasha singing the lyrics to songs outside of the audition room, and casted her immediately.
Uptown debuted in South Korea in early 1997, when Reid was just 16. Tasha was one of the first mixed race artists in Korean music, causing much criticism in a homogeneous society.
Tasha later revealed her struggles in her 2007 single, "Black Happiness", which spoke of how industry executives told her to deny her African American heritage.
In 1999, she also formed Tashannie, a hip-hop and R&B project for which she was the primary vocalist, alongside Annie Lee, who was also a member of Uptown. Uptown broke up in 2000 after a scandal proved two members to be involved in drugs. A year later, Tasha debuted as a solo artist, under the moniker T.
In 2002, she released her 1.5 album, Gemini. It was the first Korean hip-hop album to debut in the Japanese market. Tasha later left World Music to join Jungle Entertainment, a label founded by now husband Tiger JK.
In February 2012, Yoon became the face of Hewlett-Packard by signing a one-year contact to appear in their print media and radio advertisements.
She was one of four judges for the third season of Superstar K, and as of October 2012, was also judge for the fourth season.
On January 2013, Yoon, together with husband Tiger JK and Bizzy as members of MFBTY (My Fans Better Than Yours), were selected as representatives of Kpop for Korea at the International Music Tradeshow on Midem, in Cannes, France. They performed in their own showcase 'K-Pop Night Out at MIDEM 2013'.
In September 2013, Yoon earned the #1 spot on Billboard's Korea K-Pop Hot 100 list with her song "Touch Love" from the South Korean drama Master's Sun.
In December 2014, her groupMfbty was rebranded under her name. Their first single under that name "Angel" hit no. 1 on the Gaon charts.
Also in that month she revealed that the American film The Interview used her song "Pay Day" without permission, and that she will be taking legal action.
Personal life
Reid speaks Korean and English fluently.
She is an advocate against child abuse as seen by her participation in Vogue Korea's Stop & Love Campaign in 2011 and performing at the 2011 Child Abuse Awareness Concert. Together with Tiger JK, she received a commendation from South Korea's Ministry of Health and Welfare for her efforts in promoting child abuse prevention.
She also promotes awareness with multicultural families as seen with her seven month volunteer commitment in a multicultural youth camp in 2008. This is probably a result of her own history as a child of mixed ethnic origin where she experienced prejudice in Korean society against her racial background.
In June 2007, she married Tiger JK (member of Drunken Tiger) in a private ceremony. The wedding occurred a month before the death of Tiger JK's grandmother who had wanted to see them wed before her passing. Yoon became pregnant with son Jordan, the same month Tiger JK's grandmother died in July 2007. Jordan was born later in March 2008.
Wednesday, July 8, 2015
SHAWNNA the Rapper FACTS
#SHAWNNAFACTS
#34 TOP FEMALE RAPPER
ACTIVE: 1996 TO PRESENT
Rashawnna Guy (born January 3, 1978), better known by her stage name Shawnna, is an Americanrapper. She was the first female artist signed to Def Jam South through Ludacris' Disturbing tha Peace Records. She is a former member of the female Chicago rap duo Infamous Syndicate and she is also the daughter of the blues musician Buddy Guy.
She is known for her rapid-fire delivery and her sexually explicit image and lyrics. She is one of only five female rappers (others being Lauryn Hill, Lil' Kim, Remy Ma and Iggy Azalea) to ever have a number-one song on the USBillboard Hot 100, with 2003's "Stand Up" with Ludacris.
Music career
Early career
An MC from the south side of Chicago and the daughter of blues guitarist Buddy Guy. Shawnna began writing rhymes while in high school. She caught her first break in 1996, when her duo Infamous Syndicate opened for Junior M.A.F.I.A. in Chicago. Infamous Syndicate signed to Relativity a year later and released Changing the Game in 1999. The album did not live up to its title, despite production help from No I.D. and Kanye West, the duo was dropped and eventually split. She then went on to team with Ludacris where she was featured on his song "What's Your Fantasy". Before she recorded her first album, Shawnna was featured on the remix to the song "Loverboy" by Mariah Carey for the album and movie Glitter. She was featured in the video along with Ludacris, Da Brat, and Twenty II.
Worth tha Weight (2002-04)
Shawnna's debut album Worth tha Weight, originally scheduled to be released in October 2002, was delayed until September 26, 2004 and was released with little promotion due to disputes at Def Jam. Her album was well received by critics, and spawned the singles "Shake Dat Shit" and "Weight a Minute".
Block Music & departure from DTP (2006-07)
Shawnna's second album Block Music was released on June 27, 2006. Its sales have been initially lower than expected. The album has so far sold more than 260,000 copies worldwide. In preparation of the album, Shawnna teamed up with Clinton Sparks, one of Rolling Stone′s Top 10 mixtape producers, to release the official prelude to the album titled Block Music: The Mixtape. This mixtape features exclusive tracks and freestyles as well as the official "Gettin' Some(All-Star remix)" that featured Busta Rhymes, Rick Ross, Fat Joe,Jim Jones, Pimp C, Ludacris,Twista, Pharrell, Too Short, Lil Wayne, Dre, Pitbull & Sean J. She was also announced as Artist of the Week on Hollyscoop.com.
As of April 26, 2007, in an interview, Shawnna confirmed that she was no longer with DTP Records, but remains friends with everyone on the label. Although she has left DTP she is still considered to be on their label according to paperwork-said by Remy Ma. She said that she was happy to be an independent artist, and it was something she always wanted to do.
Signing with Nappy Boy (2009-present)
She is managed through Hustle Period and has started her own label: M.O.E., which stands for Money Over Everything. In October 2009, Shawnna signed with T-Pain's Nappy Boy Entertainment. Later in 2010, she released a mixtape entitled Bitch Like Me, hosted by DJ Dirty Money. Her proposed third album will be re-recorded, and was reportedly scheduled to be released in 2012; however, a 2012 release never materialized. On October 28, 2011, Money Over Everything Entertainment released the new thriller and music video for "Horror Show" by Shawnna.
Infamous Syndicate history:
Past members Shawnna
Teefa
Infamous Syndicate was an American hip hop duo from Chicago, comprising the female rappers Shawnna and Teefa.
History
Rashawnna Guy and Lateefa met at Lateefa's 17th birthday party in 1997. After scoring local radio play with their demos, they signed with Relativity Records, who released their lone LP, Changing the Game, in 1999. The album rose to #18 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart and #50 on the R&B charts on the strength of the hit single "Here I Go", which reached #8 on the Hot Rap Singles chart and #63 on the R&B charts.
Relativity dropped the group in 2000, after which Shawnna pursued a solo career; Lateefa worked in radio and as a street poet.
They also contributed to Ami Suzuki's song titled Please stay tuned (featuring Infamous Syndicate) from her album INFINITY EIGHTEEN Vol.2 released in 2000.
The Infamous Syndicate is also a popular rap site.
http://youtu.be/iGq4ERLiVw0
http://youtu.be/qhDwULY_a9U
#34 TOP FEMALE RAPPER
ACTIVE: 1996 TO PRESENT
Rashawnna Guy (born January 3, 1978), better known by her stage name Shawnna, is an Americanrapper. She was the first female artist signed to Def Jam South through Ludacris' Disturbing tha Peace Records. She is a former member of the female Chicago rap duo Infamous Syndicate and she is also the daughter of the blues musician Buddy Guy.
She is known for her rapid-fire delivery and her sexually explicit image and lyrics. She is one of only five female rappers (others being Lauryn Hill, Lil' Kim, Remy Ma and Iggy Azalea) to ever have a number-one song on the USBillboard Hot 100, with 2003's "Stand Up" with Ludacris.
Music career
Early career
An MC from the south side of Chicago and the daughter of blues guitarist Buddy Guy. Shawnna began writing rhymes while in high school. She caught her first break in 1996, when her duo Infamous Syndicate opened for Junior M.A.F.I.A. in Chicago. Infamous Syndicate signed to Relativity a year later and released Changing the Game in 1999. The album did not live up to its title, despite production help from No I.D. and Kanye West, the duo was dropped and eventually split. She then went on to team with Ludacris where she was featured on his song "What's Your Fantasy". Before she recorded her first album, Shawnna was featured on the remix to the song "Loverboy" by Mariah Carey for the album and movie Glitter. She was featured in the video along with Ludacris, Da Brat, and Twenty II.
Worth tha Weight (2002-04)
Shawnna's debut album Worth tha Weight, originally scheduled to be released in October 2002, was delayed until September 26, 2004 and was released with little promotion due to disputes at Def Jam. Her album was well received by critics, and spawned the singles "Shake Dat Shit" and "Weight a Minute".
Block Music & departure from DTP (2006-07)
Shawnna's second album Block Music was released on June 27, 2006. Its sales have been initially lower than expected. The album has so far sold more than 260,000 copies worldwide. In preparation of the album, Shawnna teamed up with Clinton Sparks, one of Rolling Stone′s Top 10 mixtape producers, to release the official prelude to the album titled Block Music: The Mixtape. This mixtape features exclusive tracks and freestyles as well as the official "Gettin' Some(All-Star remix)" that featured Busta Rhymes, Rick Ross, Fat Joe,Jim Jones, Pimp C, Ludacris,Twista, Pharrell, Too Short, Lil Wayne, Dre, Pitbull & Sean J. She was also announced as Artist of the Week on Hollyscoop.com.
As of April 26, 2007, in an interview, Shawnna confirmed that she was no longer with DTP Records, but remains friends with everyone on the label. Although she has left DTP she is still considered to be on their label according to paperwork-said by Remy Ma. She said that she was happy to be an independent artist, and it was something she always wanted to do.
Signing with Nappy Boy (2009-present)
She is managed through Hustle Period and has started her own label: M.O.E., which stands for Money Over Everything. In October 2009, Shawnna signed with T-Pain's Nappy Boy Entertainment. Later in 2010, she released a mixtape entitled Bitch Like Me, hosted by DJ Dirty Money. Her proposed third album will be re-recorded, and was reportedly scheduled to be released in 2012; however, a 2012 release never materialized. On October 28, 2011, Money Over Everything Entertainment released the new thriller and music video for "Horror Show" by Shawnna.
Infamous Syndicate history:
Past members Shawnna
Teefa
Infamous Syndicate was an American hip hop duo from Chicago, comprising the female rappers Shawnna and Teefa.
History
Rashawnna Guy and Lateefa met at Lateefa's 17th birthday party in 1997. After scoring local radio play with their demos, they signed with Relativity Records, who released their lone LP, Changing the Game, in 1999. The album rose to #18 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart and #50 on the R&B charts on the strength of the hit single "Here I Go", which reached #8 on the Hot Rap Singles chart and #63 on the R&B charts.
Relativity dropped the group in 2000, after which Shawnna pursued a solo career; Lateefa worked in radio and as a street poet.
They also contributed to Ami Suzuki's song titled Please stay tuned (featuring Infamous Syndicate) from her album INFINITY EIGHTEEN Vol.2 released in 2000.
The Infamous Syndicate is also a popular rap site.
http://youtu.be/iGq4ERLiVw0
http://youtu.be/qhDwULY_a9U
Monday, July 6, 2015
Bahamadia Facts
# BahamadiaFacts
#32 TOP FEMALE RAPPERS
ACTIVE: 1994 TO PRESENT
#Bahamadia (born Antonia Reed) is a Philadelphia-born hip hop artist. She released her debut album Kollage in 1996.
Kollage was followed in 2001 by BB Queen, an EP release. She then released Good Rap Music and then in 2014 Here.
http://youtu.be/X_TWtPLo6M4
http://m.youtube.com/watch?list=PLRBu2o2gHu1-aLwOAQbASeecxIlY_VX9h&v=yqn9HcGeMD4#
#32 TOP FEMALE RAPPERS
ACTIVE: 1994 TO PRESENT
#Bahamadia (born Antonia Reed) is a Philadelphia-born hip hop artist. She released her debut album Kollage in 1996.
Kollage was followed in 2001 by BB Queen, an EP release. She then released Good Rap Music and then in 2014 Here.
http://youtu.be/X_TWtPLo6M4
http://m.youtube.com/watch?list=PLRBu2o2gHu1-aLwOAQbASeecxIlY_VX9h&v=yqn9HcGeMD4#
Saturday, July 4, 2015
MIA X FACTS
#MIAXFACTS
#32 TOP FEMALE RAPPER
Active: 1992 to PRESENT
Mia Young (born January 9, 1970), better known by her stage name Mia X, is an American former rapper, singer-songwriter and actress. She was the first female emcee to get a contract with rapper and entertainment magnate, Master P on his successful record label No Limit Records.
She has collaborated with several No Limit Records artists, including Master P and Silkk the Shocker on the seminal albums Ghetto D and Charge It 2 Da Game.
Early life
Young was born on January 9, 1970 in the 7th Ward housing projects in downtown New Orleans, Louisiana. Although there is much misinformation on the web about Mia X getting her rap career started in Queens, New York. Mia X and her career are both New Orleans born and raised. In 1984 she joined a local rap group.
1992–95: Career beginnings
In 1992, she released a single titled "Ask Them Niggas." It appeared on her 1993 EP, "Da Payback". She signed to No Limit Records in 1994. The launch of her career was her first studio album she collaborated with on with Master P called "Good Girl Gone Bad" in 1995.
Unlady Like and Mama Drama
Mia X reappeared on the hip hop scene in late 1996 with a track called "Verbal Assault" that was produced by Donald XL Robertson on the Southern Smoke mixtapeseries. The song included a refrain with the words "Guess Who's Back?" which led to some speculation that she might be working on a new album. She released an album in 1997 called Unlady Like which was successful. The third album entitled Mama Drama was certified gold by the RIAA for sales exceeding 500,000 copies.
Mia X worked as the executive producer on the release of her son Sean's (aka Fly Guy Sean) debut album The future is in my hands...Also she is working very closely with her nephew Skrill-Dilly and his release on Mike Dean's List production label set to be released in 2009 via an unsaid major distribution deal.
In 2008, she appeared on C-Murder's album Screamin' 4 Vengeance, on tracks titled "Mihita" and "Posted on tha Block (Remix)."
Mia recently released an interview about her hiatus and comeback, revealing that she is working on a mixtape and a new album called Betty Rocka Locksmith due out in 2011.
She has shot a video for a song from her upcoming mixtape called I Get The Paper and released 2 songs called "Hush" and "Grown Woman" on December 8 through her own label Music life Recordings/XL Productionz (digitally on iTunes, Amazon MP3, etc.).
Through Twitter Mia has stated she does not want to rap again and has been retired for 12 years, which means that the mixtape and album she worked on after her 'retirement' will not be released.
She has collaborated with Gangsta Boo and La Chat with a song "Bitchy" and shot a video for the song. Also, she has a cook book with her own recipes coming out soon.
#32 TOP FEMALE RAPPER
Active: 1992 to PRESENT
Mia Young (born January 9, 1970), better known by her stage name Mia X, is an American former rapper, singer-songwriter and actress. She was the first female emcee to get a contract with rapper and entertainment magnate, Master P on his successful record label No Limit Records.
She has collaborated with several No Limit Records artists, including Master P and Silkk the Shocker on the seminal albums Ghetto D and Charge It 2 Da Game.
Early life
Young was born on January 9, 1970 in the 7th Ward housing projects in downtown New Orleans, Louisiana. Although there is much misinformation on the web about Mia X getting her rap career started in Queens, New York. Mia X and her career are both New Orleans born and raised. In 1984 she joined a local rap group.
1992–95: Career beginnings
In 1992, she released a single titled "Ask Them Niggas." It appeared on her 1993 EP, "Da Payback". She signed to No Limit Records in 1994. The launch of her career was her first studio album she collaborated with on with Master P called "Good Girl Gone Bad" in 1995.
Unlady Like and Mama Drama
Mia X reappeared on the hip hop scene in late 1996 with a track called "Verbal Assault" that was produced by Donald XL Robertson on the Southern Smoke mixtapeseries. The song included a refrain with the words "Guess Who's Back?" which led to some speculation that she might be working on a new album. She released an album in 1997 called Unlady Like which was successful. The third album entitled Mama Drama was certified gold by the RIAA for sales exceeding 500,000 copies.
Mia X worked as the executive producer on the release of her son Sean's (aka Fly Guy Sean) debut album The future is in my hands...Also she is working very closely with her nephew Skrill-Dilly and his release on Mike Dean's List production label set to be released in 2009 via an unsaid major distribution deal.
In 2008, she appeared on C-Murder's album Screamin' 4 Vengeance, on tracks titled "Mihita" and "Posted on tha Block (Remix)."
Mia recently released an interview about her hiatus and comeback, revealing that she is working on a mixtape and a new album called Betty Rocka Locksmith due out in 2011.
She has shot a video for a song from her upcoming mixtape called I Get The Paper and released 2 songs called "Hush" and "Grown Woman" on December 8 through her own label Music life Recordings/XL Productionz (digitally on iTunes, Amazon MP3, etc.).
Through Twitter Mia has stated she does not want to rap again and has been retired for 12 years, which means that the mixtape and album she worked on after her 'retirement' will not be released.
She has collaborated with Gangsta Boo and La Chat with a song "Bitchy" and shot a video for the song. Also, she has a cook book with her own recipes coming out soon.
Thursday, July 2, 2015
MIYRO THE RAPPER FACTS
#MIYROFACTS
#30 TOP FEMALE RAPPER
ACTIVE: 1999 TO PRESENT
Jo Mi-hye (Hangul: 조미혜; born November 2, 1981), better known by her stage name Miryo (미료), is a South Korean rapper, who is part of the Korean girl group Brown Eyed Girls. The stage name Miryo comes from her childhood nickname Jomiryo, which is the name of a Korean seasoning.
Career
Honey Family
Miryo started her career in 1999 when she featured on one of Honey Family's songs.
She joined the group the following year but was only a member for their second album.
It was a time when the hip-hop scene was very popular and Honey Family’s style of music as well as the group was gaining enormous amount of spotlight. After the team disbanded, she featured in other artists' song.
Brown Eyed Girls
Miryo, received an offer from JeA to join Brown Eyed Girls. She accepted the offer and became the rapper of the group.
Solo career
Miryo made her solo debut with her self-produced album "MIRYO aka JOHONEY". The album features a slew of formidable guest from idol groups to hip hop heavyweights.
Songwriting
Aside from rapping, Miryo is also a songwriter. She is known as the female idol that has copyright to the most songs, currently she has a total of 56 songs. She used to be a composer and lyricist for Honey Family and also her current group Brown Eyed Girls.
#30 TOP FEMALE RAPPER
ACTIVE: 1999 TO PRESENT
Jo Mi-hye (Hangul: 조미혜; born November 2, 1981), better known by her stage name Miryo (미료), is a South Korean rapper, who is part of the Korean girl group Brown Eyed Girls. The stage name Miryo comes from her childhood nickname Jomiryo, which is the name of a Korean seasoning.
Career
Honey Family
Miryo started her career in 1999 when she featured on one of Honey Family's songs.
She joined the group the following year but was only a member for their second album.
It was a time when the hip-hop scene was very popular and Honey Family’s style of music as well as the group was gaining enormous amount of spotlight. After the team disbanded, she featured in other artists' song.
Brown Eyed Girls
Miryo, received an offer from JeA to join Brown Eyed Girls. She accepted the offer and became the rapper of the group.
Solo career
Miryo made her solo debut with her self-produced album "MIRYO aka JOHONEY". The album features a slew of formidable guest from idol groups to hip hop heavyweights.
Songwriting
Aside from rapping, Miryo is also a songwriter. She is known as the female idol that has copyright to the most songs, currently she has a total of 56 songs. She used to be a composer and lyricist for Honey Family and also her current group Brown Eyed Girls.
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
CL THE RAPPER
CLFACTS
#29 TOP FEMALE RAPPER
Active: 2007 to Present
Lee Chae-rin (born February 26, 1991 , better known by her stage name CL, is a South Korean recording artist.
She was born inSeoul, South Korea and spent much of her early life in Japan and France. She trained in JYP Entertainment before joining YG Entertainment, and became a member of the girl group 2NE1.
Early career
CL was born in Seoul, South Korea, but spent most of her childhood living in Paris, Tsukuba Science City and Tokyo. She attended international schools. When she was 13, she moved back to Paris alone where she studied for two years.
She got an audition with YG Entertainment when she was 15.
CL's first feature on a song recording was Big Bang's "Intro (Hot Issue)" in 2007.
Later that year, she had her first stage debut at Seoul Broadcasting System's Music Awards alongside her label mates at YG Entertainment.
Her first credited appearance in a song was in 2008, with Uhm Jung-hwa's "DJ," in which she rapped.
2NE1
2NE1 debuted in SBS's The Music Trend on May 17, 2009 where they performed "Fire. For 2NE1’s second album Crush, CL wrote the lyrics and co-composed the music for the tracks "Crush", "If I Were You", and "Baby I Miss You". She also did the lyrics for her solo track "MTBD", as well as the track "Scream".
Solo activities
In August 2009, CL collaborated with label-mates G-Dragon and Teddy Park of 1TYM for "The Leaders", on G-Dragon's first solo album, Heartbreaker.
In August, after finishing "I Don't Care" promotions, 2NE1 members released their own solo singles. CL collaborated with fellow member Minzy for "Please Don't Go," which charted at number six by the end of November.
CL's first solo single, "The Baddest Female", was released on 28 May 2013.
Musical style and influences
CL is the leader, vocalist and rapper in her group. She cites 1TYM leader Teddy Park who produces much of 2NE1's music as influences and inspirations, as well as Madonna, Queen andLauryn Hill.
#29 TOP FEMALE RAPPER
Active: 2007 to Present
Lee Chae-rin (born February 26, 1991 , better known by her stage name CL, is a South Korean recording artist.
She was born inSeoul, South Korea and spent much of her early life in Japan and France. She trained in JYP Entertainment before joining YG Entertainment, and became a member of the girl group 2NE1.
Early career
CL was born in Seoul, South Korea, but spent most of her childhood living in Paris, Tsukuba Science City and Tokyo. She attended international schools. When she was 13, she moved back to Paris alone where she studied for two years.
She got an audition with YG Entertainment when she was 15.
CL's first feature on a song recording was Big Bang's "Intro (Hot Issue)" in 2007.
Later that year, she had her first stage debut at Seoul Broadcasting System's Music Awards alongside her label mates at YG Entertainment.
Her first credited appearance in a song was in 2008, with Uhm Jung-hwa's "DJ," in which she rapped.
2NE1
2NE1 debuted in SBS's The Music Trend on May 17, 2009 where they performed "Fire. For 2NE1’s second album Crush, CL wrote the lyrics and co-composed the music for the tracks "Crush", "If I Were You", and "Baby I Miss You". She also did the lyrics for her solo track "MTBD", as well as the track "Scream".
Solo activities
In August 2009, CL collaborated with label-mates G-Dragon and Teddy Park of 1TYM for "The Leaders", on G-Dragon's first solo album, Heartbreaker.
In August, after finishing "I Don't Care" promotions, 2NE1 members released their own solo singles. CL collaborated with fellow member Minzy for "Please Don't Go," which charted at number six by the end of November.
CL's first solo single, "The Baddest Female", was released on 28 May 2013.
Musical style and influences
CL is the leader, vocalist and rapper in her group. She cites 1TYM leader Teddy Park who produces much of 2NE1's music as influences and inspirations, as well as Madonna, Queen andLauryn Hill.
Sunday, June 28, 2015
LIL MAMA FACTS
#LILMAMAFACTS
#28 TOP FEMALE RAPPER
ACTIVE: 2006 TO PRESENT
Niatia Jessica Kirkland (born October 4, 1989), better known by her stage name Lil Mama, is an American hip hop recording artist from Brooklyn, New York City, New York. A rapper, singer, songwriter,entrepreneur, spokesperson,dancer and actress, Lil Mama was also a talent show judge for seven seasons on America's Best Dance Crew.
She experienced Billboard placement with the release of her debut album, VYP (Voice of the Young People), which spawned the hit single "Lip Gloss".
She was also cast for the role of Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes, in the VH1 biographical film CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story, which aired in October 2013.
Life and career
1989-2005: Early life
Lil Mama was born Niatia Jessica Kirkland in Harlem, in 1989. She was raised in Brooklyn, New York where she attended Edward R. Murrow High School. Kirkland is the third child and eldest daughter of eight kids. Being the eldest daughter of eight, she acquired her nickname "lil mama".
Kirkland faced personal and financial struggles at an early age. As one of eight brothers and sisters, she started to express herself artistically through poetry and dance.
Her mother Tara, died on December 15, 2007 following a four-year battle with colon cancer.
2006-08: Career beginnings and VYP (Voice of the Young People)
In 2006, Kirkland signed a recording contract with Jive Records. In 2007, she was featured in Dr. Luke's remix of Avril Lavigne's song, "Girlfriend".
Her first studio album VYP (Voice of the Young People) was released in late April 2008. The album spawned four singles: "Lip Gloss", "G-Slide (Tour Bus)", "Shawty Get Loose" and "What It Is (Strike a Pose)". The album sold 19,000 copies in the first week, debuting at number 25 on the Billboard 200.
Lil Mama served as a judge on the competitive dance contest television series America's Best Dance Crew. She joined the judges's circle in 2008 at the age of nineteen.
2009-present
Since the release of her first album, Lil Mama has been in the studio working on new music. She released the singles "Dough Boy" featuring Mishon, "On & On & On", and "NYNYLALA" featuring Snoop Dogg. She has since released two singles entitled "Scrawberry" and "Hustler Girl" featuring Clyde McKnight.
In 2009 she announced the title of her proposed new album as "Voice Of The Young People: I Am That", although this has not been released.
On October 7, 2012 RCA Music Group announced it was disbanding J Records along with Arista Records and Jive Records. With the shutdown, Lil Mama (and all other artists previously signed to these three labels) will release her future material on the RCA Records brand. "Voice Of The Young People: I Am That" will have guest appearances including SOULJA Boy, Khalil, Angel Haze,LoLa Monroe, Teyana Taylor,Trina, Keke Palmer, Nas, Chris Brown among others.
At the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, Lil Mama came onstage while Jay-Z and Alicia Keys performed "Empire State of Mind". While Jay-Z was ending his final verse, Lil Mama left her seat in the audience, got onto the stage, and started bobbing her head to the beat. Jay-Z was surprised but continued to perform. Right before this moment, Beyonce had even tried to hold her from going up.
Jay-Z patted Lil Mama on the leg to fall back, jokingly telling her, "you T-Paining right now," a reference to a similar incident two months earlier when T-Pain jumped onstage with Jay-Z at Summer Jam during his performance of "D.O.A.". At the end of the performance, Lil Mama came to foreground and posed alongside Jay-Z and Keys.
She later clarified that she "would never ... try to disrespect Jay-Z or take a moment that someone has created it and try to relive it. I’m too original for that and I respect him too much for that."
In October 2009, she also appeared in cycle 13 of America's Next Top Model. with Benny Ninja.
Lil Mama starred as Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes in the VH1 TLC biographical film CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story, which aired on October 21, 2013, alongside Keke Palmer and Drew Sidora, who played Rozonda "Chilli" Thomas and Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins, respectively.
#28 TOP FEMALE RAPPER
ACTIVE: 2006 TO PRESENT
Niatia Jessica Kirkland (born October 4, 1989), better known by her stage name Lil Mama, is an American hip hop recording artist from Brooklyn, New York City, New York. A rapper, singer, songwriter,entrepreneur, spokesperson,dancer and actress, Lil Mama was also a talent show judge for seven seasons on America's Best Dance Crew.
She experienced Billboard placement with the release of her debut album, VYP (Voice of the Young People), which spawned the hit single "Lip Gloss".
She was also cast for the role of Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes, in the VH1 biographical film CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story, which aired in October 2013.
Life and career
1989-2005: Early life
Lil Mama was born Niatia Jessica Kirkland in Harlem, in 1989. She was raised in Brooklyn, New York where she attended Edward R. Murrow High School. Kirkland is the third child and eldest daughter of eight kids. Being the eldest daughter of eight, she acquired her nickname "lil mama".
Kirkland faced personal and financial struggles at an early age. As one of eight brothers and sisters, she started to express herself artistically through poetry and dance.
Her mother Tara, died on December 15, 2007 following a four-year battle with colon cancer.
2006-08: Career beginnings and VYP (Voice of the Young People)
In 2006, Kirkland signed a recording contract with Jive Records. In 2007, she was featured in Dr. Luke's remix of Avril Lavigne's song, "Girlfriend".
Her first studio album VYP (Voice of the Young People) was released in late April 2008. The album spawned four singles: "Lip Gloss", "G-Slide (Tour Bus)", "Shawty Get Loose" and "What It Is (Strike a Pose)". The album sold 19,000 copies in the first week, debuting at number 25 on the Billboard 200.
Lil Mama served as a judge on the competitive dance contest television series America's Best Dance Crew. She joined the judges's circle in 2008 at the age of nineteen.
2009-present
Since the release of her first album, Lil Mama has been in the studio working on new music. She released the singles "Dough Boy" featuring Mishon, "On & On & On", and "NYNYLALA" featuring Snoop Dogg. She has since released two singles entitled "Scrawberry" and "Hustler Girl" featuring Clyde McKnight.
In 2009 she announced the title of her proposed new album as "Voice Of The Young People: I Am That", although this has not been released.
On October 7, 2012 RCA Music Group announced it was disbanding J Records along with Arista Records and Jive Records. With the shutdown, Lil Mama (and all other artists previously signed to these three labels) will release her future material on the RCA Records brand. "Voice Of The Young People: I Am That" will have guest appearances including SOULJA Boy, Khalil, Angel Haze,LoLa Monroe, Teyana Taylor,Trina, Keke Palmer, Nas, Chris Brown among others.
At the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, Lil Mama came onstage while Jay-Z and Alicia Keys performed "Empire State of Mind". While Jay-Z was ending his final verse, Lil Mama left her seat in the audience, got onto the stage, and started bobbing her head to the beat. Jay-Z was surprised but continued to perform. Right before this moment, Beyonce had even tried to hold her from going up.
Jay-Z patted Lil Mama on the leg to fall back, jokingly telling her, "you T-Paining right now," a reference to a similar incident two months earlier when T-Pain jumped onstage with Jay-Z at Summer Jam during his performance of "D.O.A.". At the end of the performance, Lil Mama came to foreground and posed alongside Jay-Z and Keys.
She later clarified that she "would never ... try to disrespect Jay-Z or take a moment that someone has created it and try to relive it. I’m too original for that and I respect him too much for that."
In October 2009, she also appeared in cycle 13 of America's Next Top Model. with Benny Ninja.
Lil Mama starred as Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes in the VH1 TLC biographical film CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story, which aired on October 21, 2013, alongside Keke Palmer and Drew Sidora, who played Rozonda "Chilli" Thomas and Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins, respectively.
Friday, June 26, 2015
Snow the Product Facts
#SNOWTHAPRODUCTFACTS
#27 TOP FEMALE RAPPER
ACTIVE: 2007 TO PRESENT
Claudia Alexandra Feliciano (born June 24, 1987), better known by her stage name Snow Tha Product, is an American rapper of Mexican descent and singer, signed to Atlantic Records.
Snow is mostly known for her singles "Holy Shit" and "Drunk Love" and her mixtape Good Nights & Bad Mornings. She released her first independent album Unorthodox in 2011 to positive reviews.
Her debut studio album "40z in First Class" is set for a 2015 release.
Musical style and influences
Snow is known for her "rapid-fire" style of rapping. She can sing without the help of voice-correction software like Auto-tune, but she doesn't consider herself a "singer".
She states she admires and supports artists, who have their own original style. Snow is influenced by artists, such asMissy Elliott, Da Brat, Big Pun,Lauryn Hill, Aaliyah, Amy Winehouse, Andre 3000, Ludacris,Eminem, Busta Rhymes, Tupac,Tech N9ne and Brotha Lynch Hung, as well as Mexican actress María Félix and singers Gloria Trevi and Lupita D'Alessio.
Snow is bilingual, speaking fluently English and Spanish, and recording in both languages.
#27 TOP FEMALE RAPPER
ACTIVE: 2007 TO PRESENT
Claudia Alexandra Feliciano (born June 24, 1987), better known by her stage name Snow Tha Product, is an American rapper of Mexican descent and singer, signed to Atlantic Records.
Snow is mostly known for her singles "Holy Shit" and "Drunk Love" and her mixtape Good Nights & Bad Mornings. She released her first independent album Unorthodox in 2011 to positive reviews.
Her debut studio album "40z in First Class" is set for a 2015 release.
Musical style and influences
Snow is known for her "rapid-fire" style of rapping. She can sing without the help of voice-correction software like Auto-tune, but she doesn't consider herself a "singer".
She states she admires and supports artists, who have their own original style. Snow is influenced by artists, such asMissy Elliott, Da Brat, Big Pun,Lauryn Hill, Aaliyah, Amy Winehouse, Andre 3000, Ludacris,Eminem, Busta Rhymes, Tupac,Tech N9ne and Brotha Lynch Hung, as well as Mexican actress María Félix and singers Gloria Trevi and Lupita D'Alessio.
Snow is bilingual, speaking fluently English and Spanish, and recording in both languages.
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
PEPA from Salt n Pepa FACTS
#PEPAFACTS
26 TOP FEMALE RAPPER
ACTIVE: 1985 TO PRESENT
Sandra Denton (born November 9, 1969) better known by her stage name "Pepa" is a Jamaican-born American hip hop artist and actress, best known for her work as a member of the female rap trio Salt-n-Pepa.
Early life and education
Born in Kingston, Jamaica on November 9, 1969, Denton's family moved to Queens, New York when she was a child.
In 1985, while studying nursing at Queensborough Community College, she met Cheryl "Salt" James.
Career
With production by Hurby "Luv Bug" Azor", James and Denton released a single called "The Showstopper" which became a moderate R&B hit. They were joined with Latoya Hanson who was the original DJ of the group.
Shortly after in 1986, Deidra "Spinderella" Roper joined as the group's DJ as a full-length debut album, Hot, Cool & Vicious, was being released.
The trio released a total of five studio albums: "Hot, Cool, and Vicious" (1986), A Salt with a Deadly Pepa (1988), Blacks' Magic (1990), Very Necessary(1993), and Brand New (1997), plus several greatest hits albums.
Salt-n-Pepa disbanded in 2002 several months after their Brand New album was released on Red Ant Records. Pepa's group member Salt had stated she was ready to leave the music industry. The trio reunited for a performance on VH1's Hip Hop Honors program on September 22, 2005.
In 2005, Pepa was a cast member of VH1's The Surreal Life (season 5). Pepa's acting credits also include the motion picture Joe's Apartment, an appearance in the HBO movie First Time Felon, and a stint as Officer Andrea Phelan on the HBO drama, Oz. She also starred on The Surreal Life: Fame Games.
Salt-n-Pepa reformed in 2008, and are still in the process of releasing an album since reforming as they work out past issues. Pepa teamed up with Salt for VH1's The Salt-N-Pepa Show.
Pepa also starred in her own reality show on the network entitled Let's Talk About Pep, a name play-off the group's hit song "Let's Talk About Sex". She can also be heard speaking a Jamaican chant in the song "Need U Bad" by Jazmine Sullivan.
In August 2008, Pepa released her autobiography, which was also entitled Let's Talk About Pep. It was co-written by Karen Hunter, and it offered a look behind the fame, family, failures, and successes of her life in one of hip-hop's most successful groups.
It features an introduction by Queen Latifah, and an epilogue by Missy Elliott. To accommodate the book, Pepa launched her own social network for her fans. On October 23, 2008 Salt-N-Pepa performed at the BET Hip Hop Awards.
In January 2011, Pepa appeared in an episode of the TBS sitcom "Are We There Yet?" as a woman who falls for the Terry Crews character of Nick.
Personal life
In 1990, Pepa gave birth to her first child, son Tyran Moore. She made a guest appearance on Ricki Lakein 1993, teaching teenage girls the responsibilities of being a mother.
In 1999, she married Treach of the rap group Naughty by Nature. She and Treach had one daughter, Egypt Jahnari Criss (born September 2, 1998). After allegations of physical abuse by Treach, they divorced in 2001.
26 TOP FEMALE RAPPER
ACTIVE: 1985 TO PRESENT
Sandra Denton (born November 9, 1969) better known by her stage name "Pepa" is a Jamaican-born American hip hop artist and actress, best known for her work as a member of the female rap trio Salt-n-Pepa.
Early life and education
Born in Kingston, Jamaica on November 9, 1969, Denton's family moved to Queens, New York when she was a child.
In 1985, while studying nursing at Queensborough Community College, she met Cheryl "Salt" James.
Career
With production by Hurby "Luv Bug" Azor", James and Denton released a single called "The Showstopper" which became a moderate R&B hit. They were joined with Latoya Hanson who was the original DJ of the group.
Shortly after in 1986, Deidra "Spinderella" Roper joined as the group's DJ as a full-length debut album, Hot, Cool & Vicious, was being released.
The trio released a total of five studio albums: "Hot, Cool, and Vicious" (1986), A Salt with a Deadly Pepa (1988), Blacks' Magic (1990), Very Necessary(1993), and Brand New (1997), plus several greatest hits albums.
Salt-n-Pepa disbanded in 2002 several months after their Brand New album was released on Red Ant Records. Pepa's group member Salt had stated she was ready to leave the music industry. The trio reunited for a performance on VH1's Hip Hop Honors program on September 22, 2005.
In 2005, Pepa was a cast member of VH1's The Surreal Life (season 5). Pepa's acting credits also include the motion picture Joe's Apartment, an appearance in the HBO movie First Time Felon, and a stint as Officer Andrea Phelan on the HBO drama, Oz. She also starred on The Surreal Life: Fame Games.
Salt-n-Pepa reformed in 2008, and are still in the process of releasing an album since reforming as they work out past issues. Pepa teamed up with Salt for VH1's The Salt-N-Pepa Show.
Pepa also starred in her own reality show on the network entitled Let's Talk About Pep, a name play-off the group's hit song "Let's Talk About Sex". She can also be heard speaking a Jamaican chant in the song "Need U Bad" by Jazmine Sullivan.
In August 2008, Pepa released her autobiography, which was also entitled Let's Talk About Pep. It was co-written by Karen Hunter, and it offered a look behind the fame, family, failures, and successes of her life in one of hip-hop's most successful groups.
It features an introduction by Queen Latifah, and an epilogue by Missy Elliott. To accommodate the book, Pepa launched her own social network for her fans. On October 23, 2008 Salt-N-Pepa performed at the BET Hip Hop Awards.
In January 2011, Pepa appeared in an episode of the TBS sitcom "Are We There Yet?" as a woman who falls for the Terry Crews character of Nick.
Personal life
In 1990, Pepa gave birth to her first child, son Tyran Moore. She made a guest appearance on Ricki Lakein 1993, teaching teenage girls the responsibilities of being a mother.
In 1999, she married Treach of the rap group Naughty by Nature. She and Treach had one daughter, Egypt Jahnari Criss (born September 2, 1998). After allegations of physical abuse by Treach, they divorced in 2001.
Monday, June 22, 2015
KREAYSHAWN FACTS
#KREAYSHAWNFACTS
25 TOP FEMALE RAPPER
ACTIVE: 2008 TO PRESENT
Natassia Gail Zolot (born September 24, 1989), better known by her stage name Kreayshawn, is an American rapper, creative director of OK 1984 and music video director from Oakland, .
In 2011, while serving as a member of a rap group with her friends, she released the music video to her debut single "Gucci Gucci", to internet viral success.
The popularity of the song and its video led to a recording contract with Columbia Records soon after. Kreayshawn released her debut studio album, entitled Somethin' 'Bout Kreay, on September 14, 2012.
1989–2009: Early life and career beginnings
Natassia Gail Zolot was born on September 24, 1989, in San Francisco. She has Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry from Russia on her mother's side. Her mother, Elka Zolot, is a former member of the San Francisco garage punk band The Trashwomen.
Kreayshawn moved to East Oakland and got her first video camera at age ten, and started documenting her raps and films about herself and everyday life.
At the age of 13, she enrolled at MetWest high school, which she described as a "new alternative type of high school".
Instead of having the usual classes, such as English and mathematics, she had to take an internship at a local radio station three days a week. She was dissatisfied with the lack of work and wanted to go to a normal high school, so she switched to Oakland High School.
However, according to Kreayshawn, she "went to none of [her] classes, ever" at her new school, which led to her finishing the term with a 0.0 grade point average and getting expelled for truancy.
After taking a short break, she went to Alameda High School but after a few months she was expelled for threatening to throw a watermelon at a schoolmate.
After the incident, she then enrolled in the continuation high school, Island High, where she then completed her sophomore year. While attending, she began skipping school for weeks on end. After two weeks, she returned to find out the school moved to a different location. Since she had no address or any contact with the school she was unable to find the new location and never went back.
At the age of 16, she moved to live with her aunt in Berkeley and was taking care of her little cousin. She later moved again to live with her friend V-Nasty and enrolled in a work program, where she passed her GED test.
After graduating, she received financial support from her work program and used the money to get her own apartment. She became employed at IKEA, and was also selling marijuana and working a short-lived stint as a "Craigslist pimp" in her spare time.
When she was 17, she got a laptop and began recording songs and exploring her interest in cinematography, by shooting music videos for local artists such as Lil B.
Her videos caught the attention of dean Patrick Kriwanek, and she attended Berkeley Digital Film Institute with a full scholarship for two semesters.
She then moved to Los Angeles to pursue her music video career. Her manager Chioke McCoy, whom she met while directing a video for DB tha General, encouraged her take on a music career of her own.
Kreayshawn performed in the hip hop group the White Girl Mob (WGM). The group included her friends V-Nasty and Lil Debbie. The White Girl Mob, after many disputes, disbanded in 2012. However, the entire White Girl Mob crew appears in Kreayshawn's video "Go Hard (La.La.La)".
2010–2012: "Gucci Gucci" and Somethin 'Bout Kreay
In 2010, Kreayshawn released her first mixtape, Kittys x Choppas, as well as her first music video for the song "Bumpin Bumpin." On May 16, 2011, she released a music video for her single "Gucci Gucci", which generated nearly three million views on YouTube in the first three weeks.
"Gucci Gucci," according to Kreayshawn, is a song coaxing people to wear their own styles and not succumb to being "basic bitches,"
The popularity of her "Gucci Gucci" video caught the attention of several record labels, and Kreayshawn quickly signed a contract with Columbia Records. Kreayshawn's management was contacted by the label representing the Red Hot Chili Peppers about directing a music video for the band's single, "The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie" (from the album,I'm with You).
In August 2011,Billboard ranked Kreayshawn number 34 on their Social 50 chart for her presence on social media.
Kreayshawn sparked controversy during a Tiny chat freestyle, wherein she insulted rapper Rick Ross by calling him "fake." She later retracted her statements and described it as a misunderstanding; however, a few days following her statement, Kreayshawn continued making negative remarks about Ross's body weight, once again calling him "fake" and stating that "he can't rap." These remarks eventually led to Rick Ross verbally threatening Kreayshawn and her manager Chioke "Stretch" McCoy entourage during the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards.
She was nominated for the MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist, but lost the category to Tyler, The Creator. She also hosted the Red Carpet event.
The same night, nude pictures of herself were leaked via her Twitter being hacked. She claimed the photos were taken when she was underage.
In July 2011, Kreayshawn's first physical release, Nattymari presents Kreayshawn and Sortahuman Murder in Memphis Vol 1, came out on cassette tape via Clan Destine Records.
Produced by Nattymari with features by V-Nasty and Yung Hawaii Slim among others, the release was limited to 100 copies and celebrated Memphis' culture of murky, underground rap distributed via tape. Side A of the tape is available for free online via clothing company Mishka NYC, while the instrumental side B is tape exclusive.
In 2012, Kreayshawn was nominated for the O Music Awards.
Kreayshawn's debut studio album,Somethin' 'Bout Kreay was released for digital download on September 14, 2012 under Columbia Records in the United States.
It was released on CD elsewhere on September 25, 2012.
The singles, "Breakfast", featuring 2 Chainz, and "Go Hard (La.La.La)" precede the album. A music video was released for "Blasé Blasé" exclusively through HungerTV.
2013–present: Motherhood, upcoming EP, and "Lost in Thot"
On May 5, 2013, Kreayshawn announced via her Instagram that she was expecting her first child.
She gave birth to her son, Desmond, on September 18, 2013.
On one of her YouTube videos she stated that she's working on an EP. On February 15, Kreayshawn vlogged her at the shoot for her new line of jewelry along with her appearing in a new music video with Bukkweatbill for their song "Pipe Down" Kreayshawn announced in a vlog released on February 22, 2014 that she has recorded several songs that might be on her upcoming EP, she also announced that she had an interest in getting a production crew together and to start directing again along with making a reel.
In the same vlog, she also said that she had been unsigned from her label after she had had her first child.
On July 24, Kreayshawn released a collection of chokers called "Hella Cute". Kreayshawn has been the creative director of OK 1984 since releasing her first collection last summer.
She also released a new song "Pizza Song". When responding to a fan on Twitter, Kreayshawn stated that she was working on music and would have something out by the end of 2014 hopefully.
On October 22, Kreayshawn announced on her Facebook page that she had created a podcast called "Lost in Thot" which features Kreayshawn and Chippy Nonstop.
Lost in Thot is usually released on SoundCloud and Stitcher.
In the first two weeks of November, Kreayshawn directed Dev's video for her single "Honey Dip" from her EP "Bittersweet July". The video was released on YouTube on November 25.
Artistry
Influences
Kreayshawn has stated that the biggest influences on her rapping style are the Spice Girls and Missy Elliott.
Kreayshawn states that Missy Elliot is her strongest influence because "she's always been stylish, and she’s always kept her own thing going." In an interview for M.I.S.S., Kreayshawn stated that there were several musicians she was a major fan of, some include Waka Flocka Flame,Kool Keith, Aaliyah, and The Spice Girls.
Musical style
Critics of Kreayshawn's music cite cultural appropriation and "exploitation of African American culture."
West coast rapperGame released a diss track, titled "Uncle Otis", containing lyrics criticizing Kreayshawn for her alleged use of the word 'nigga' though she has never used the word in her music, she has expressed frustration at repeatedly having to account for her friend V-Nasty's use of the word.
She's working together with Grimes and Lady Tragik as the Alternative Hip-Hop/Seapunk group L$D.
Accolades
In 2011 Kreayshawn was listed as on of the 19 most important white rappers in 2011 in the same list like Eminem or Mac Miller by Business Insider.
Furthermore Kreayshawn is one of the most successful artist in terms of social media at the moment especially compared to the poor sale numbers of her debut album. She was ranked #1 on Billboard 's Next Big Sound with almost 700.000 Facebook fans presently.
OnInstagram she has more than 300.000 followers. Therefore she was placed on Billboard 's Social Chart as #35 briefly.
Her 2011 hit song Gucci Gucci was critically heavily acclaimed while referred by Pitchfork as #141 of The 200 Best Tracks of the Decade So Far.
Writing: "An amateur pops off with a genuine hit—it's nearing 50 million views, aka Bieber numbers—and suddenly everyone has to make sure you know she didn't write her own lyrics, that everyone just liked the beat, it was really the Odd Future cosign, that the writer deserves the credit, that anything can and must be taken from her. But "Gucci Gucci", a perfect pop-rap record, has sustained, because Kreayshawn was at its center. Not that collaboration didn't help it come together: DJ Two Stacks' beat was immediate and hooky, and the song's lyrics are eminently quotable. But the spirit of Kreayshawn was what people wanted, what captured our eyes and ears. Down to the quotidian detail, she got what it was like to be a young and urbane hip-hop head in 2011, growing up on the Cool Kids and Curren$y, choosing style over fashion, dealing Adderall out of your backpack and shooting music videos for the gangster rapper up the street.
In one record she built a universe—and transformed "basic" into the slang term heard round the world. — David Drake" Gucci Gucci was included in many music critic year-end lists.
Rick Ross
A few weeks before 2011's MTV Video Music Awards, Kreayshawn had dissed rapper Rick Ross several times by referencing him in one of her songs with the lyrics "I’m about to grab a knife, you tryin’ to play me like a boss, But you faker than Rick Ross" and also making several live streams saying he was fake.
After the 2011 VMAs, a video surfaced online showing Kreayshawn's security talking to Rick Ross and his crew, with Kreayshawn being lead out of the building shortly after. Kreayshawn revealed in a radio interview that she and Rick Ross had talked it out and everything was fine between the two.
Kreayshawn also ended up including the song "Left Ey3" where she dissed Rick Ross on her debut album "Somethin' 'Bout Kreay", with the lyrics referencing Rick Ross changed.
Azealia Banks
Kreayshawn had a brief feud with American rapper Azealia Banks on Twitter in early January 2012 after Kreayshawn had retweeted a link of Azealia Banks' video for her song "212" on PornHub, Banks responded with a string of tweets telling Kreayshawn that she couldn't rap and wasn't funny for tweeting the link.
Kreayshawn responded by telling Banks that she was a fan of her music and that Banks' frustration was confusing to her. After several tweets from Banks describing her anger towards Kreayshawn retweeting a video of her song on a PornHub video, Kreayshawn told Azealia "Come on you mad because I retweeted your link? Because I like your music? Pffff get outta here! Not a fan anymore." Several months later after their Twitter feud, Banks tweeted her apologies to Kreayshawn and offered to do a collaboration with Kreayshawn and Angel Haze. Kreayshawn accepted her apology and stated her looking forward to them collaborating on music.
25 TOP FEMALE RAPPER
ACTIVE: 2008 TO PRESENT
Natassia Gail Zolot (born September 24, 1989), better known by her stage name Kreayshawn, is an American rapper, creative director of OK 1984 and music video director from Oakland, .
In 2011, while serving as a member of a rap group with her friends, she released the music video to her debut single "Gucci Gucci", to internet viral success.
The popularity of the song and its video led to a recording contract with Columbia Records soon after. Kreayshawn released her debut studio album, entitled Somethin' 'Bout Kreay, on September 14, 2012.
1989–2009: Early life and career beginnings
Natassia Gail Zolot was born on September 24, 1989, in San Francisco. She has Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry from Russia on her mother's side. Her mother, Elka Zolot, is a former member of the San Francisco garage punk band The Trashwomen.
Kreayshawn moved to East Oakland and got her first video camera at age ten, and started documenting her raps and films about herself and everyday life.
At the age of 13, she enrolled at MetWest high school, which she described as a "new alternative type of high school".
Instead of having the usual classes, such as English and mathematics, she had to take an internship at a local radio station three days a week. She was dissatisfied with the lack of work and wanted to go to a normal high school, so she switched to Oakland High School.
However, according to Kreayshawn, she "went to none of [her] classes, ever" at her new school, which led to her finishing the term with a 0.0 grade point average and getting expelled for truancy.
After taking a short break, she went to Alameda High School but after a few months she was expelled for threatening to throw a watermelon at a schoolmate.
After the incident, she then enrolled in the continuation high school, Island High, where she then completed her sophomore year. While attending, she began skipping school for weeks on end. After two weeks, she returned to find out the school moved to a different location. Since she had no address or any contact with the school she was unable to find the new location and never went back.
At the age of 16, she moved to live with her aunt in Berkeley and was taking care of her little cousin. She later moved again to live with her friend V-Nasty and enrolled in a work program, where she passed her GED test.
After graduating, she received financial support from her work program and used the money to get her own apartment. She became employed at IKEA, and was also selling marijuana and working a short-lived stint as a "Craigslist pimp" in her spare time.
When she was 17, she got a laptop and began recording songs and exploring her interest in cinematography, by shooting music videos for local artists such as Lil B.
Her videos caught the attention of dean Patrick Kriwanek, and she attended Berkeley Digital Film Institute with a full scholarship for two semesters.
She then moved to Los Angeles to pursue her music video career. Her manager Chioke McCoy, whom she met while directing a video for DB tha General, encouraged her take on a music career of her own.
Kreayshawn performed in the hip hop group the White Girl Mob (WGM). The group included her friends V-Nasty and Lil Debbie. The White Girl Mob, after many disputes, disbanded in 2012. However, the entire White Girl Mob crew appears in Kreayshawn's video "Go Hard (La.La.La)".
2010–2012: "Gucci Gucci" and Somethin 'Bout Kreay
In 2010, Kreayshawn released her first mixtape, Kittys x Choppas, as well as her first music video for the song "Bumpin Bumpin." On May 16, 2011, she released a music video for her single "Gucci Gucci", which generated nearly three million views on YouTube in the first three weeks.
"Gucci Gucci," according to Kreayshawn, is a song coaxing people to wear their own styles and not succumb to being "basic bitches,"
The popularity of her "Gucci Gucci" video caught the attention of several record labels, and Kreayshawn quickly signed a contract with Columbia Records. Kreayshawn's management was contacted by the label representing the Red Hot Chili Peppers about directing a music video for the band's single, "The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie" (from the album,I'm with You).
In August 2011,Billboard ranked Kreayshawn number 34 on their Social 50 chart for her presence on social media.
Kreayshawn sparked controversy during a Tiny chat freestyle, wherein she insulted rapper Rick Ross by calling him "fake." She later retracted her statements and described it as a misunderstanding; however, a few days following her statement, Kreayshawn continued making negative remarks about Ross's body weight, once again calling him "fake" and stating that "he can't rap." These remarks eventually led to Rick Ross verbally threatening Kreayshawn and her manager Chioke "Stretch" McCoy entourage during the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards.
She was nominated for the MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist, but lost the category to Tyler, The Creator. She also hosted the Red Carpet event.
The same night, nude pictures of herself were leaked via her Twitter being hacked. She claimed the photos were taken when she was underage.
In July 2011, Kreayshawn's first physical release, Nattymari presents Kreayshawn and Sortahuman Murder in Memphis Vol 1, came out on cassette tape via Clan Destine Records.
Produced by Nattymari with features by V-Nasty and Yung Hawaii Slim among others, the release was limited to 100 copies and celebrated Memphis' culture of murky, underground rap distributed via tape. Side A of the tape is available for free online via clothing company Mishka NYC, while the instrumental side B is tape exclusive.
In 2012, Kreayshawn was nominated for the O Music Awards.
Kreayshawn's debut studio album,Somethin' 'Bout Kreay was released for digital download on September 14, 2012 under Columbia Records in the United States.
It was released on CD elsewhere on September 25, 2012.
The singles, "Breakfast", featuring 2 Chainz, and "Go Hard (La.La.La)" precede the album. A music video was released for "Blasé Blasé" exclusively through HungerTV.
2013–present: Motherhood, upcoming EP, and "Lost in Thot"
On May 5, 2013, Kreayshawn announced via her Instagram that she was expecting her first child.
She gave birth to her son, Desmond, on September 18, 2013.
On one of her YouTube videos she stated that she's working on an EP. On February 15, Kreayshawn vlogged her at the shoot for her new line of jewelry along with her appearing in a new music video with Bukkweatbill for their song "Pipe Down" Kreayshawn announced in a vlog released on February 22, 2014 that she has recorded several songs that might be on her upcoming EP, she also announced that she had an interest in getting a production crew together and to start directing again along with making a reel.
In the same vlog, she also said that she had been unsigned from her label after she had had her first child.
On July 24, Kreayshawn released a collection of chokers called "Hella Cute". Kreayshawn has been the creative director of OK 1984 since releasing her first collection last summer.
She also released a new song "Pizza Song". When responding to a fan on Twitter, Kreayshawn stated that she was working on music and would have something out by the end of 2014 hopefully.
On October 22, Kreayshawn announced on her Facebook page that she had created a podcast called "Lost in Thot" which features Kreayshawn and Chippy Nonstop.
Lost in Thot is usually released on SoundCloud and Stitcher.
In the first two weeks of November, Kreayshawn directed Dev's video for her single "Honey Dip" from her EP "Bittersweet July". The video was released on YouTube on November 25.
Artistry
Influences
Kreayshawn has stated that the biggest influences on her rapping style are the Spice Girls and Missy Elliott.
Kreayshawn states that Missy Elliot is her strongest influence because "she's always been stylish, and she’s always kept her own thing going." In an interview for M.I.S.S., Kreayshawn stated that there were several musicians she was a major fan of, some include Waka Flocka Flame,Kool Keith, Aaliyah, and The Spice Girls.
Musical style
Critics of Kreayshawn's music cite cultural appropriation and "exploitation of African American culture."
West coast rapperGame released a diss track, titled "Uncle Otis", containing lyrics criticizing Kreayshawn for her alleged use of the word 'nigga' though she has never used the word in her music, she has expressed frustration at repeatedly having to account for her friend V-Nasty's use of the word.
She's working together with Grimes and Lady Tragik as the Alternative Hip-Hop/Seapunk group L$D.
Accolades
In 2011 Kreayshawn was listed as on of the 19 most important white rappers in 2011 in the same list like Eminem or Mac Miller by Business Insider.
Furthermore Kreayshawn is one of the most successful artist in terms of social media at the moment especially compared to the poor sale numbers of her debut album. She was ranked #1 on Billboard 's Next Big Sound with almost 700.000 Facebook fans presently.
OnInstagram she has more than 300.000 followers. Therefore she was placed on Billboard 's Social Chart as #35 briefly.
Her 2011 hit song Gucci Gucci was critically heavily acclaimed while referred by Pitchfork as #141 of The 200 Best Tracks of the Decade So Far.
Writing: "An amateur pops off with a genuine hit—it's nearing 50 million views, aka Bieber numbers—and suddenly everyone has to make sure you know she didn't write her own lyrics, that everyone just liked the beat, it was really the Odd Future cosign, that the writer deserves the credit, that anything can and must be taken from her. But "Gucci Gucci", a perfect pop-rap record, has sustained, because Kreayshawn was at its center. Not that collaboration didn't help it come together: DJ Two Stacks' beat was immediate and hooky, and the song's lyrics are eminently quotable. But the spirit of Kreayshawn was what people wanted, what captured our eyes and ears. Down to the quotidian detail, she got what it was like to be a young and urbane hip-hop head in 2011, growing up on the Cool Kids and Curren$y, choosing style over fashion, dealing Adderall out of your backpack and shooting music videos for the gangster rapper up the street.
In one record she built a universe—and transformed "basic" into the slang term heard round the world. — David Drake" Gucci Gucci was included in many music critic year-end lists.
Rick Ross
A few weeks before 2011's MTV Video Music Awards, Kreayshawn had dissed rapper Rick Ross several times by referencing him in one of her songs with the lyrics "I’m about to grab a knife, you tryin’ to play me like a boss, But you faker than Rick Ross" and also making several live streams saying he was fake.
After the 2011 VMAs, a video surfaced online showing Kreayshawn's security talking to Rick Ross and his crew, with Kreayshawn being lead out of the building shortly after. Kreayshawn revealed in a radio interview that she and Rick Ross had talked it out and everything was fine between the two.
Kreayshawn also ended up including the song "Left Ey3" where she dissed Rick Ross on her debut album "Somethin' 'Bout Kreay", with the lyrics referencing Rick Ross changed.
Azealia Banks
Kreayshawn had a brief feud with American rapper Azealia Banks on Twitter in early January 2012 after Kreayshawn had retweeted a link of Azealia Banks' video for her song "212" on PornHub, Banks responded with a string of tweets telling Kreayshawn that she couldn't rap and wasn't funny for tweeting the link.
Kreayshawn responded by telling Banks that she was a fan of her music and that Banks' frustration was confusing to her. After several tweets from Banks describing her anger towards Kreayshawn retweeting a video of her song on a PornHub video, Kreayshawn told Azealia "Come on you mad because I retweeted your link? Because I like your music? Pffff get outta here! Not a fan anymore." Several months later after their Twitter feud, Banks tweeted her apologies to Kreayshawn and offered to do a collaboration with Kreayshawn and Angel Haze. Kreayshawn accepted her apology and stated her looking forward to them collaborating on music.
Saturday, June 20, 2015
YoYo the Rapper
#YOYOFACTS
#24 TOP FEMALE ARTIST
Yo-Yo (born Yolanda Whitaker on August 4, 1971) is an American hip-hop artist and actress.
Much of her music has advocated female empowerment, denouncing the frequent sexism found in hip-hop music.
She is the protégé of gangsta rapper Ice Cube. Yo-Yo dubbed her crew the IBWC, which stood for the Intelligent Black Woman's Coalition.
Music career:
Yo-Yo first appeared as a guest on Ice Cube's AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted album in 1990, on the track "It's a Man's World."
Cube returned the favor by appearing on "You Can't Play with My Yo-Yo," which was on Yo-Yo's 1991 debut album,Make Way for the Motherlode.
Her follow-up in 1992, Black Pearl was well received by critics, partly because of its focus on positive messages and uplifting themes that contrasted the popular gangsta rap style.
However, despite a plethora of renowned producers such as DJ Muggs, this did not translate into a hit with mainstream hip-hop audiences, and the album's sales were considered a disappointment.
Less than a year later, YoYo released her follow-up "You Better Ask Somebody".
The final track on the album was her third recorded hip-hop duet with Ice Cube, "The Bonnie and Clyde Theme".
Yo-Yo's next album was 1996's Total Control.
In 1998, she finished her fifth album, Ebony, but it was not released.
In 2008, her single "Can't Play With My Yo-Yo" was ranked number 92 on VH1's 100 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs.
Later that year, she performed with MC Lyte, the Lady of Rage, and Salt-n-Pepa at the BET Hip Hop Awards.
As of 2009, she has been at work on an EP, titled My Journey to Fearless: The Black Butterfly.
As of 2012, she is currently running the Youth program "YoYo's School of Hip-Hop."
In 2013, it was announced she has joined the upcoming BET reality series Hip Hop Sisters which will focus on six female rappers' lives and their attempts to relaunch their careers. Other rappers confirmed to appear are MC Lyte,Lady of Rage, Monie Love, Lil Mama, and Smooth.
Acting career:
She appeared in the 1991 film Boyz n the Hood.
1993's Menace II Society and other urban-oriented films.
Had a recurring role on the television show Martin as Keylolo, the sidekick of comedian Martin Lawrence's alter ego Sheneneh.
And appeared on other TV shows, including the Fox network's New York Undercover.
She has also made many cameo appearances, including the music video for Missy Elliott's "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)".
She has also appeared in the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, as a voice actor.
She has two daughters named Tiffany Whitaker and Sanai Whitaker.
She got engaged to DeAndre Windom, the mayor of Highland Park, Michigan, in August 2012. They married on August 17, 2013.
#24 TOP FEMALE ARTIST
Yo-Yo (born Yolanda Whitaker on August 4, 1971) is an American hip-hop artist and actress.
Much of her music has advocated female empowerment, denouncing the frequent sexism found in hip-hop music.
She is the protégé of gangsta rapper Ice Cube. Yo-Yo dubbed her crew the IBWC, which stood for the Intelligent Black Woman's Coalition.
Music career:
Yo-Yo first appeared as a guest on Ice Cube's AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted album in 1990, on the track "It's a Man's World."
Cube returned the favor by appearing on "You Can't Play with My Yo-Yo," which was on Yo-Yo's 1991 debut album,Make Way for the Motherlode.
Her follow-up in 1992, Black Pearl was well received by critics, partly because of its focus on positive messages and uplifting themes that contrasted the popular gangsta rap style.
However, despite a plethora of renowned producers such as DJ Muggs, this did not translate into a hit with mainstream hip-hop audiences, and the album's sales were considered a disappointment.
Less than a year later, YoYo released her follow-up "You Better Ask Somebody".
The final track on the album was her third recorded hip-hop duet with Ice Cube, "The Bonnie and Clyde Theme".
Yo-Yo's next album was 1996's Total Control.
In 1998, she finished her fifth album, Ebony, but it was not released.
In 2008, her single "Can't Play With My Yo-Yo" was ranked number 92 on VH1's 100 Greatest Hip-Hop Songs.
Later that year, she performed with MC Lyte, the Lady of Rage, and Salt-n-Pepa at the BET Hip Hop Awards.
As of 2009, she has been at work on an EP, titled My Journey to Fearless: The Black Butterfly.
As of 2012, she is currently running the Youth program "YoYo's School of Hip-Hop."
In 2013, it was announced she has joined the upcoming BET reality series Hip Hop Sisters which will focus on six female rappers' lives and their attempts to relaunch their careers. Other rappers confirmed to appear are MC Lyte,Lady of Rage, Monie Love, Lil Mama, and Smooth.
Acting career:
She appeared in the 1991 film Boyz n the Hood.
1993's Menace II Society and other urban-oriented films.
Had a recurring role on the television show Martin as Keylolo, the sidekick of comedian Martin Lawrence's alter ego Sheneneh.
And appeared on other TV shows, including the Fox network's New York Undercover.
She has also made many cameo appearances, including the music video for Missy Elliott's "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)".
She has also appeared in the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, as a voice actor.
She has two daughters named Tiffany Whitaker and Sanai Whitaker.
She got engaged to DeAndre Windom, the mayor of Highland Park, Michigan, in August 2012. They married on August 17, 2013.
Tuesday, June 16, 2015
Monie Love Facts
#MONIELOVEFACTS
#22 TOP FEMALE RAPPERS
ACTIVE: 1988 TO PRESENT
Monie Love (born Simone Gooden; 2 July 1970) is an English emcee and radio personality in the United States.
She is a well-respected figure in British hip hop, and made an impact with American hip hop audiences as a protégé of female American emcee Queen Latifah, as well as through her membership in the late 1980s/early 1990s Native Tongues.
Love was one of the first BritHop artists to be signed and distributed worldwide by a major record label. Love was born in the Battersea area of London.
She is the younger sister of technomusician Dave Angel, and was a daughter of a London-based, jazz musician father.
Musical career
Love began her hip hop career as an emcee in the British Jus Bad crew, which featured DJ Pogo, Sparki, and MC Mell'O'. The group released the single "Free Style/Proud" on the independent tuff Groove record label in 1988.
Love first gained critical and commercial notice in the United States in 1989 for her cameos on Queen Latifah's Grammy Award-winning and pro-woman single "Ladies First", on Adeva's "Ring My Bell", on the Jungle Brothers' well-received single "Doin' Our Own Dang" and on De La Soul's hit single "Buddy".
The acclaim led her to a recording contract with Warner Bros. Records, making Love one of the few British hip-hop efforts released by a major label. Love also has a place in hip-hop history as a member of the Native Tongues, a positive-minded hip-hop collective that included Queen Latifah, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, the Jungle Brothers, and a number of other acts.
Her versatility was demonstrated with her involvement in the emerging popularity of house music with her own single "Grandpa's Party" as well as providing rap for the Dancin' Danny D Remix of Adeva's house hit "Respect".
Love's debut album, Down To Earth, spawned two, Grammy-nominated hits, "Monie in the Middle" (a high school-set track dealing with a woman's right to determine what she wants out of a relationship) and "It's a Shame (My Sister)" (which sampled The Spinners' "It's a Shame", written for the band by Stevie Wonder) and featured house-music vocalist and then-label mate Ultra Naté.
The album reached #26 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. Love also appears on the song titled "United" from Inner City's third album,Praise.
Love was featured on her brother Dave Angel's remix of Whitney Houston's R&B hit "My Name Is Not Susan" in 1991, and appeared in the music video alongside Houston. Love's 1992 single "Full-Term Love", from the Class Act movie soundtrack, reached #7 on the Hot Hip-Hop Singles chart.
Love collaborated with Marley Marl on her second album, In a Word or 2 (1993), which featured the Prince-produced single "Born To B.R.E.E.D." (which reached #1 on the Hot Dance Music chart and #7 on the Hot Rap Singles chart), as well as a re-release of "Full-Term Love".
The same year, Prince asked her to write lyrics for a few songs on a side-project,Carmen Electra's eponymous album, Carmen Electra. Love's last release as lead artist was the single Slice of Da Pie in 2000. In 2013, she featured on the track "Sometimes" by Ras Kass, from his album Barmageddon.
Radio career
From 2004 until the week of 11 December 2006, Love was the morning drive host on Philadelphia's WPHI-FM 100.3.
The 22 December 2006 edition of the Philadelphia Daily News confirmed that Love left WPHI-FM on amicable terms after contract negotiations stalled.
Love's departure from WPHI followed soon after her December 2006 interview with Young Jeezy, where the two argued over whether hip hop is dead.
Love is also an official MySpace.com DJ, according to her Myspace page. Love currently resides in Miami, Florida, and is a single mother to four children. Currently, she has a radio show on XM Satellite Radio called 'Ladies First Radio with Monie Love'. It airs Thursdays 6PM ET and Sundays 8PM ET.
#22 TOP FEMALE RAPPERS
ACTIVE: 1988 TO PRESENT
Monie Love (born Simone Gooden; 2 July 1970) is an English emcee and radio personality in the United States.
She is a well-respected figure in British hip hop, and made an impact with American hip hop audiences as a protégé of female American emcee Queen Latifah, as well as through her membership in the late 1980s/early 1990s Native Tongues.
Love was one of the first BritHop artists to be signed and distributed worldwide by a major record label. Love was born in the Battersea area of London.
She is the younger sister of technomusician Dave Angel, and was a daughter of a London-based, jazz musician father.
Musical career
Love began her hip hop career as an emcee in the British Jus Bad crew, which featured DJ Pogo, Sparki, and MC Mell'O'. The group released the single "Free Style/Proud" on the independent tuff Groove record label in 1988.
Love first gained critical and commercial notice in the United States in 1989 for her cameos on Queen Latifah's Grammy Award-winning and pro-woman single "Ladies First", on Adeva's "Ring My Bell", on the Jungle Brothers' well-received single "Doin' Our Own Dang" and on De La Soul's hit single "Buddy".
The acclaim led her to a recording contract with Warner Bros. Records, making Love one of the few British hip-hop efforts released by a major label. Love also has a place in hip-hop history as a member of the Native Tongues, a positive-minded hip-hop collective that included Queen Latifah, De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, the Jungle Brothers, and a number of other acts.
Her versatility was demonstrated with her involvement in the emerging popularity of house music with her own single "Grandpa's Party" as well as providing rap for the Dancin' Danny D Remix of Adeva's house hit "Respect".
Love's debut album, Down To Earth, spawned two, Grammy-nominated hits, "Monie in the Middle" (a high school-set track dealing with a woman's right to determine what she wants out of a relationship) and "It's a Shame (My Sister)" (which sampled The Spinners' "It's a Shame", written for the band by Stevie Wonder) and featured house-music vocalist and then-label mate Ultra Naté.
The album reached #26 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. Love also appears on the song titled "United" from Inner City's third album,Praise.
Love was featured on her brother Dave Angel's remix of Whitney Houston's R&B hit "My Name Is Not Susan" in 1991, and appeared in the music video alongside Houston. Love's 1992 single "Full-Term Love", from the Class Act movie soundtrack, reached #7 on the Hot Hip-Hop Singles chart.
Love collaborated with Marley Marl on her second album, In a Word or 2 (1993), which featured the Prince-produced single "Born To B.R.E.E.D." (which reached #1 on the Hot Dance Music chart and #7 on the Hot Rap Singles chart), as well as a re-release of "Full-Term Love".
The same year, Prince asked her to write lyrics for a few songs on a side-project,Carmen Electra's eponymous album, Carmen Electra. Love's last release as lead artist was the single Slice of Da Pie in 2000. In 2013, she featured on the track "Sometimes" by Ras Kass, from his album Barmageddon.
Radio career
From 2004 until the week of 11 December 2006, Love was the morning drive host on Philadelphia's WPHI-FM 100.3.
The 22 December 2006 edition of the Philadelphia Daily News confirmed that Love left WPHI-FM on amicable terms after contract negotiations stalled.
Love's departure from WPHI followed soon after her December 2006 interview with Young Jeezy, where the two argued over whether hip hop is dead.
Love is also an official MySpace.com DJ, according to her Myspace page. Love currently resides in Miami, Florida, and is a single mother to four children. Currently, she has a radio show on XM Satellite Radio called 'Ladies First Radio with Monie Love'. It airs Thursdays 6PM ET and Sundays 8PM ET.
Sunday, June 14, 2015
Gangsta Boo The Rapper
#GANGSTABOOFACTS AKA #LADYBOOFACTS
#21 TOP FEMALE RAPPER
ACTIVE: 1991 TO PRESENT
Gangsta Boo, also known as Lady Boo (born August 7, 1979) is an American rapper. She was the first and only female member of the Memphis, Tennessee-based rap group Three 6 Mafia.
She left the group following the release of their album When the Smoke Clears: Sixty 6, Sixty 1, over money disputes.
Her first solo album, Enquiring Minds, was released in 1998 and reached number fifteen on the billboard Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart and number 46 on the Billboard 200.
The album featured the surprise hit "Where Dem Dollas At!?"
Gangsta Boo released her second album Both Worlds *69 in 2001, which reached number eight on the R&B/Hip-Hop chart and number 29 on the Billboard200.
In 2003, she released her third album, Enquiring Minds II: The Soap Opera. The album peaked at number 53 on the R&B/Hip-Hop chart and 24 on the Independent Albums chart.
In 2009, Gangsta Boo released her 3rd official mixtape "The Rumors" (following her previous mixtapes "Street Ringers Vol. 1" & "Still Gangsta"). She also released 2 mixtapes with DJ Fletch, "Miss.Com" (No DJ Version on iTunes) and "4 Da Hood".
On Monday, June 27, 2011, she released her new mixtape with Trap-A-Holics, "Forever Gangsta". In 2013, she joined the Three 6 Mafia spin-off group Da Mafia 6ix, and was significantly featured on their debut mixtape 6ix Commandments.
She departed from the group in 2014.
#21 TOP FEMALE RAPPER
ACTIVE: 1991 TO PRESENT
Gangsta Boo, also known as Lady Boo (born August 7, 1979) is an American rapper. She was the first and only female member of the Memphis, Tennessee-based rap group Three 6 Mafia.
She left the group following the release of their album When the Smoke Clears: Sixty 6, Sixty 1, over money disputes.
Her first solo album, Enquiring Minds, was released in 1998 and reached number fifteen on the billboard Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart and number 46 on the Billboard 200.
The album featured the surprise hit "Where Dem Dollas At!?"
Gangsta Boo released her second album Both Worlds *69 in 2001, which reached number eight on the R&B/Hip-Hop chart and number 29 on the Billboard200.
In 2003, she released her third album, Enquiring Minds II: The Soap Opera. The album peaked at number 53 on the R&B/Hip-Hop chart and 24 on the Independent Albums chart.
In 2009, Gangsta Boo released her 3rd official mixtape "The Rumors" (following her previous mixtapes "Street Ringers Vol. 1" & "Still Gangsta"). She also released 2 mixtapes with DJ Fletch, "Miss.Com" (No DJ Version on iTunes) and "4 Da Hood".
On Monday, June 27, 2011, she released her new mixtape with Trap-A-Holics, "Forever Gangsta". In 2013, she joined the Three 6 Mafia spin-off group Da Mafia 6ix, and was significantly featured on their debut mixtape 6ix Commandments.
She departed from the group in 2014.
Friday, June 12, 2015
AZEALIA BANKS FACTS
#AZEALIABANKSFACTS
#19 TOP FEMALE RAPPER
ACTIVE: 2008 TO PRESENT
Azealia Amanda Banks (/əˈziːliə/born May 31, 1991) is an American rapper, singer, and songwriter. Raised in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, Banks pursued an interest in musical theatre at a young age, studying at the LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts before dropping out to focus on her musical career.
In late 2008, she adopted the pseudonym "Miss Bank$", and began releasing music through MySpace, eventually being signed to XL Recordings at age 17.
After signing a recording contract with Interscope and Polydor Records, Banks came to prominence by topping NME's Cool List in 2011 and finishing third in the Sound of 2012.
Her debut single "212", first extended play 1991 (2012), and first mixtape Fantasea (2012) received critical acclaim.
Banks' debut studio album Broke with Expensive Taste (2014) experienced several delays since its initial announcement before being unexpectedly released to online music stores.
Azealia Amanda Banks was born on May 31, 1991. Her mother raised her and two older sisters in Harlem, after their father died of pancreatic cancer when she was two years old.
Following her father's death, Banks says that her mother "became really abusive—physically and verbally. Like she would hit me and my sisters with baseball bats, bang our heads up against walls, and she would always tell me I was ugly. I remember once she threw out all the food in the fridge, just so we wouldn't have anything to eat."
Due to escalating violence, Banks moved out of her mother's home at age 14 to live with her older sister.
At a young age Banks became interested in musical theater, dancing, acting and singing. Aged ten, she began performing in off-Broadway musicals with the Tada! Youth Theater in Lower Manhattan. She had lead roles in three productions (Rabbit Sense,Sleepover, and Heroes) in addition to performing as a soloist.
Banks attended Catholic school in Harlem in her childhood, and danced with the National Dance Institute. As a teenager she trained in the performing arts at the LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan. At the age of sixteen, Banks starred in a production of the comedy-noir musical City of Angels, where she was found by an agent and sent on auditions for TBS, Nickelodeon, and Law & Order, all without success.
It was at this point that Banks decided to end her pursuit of an acting career, citing the large amount of competition and overall sense of unfulfillment as reasons for her retirement. Because of this, Banks began writing rap and R&B songs as a creative outlet. She never finished high school, instead choosing to follow her dream of becoming a recording artist.
Under the moniker 'Miss Bank$', she released her debut recording "Gimme a Chance" onto the internet on November 9, 2008.
The recording was accompanied by the self-produced track "Seventeen", which, sampling the Ladytron song of the same name, Banks sent to American DJDiplo.
Later that year, Banks signed a development deal with record label XL Recordings and began working with producer Richard Russell in London, leaving the label later that year due to conflicting ideas.
2011–12: 1991 and Fantasea
"Richard [Russell] was cool, but as soon as I didn't want to use his beats, it got real sour. He wound up calling me 'amateur' and the XL interns started talking shit about me. It just got real fucking funny. I was like, 'I didn't come here for a date. I came here to cut some fucking records.' I got turned off on the music industry and disappeared for a bit. I went into a bit of a depression."
—Banks talking of her departure from XL Recordings.
Following her departure from XL Recordings, Banks left behind the 'Miss Bank$' moniker and formally became Azealia Banks, which preceded a move to Montreal. Using YouTube as a portal, Banks uploaded several demo tracks—including "L8R" and a cover of "Slow Hands" by Interpol. After her Canadian visa expired, Banks returned to New York, where she sold key chains at a Manhattan jazz club and danced at a Queens strip club to make ends meet.
"That's when I was really depressed", Banks says, "I don't have a manager, I don't have a boyfriend, I don't have any friends, I don't have any money. Here I am working at the strip club, trying not to say the wrong thing and get into fights with these girls who don't give a shit."
In September 2011, Banks released her debut single "212" as a free digital download from her website, which was subsequently released officially on December 6, 2011, as the lead single from her EP 1991.
The track attained European chart success, peaking at number fourteen in the Netherlands, number twelve in the United Kingdom and at number seven in Ireland.
Though unsigned at the time, Banks began working with British producer Paul Epworth on a debut studio album.
It was announced in December 2011 that Banks would feature on "Shady Love", a track from American band Scissor Sisters' fourth studio album Magic Hour, though the feature would remain uncredited.
An accompanying music video was released in January 2012 following its radio première from Annie Mac(BBC Radio 1) on January 4, though the release of the single was cancelled for unconfirmed reasons. Banks released the track "NEEDSUMLUV (SXLND)" on the Internet on January 16, 2012, coinciding with what would have been the thirty-third birthday of the late singer Aaliyah, who is sampled on the track.
A week later saw the emergence of a second track titled "Bambi", which having been produced by Paul Epworth, had been selected as the soundtrack for a Mugler fashion show in Paris.
It was then in February that Banks revealed the title of her upcoming debut album,Broke with Expensive Taste.

Banks performing at Art Basel in Miami Beach 2012
In May 2012, Banks announced plans to release a mixtape—originally titled Fantastic—titled Fantasea. Preceding its release was the track "Jumanji", released online on May 11. A second track from the mixtape, "Aquababe", was made available online on June 13, while the third, "Nathan"—featuring rapper Styles P—was made available online on June 30.
Fantaseawas released via Banks' Twitter account on July 11, and was succeeded by the unveiling of Banks' online radio project,'Kunt.FM' the following week.Banks' first extended play, 1991, was released in the United Kingdom on May 28 and in the United States the following day.The four-track play, of which "212" featured, was not eligible for the UK Albums Chart, but the title track charted at number seventy nine on the UK Singles Chart.
It also reached 133 on the USBillboard 200, while reaching number seventeen on theR&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, number twelve on the Rap Albumschart, and number one on theHeatseekers Albums chart. In 2013, 1991 was certified gold by the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA).
Banks was scheduled to release her second single "Esta Noche" on September 25, 2012, but the track was pulled the day of its release due to sampling disputes between Banks and the track's producerMunchi.
The next month, it was confirmed that Banks had worked with Lady Gaga on two tracks titled "Ratchet" and "Red Flame". Banks also revealed that she collaborated with Kanye West on G.O.O.D. Music's compilation album, Cruel Summer, but further clarified that, ultimately, her contributions did not make the final edition of the album. It is unknown if this collaboration will see future release.
On December 31, 2012, Banks released a promotional track titled "BBD", set to appear on her upcoming album Broke with Expensive Taste. The song had been originally planned for release on November 28, but was pushed back for sample clearance. The beat contains a sample of "Trap Shit V9" by ƱZ.
2013–present: Broke with Expensive Taste
Early in 2012, Banks revealed that her debut album would be called Broke with Expensive Taste, stating that the album will include contributions from various musicians including Toko Yasuda,Theophilus London, Kevin Hussein, and Ariel Pink. Banks initially announced that the album's lead single would be a track titled "Miss Amor," and that it would be accompanied by a B-side, "Miss Camaraderie," both produced by Lone.
However, these plans changed when she later announced in January 2013 that the first official single from the album would be a song called "Yung Rapunxel," which was released in March 2013 throughSoundCloud.
In January 2013, rapper Angel Haze initiated a Twitter feud with Banks, referring to her as a "charcoal skinned bitch"; Banks responded by tweeting that "another young black woman is on twitter making fun of my skin color?", to which Haze apologized.
Blogger Perez Hilton joined in the argument by siding with Haze, after which Banks characterized him as "a messy faggot." When queried on the use of this homophobicterm, she tweeted that "A faggot is not a homosexual male. A faggot is any male who acts like a female. There's a BIG difference... As a bisexual person I knew what I meant when I used that word."
Banks' comment was criticized by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation(GLAAD), who stated that regardless of her intent, Banks' use of the word could encourage homophobic bullying.
Banks responded with the claim that GLAAD lacked integrity; she tweeted that they were "media whores" who were "picking and choosing when to be offended" by criticizing her while ignoring other musicians who used the term "faggot".
She compared the public reaction to usage of "nigger" in hip-hop culture, stating, "Why are all these other things like murder, and sex, and violence, and all these other things accepted, but as soon as I call one gay white man a faggot, his feelings are more important."
Banks was publicly backed on Twitter by black gay rappers Le1f and Mykki Blanco.
The following month, Banks was involved in another dispute over her posting a remix of American producer Baauer's song, "Harlem Shake", featuring her added vocals, which Baauer asked her to remove.
After the remix was taken down, Banks later re-posted it along with emails showing Baauer had stated he liked her version, with Banks stating she was asked to take it down as Baauer did not wish to officially release her version, and he wanted to feature rapper Juicy J instead.
After the feud, which included a tweet directed toward Baauer where Banks stated "may you drown in faggotry", LGBT publication The Advocate noted "The last time [she] used a gay slur on Twitter [...] her album sales went up by 18%."
On June 8, 2014, Banks apologized for her use of the words on her Twitter account after performing at LA Pride.
In May 2013, Banks announced that the second single from Broke with Expensive Taste would be "ATM Jam", featuring Pharrell.
The next month, on June 29, Banks debuted the song in a performance at the 2013 Glastonbury Festival, with New York City radio station Hot 97 premiering a clean, shortened version of the studio recording three days later on July 2.
On July 11, 2013, the full studio version of "ATM Jam" was released on BBC Radio 1, and was released for digital download on September 29, 2013.
Banks later confirmed in November 2013 that "ATM Jam" will not be appearing on Broke with Expensive Taste due to poor sales.
In late August 2013, Banks announced that she would be releasing a sequel to her 2012 mixtape Fantasea, titled Fantasea II: The Second Wave. The announcement was accompanied by a track entitled "Count Contessa" being posted to Banks' account on SoundCloud.
In February 2014, Banks stated in an interview with Forbes that Broke with Expensive Taste would be officially released in summer 2014.
Banks announced in mid-July that after a long battle, she had parted ways with Universal Music Group. Banks reportedly has possession and the rights to the work she released with Interscope.
On 28 July 2014 Banks released her new single "Heavy Metal and Reflective", on her own label, Azealia Banks Records. This was followed by "Chasing Time" on 22 September. Banks surprise-released her debut studio album,Broke with Expensive Taste on iTunes on November 6, 2014.
In an interview for NME Magazine, Banks revealed that her third studio album, entitled Business and Pleasure, would be released in 2016, preceded by her second album Fantasea II: The Second Wave in mid 2015.
Personal life
A commentator at Splice Today described Banks as having "that hot New York temper where she will pop off if you cross her the wrong way".
Banks identifies asbisexual. During the few instances where she has discussed her sexuality with the press, Banks has expressed dissatisfaction with society's labeling of others based on sexual orientation. In an interview withThe New York Times, Banks stated, "I'm not trying to be, like, the bisexual, lesbian rapper. I don't live on other people's terms."
Banks has been cited as a gay icon with a predominantly gay fan following. In February 2015, she attracted media attention for publicly criticizing the "gay white media", believing that it uses "homophobia as a means to try and victimize itself and scar the names of its opponents."
She questioned why the gay press had heavily criticized her for using the term "faggot" while gay men colloquially refer to women as "bitches". Noting that both terms were associated with violent abuse, she asked "Do gay men get a special pass to say misogynist things simply because they like dick?".
Banks is known for publicly speaking out on African-American civil rights issues. In December 2014 she called for over $100 trillion to be paid to African-Americans as financial reparations for the enslavement of their ancestors, citing U.S. reparations to Native American communities and the German reparations to Jewish survivors of the Holocaustas a precedent.
Using Twitter, she urged young African-Americans to take an interest in such issues, adding that "We are the children of the people who perished in the name of modern capitalism and we deserve a piece of that fucking pie." She added that reparations could be used to improve educational prospects for black Americans.
Banks has said she admires American recording artists Beyoncé and Aaliyah stating the former "[is] the queen of everything. She's the most remarkable performer and musician. And this is just my humble opinion, but I just think she's better than everyone else making music right now." Banks also cites Bajan pop singer,Rihanna and house singer, Crystal Waters as influences.
Banks is inspired by, and has drawn directly upon, black gay culture, such as the film Paris is Burning, in her music.
AllMusic characterizes Banks as "a stylish vocalist who combines hardcore hip-hop, indie pop, and dance music." In regards to her musical style, Banks has frequently been noted for the use of profanity in many of her songs, particularly her reclamation of the word "cunt", examples including her debut single "212", in which she uses the word more than ten times, or other songs such as "Fierce", in which she refers to herself as the "cunt queen".
Banks attributes this to her upbringing in Harlem, saying, "...I'm from Harlem. I went to art school; I grew up with the cunts. And that term doesn't come from me! People think I invented it, but I didn't. To be cunty is to be feminine and to be, like, aware of yourself. Nobody's fucking with that inner strength and delicateness. The cunts, the gay men, adore that. My friends would say, 'Oh you need to cunt it up! You're being too banjee.' Banjee means unrefined and rough. You need your cunts: they fix your hair for you and do your makeup. They give you confidence and give you life."
In addition, Banks uses the word as a term of endearment for her fanbase, known as the "Kunt Brigade". She is also known for her often fast-paced rapping, or "flow". In a review of Banks' debut EP 1991, Chris Dart of Exclaim! found Banks' rapping speed "remarkable", commenting that she "manages a feat that takes most rappers the better part of a career to master: the perfect marriage of bangin', club-friendly beats and smart, crisply delivered lyrics".
Since writing "212", Banks has adopted an alter-ego named "Yung Rapunxel". This alter-ego was adapted from Banks referring to herself as Rapunzel, due to a long weave she wore while working at Starbucks as a teenager.
Banks discussed this with Rolling Stone saying, "Yung Rapunxel is that girl who pisses people off but doesn't really mean to. She's actually a sweetheart! But people are so taken aback that she's so herself; she's not even trying to be unique or different. She literally just lives in her head; she does what she wants to do. So, the lipstick is here for someone who is happy to be themself."
Controversy
Banks has been involved in numerous public disputes with other artists, typically via social media.
Iggy Azalea
After Iggy Azalea was featured on XXL magazine's fifth annual "Freshman cover", Azealia Banks responded with a series of tweets stating that their choice to include Iggy Azalea in their list was wrong in her opinion and that Iggy Azalea had tried to "trivialize very serious aspects" of African American culture by referring to herself as a "runaway slave master" among other things. Iggy Azalea responded with several tweets stating that she was "pro people".
T.I.
After Banks' comments about Iggy Azalea, Azalea's co worker and fellow rapper T.I. defended Iggy Azalea and said that Banks should "hope to get shelved so she can wait around for next year’s Freshman cover".
Banks responded with a paragraph that dissed T.I.'s involvement in the situation and also said that she was just questioning why other artists like Rapsody, Nitty Scott, and Angel Haze weren't included. Later on, T.I. said ""That's bitch shit, I'ma man.
You ain't got no business addressing me. Get your man to address me, if you got a man, get him to address me and he and I can speak on it."
Mitchell Sunderland
Mitchell Sunderland, blogger and Vice associate editor, wrote a piece titled "My Bizarre Twitter Beef with Azealia Banks and Her Homophobia." In response to the piece, Banks tweeted at Sunderland, "do you know that your mother pushed you out of a pussy?" The two engaged in a heated exchange and traded barbs over a period of days, with Banks stating, "and even if i am a homophobe… so wat? i still make more $ than you.. still have an extra hole.. and still own everything."
In response,Queerty posted an article titled "Azealia Banks Says She’s Too Rich To Care If You Think She’s A Homophobe".
Most of the responses Banks gave during the feud with Sunderland were received negatively, with the media calling them "anti-gay".
James DeWolf Perry
On December 26, 2014, Banks posted comments to her Twitter account, stating that the descendants of prominent slave-trading families "should all have their houses burned and their finances seized."
She also sent direct messages to James DeWolf Perry, a descendant of James DeWolf, who was an eighteenth century politician, and slave-owner, demanding details about his finances, adding "I think white men all need to be locked away in a psych ward… Considering the atrocities committed by white men ON THE WORLD" and "someone should kick your ass, and punch you right in your stupid smiling cracker face."
Other
Banks has also had minor online spats with Kreayshawn,Dominique Young Unique, Lil' Kim,Nicki Minaj, Jim Jones, Angel Haze, Baauer, Diplo, Rita Ora,ASAP Rocky, Lily Allen, Lady Gaga,Pharrell, Action Bronson, Lupe Fiasco, and Perez Hilton.
#19 TOP FEMALE RAPPER
ACTIVE: 2008 TO PRESENT
Azealia Amanda Banks (/əˈziːliə/born May 31, 1991) is an American rapper, singer, and songwriter. Raised in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, Banks pursued an interest in musical theatre at a young age, studying at the LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts before dropping out to focus on her musical career.
In late 2008, she adopted the pseudonym "Miss Bank$", and began releasing music through MySpace, eventually being signed to XL Recordings at age 17.
After signing a recording contract with Interscope and Polydor Records, Banks came to prominence by topping NME's Cool List in 2011 and finishing third in the Sound of 2012.
Her debut single "212", first extended play 1991 (2012), and first mixtape Fantasea (2012) received critical acclaim.
Banks' debut studio album Broke with Expensive Taste (2014) experienced several delays since its initial announcement before being unexpectedly released to online music stores.
Azealia Amanda Banks was born on May 31, 1991. Her mother raised her and two older sisters in Harlem, after their father died of pancreatic cancer when she was two years old.
Following her father's death, Banks says that her mother "became really abusive—physically and verbally. Like she would hit me and my sisters with baseball bats, bang our heads up against walls, and she would always tell me I was ugly. I remember once she threw out all the food in the fridge, just so we wouldn't have anything to eat."
Due to escalating violence, Banks moved out of her mother's home at age 14 to live with her older sister.
At a young age Banks became interested in musical theater, dancing, acting and singing. Aged ten, she began performing in off-Broadway musicals with the Tada! Youth Theater in Lower Manhattan. She had lead roles in three productions (Rabbit Sense,Sleepover, and Heroes) in addition to performing as a soloist.
Banks attended Catholic school in Harlem in her childhood, and danced with the National Dance Institute. As a teenager she trained in the performing arts at the LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan. At the age of sixteen, Banks starred in a production of the comedy-noir musical City of Angels, where she was found by an agent and sent on auditions for TBS, Nickelodeon, and Law & Order, all without success.
It was at this point that Banks decided to end her pursuit of an acting career, citing the large amount of competition and overall sense of unfulfillment as reasons for her retirement. Because of this, Banks began writing rap and R&B songs as a creative outlet. She never finished high school, instead choosing to follow her dream of becoming a recording artist.
Under the moniker 'Miss Bank$', she released her debut recording "Gimme a Chance" onto the internet on November 9, 2008.
The recording was accompanied by the self-produced track "Seventeen", which, sampling the Ladytron song of the same name, Banks sent to American DJDiplo.
Later that year, Banks signed a development deal with record label XL Recordings and began working with producer Richard Russell in London, leaving the label later that year due to conflicting ideas.
2011–12: 1991 and Fantasea
"Richard [Russell] was cool, but as soon as I didn't want to use his beats, it got real sour. He wound up calling me 'amateur' and the XL interns started talking shit about me. It just got real fucking funny. I was like, 'I didn't come here for a date. I came here to cut some fucking records.' I got turned off on the music industry and disappeared for a bit. I went into a bit of a depression."
—Banks talking of her departure from XL Recordings.
Following her departure from XL Recordings, Banks left behind the 'Miss Bank$' moniker and formally became Azealia Banks, which preceded a move to Montreal. Using YouTube as a portal, Banks uploaded several demo tracks—including "L8R" and a cover of "Slow Hands" by Interpol. After her Canadian visa expired, Banks returned to New York, where she sold key chains at a Manhattan jazz club and danced at a Queens strip club to make ends meet.
"That's when I was really depressed", Banks says, "I don't have a manager, I don't have a boyfriend, I don't have any friends, I don't have any money. Here I am working at the strip club, trying not to say the wrong thing and get into fights with these girls who don't give a shit."
In September 2011, Banks released her debut single "212" as a free digital download from her website, which was subsequently released officially on December 6, 2011, as the lead single from her EP 1991.
The track attained European chart success, peaking at number fourteen in the Netherlands, number twelve in the United Kingdom and at number seven in Ireland.
Though unsigned at the time, Banks began working with British producer Paul Epworth on a debut studio album.
It was announced in December 2011 that Banks would feature on "Shady Love", a track from American band Scissor Sisters' fourth studio album Magic Hour, though the feature would remain uncredited.
An accompanying music video was released in January 2012 following its radio première from Annie Mac(BBC Radio 1) on January 4, though the release of the single was cancelled for unconfirmed reasons. Banks released the track "NEEDSUMLUV (SXLND)" on the Internet on January 16, 2012, coinciding with what would have been the thirty-third birthday of the late singer Aaliyah, who is sampled on the track.
A week later saw the emergence of a second track titled "Bambi", which having been produced by Paul Epworth, had been selected as the soundtrack for a Mugler fashion show in Paris.
It was then in February that Banks revealed the title of her upcoming debut album,Broke with Expensive Taste.

Banks performing at Art Basel in Miami Beach 2012
In May 2012, Banks announced plans to release a mixtape—originally titled Fantastic—titled Fantasea. Preceding its release was the track "Jumanji", released online on May 11. A second track from the mixtape, "Aquababe", was made available online on June 13, while the third, "Nathan"—featuring rapper Styles P—was made available online on June 30.
Fantaseawas released via Banks' Twitter account on July 11, and was succeeded by the unveiling of Banks' online radio project,'Kunt.FM' the following week.Banks' first extended play, 1991, was released in the United Kingdom on May 28 and in the United States the following day.The four-track play, of which "212" featured, was not eligible for the UK Albums Chart, but the title track charted at number seventy nine on the UK Singles Chart.
It also reached 133 on the USBillboard 200, while reaching number seventeen on theR&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, number twelve on the Rap Albumschart, and number one on theHeatseekers Albums chart. In 2013, 1991 was certified gold by the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA).
Banks was scheduled to release her second single "Esta Noche" on September 25, 2012, but the track was pulled the day of its release due to sampling disputes between Banks and the track's producerMunchi.
The next month, it was confirmed that Banks had worked with Lady Gaga on two tracks titled "Ratchet" and "Red Flame". Banks also revealed that she collaborated with Kanye West on G.O.O.D. Music's compilation album, Cruel Summer, but further clarified that, ultimately, her contributions did not make the final edition of the album. It is unknown if this collaboration will see future release.
On December 31, 2012, Banks released a promotional track titled "BBD", set to appear on her upcoming album Broke with Expensive Taste. The song had been originally planned for release on November 28, but was pushed back for sample clearance. The beat contains a sample of "Trap Shit V9" by ƱZ.
2013–present: Broke with Expensive Taste
Early in 2012, Banks revealed that her debut album would be called Broke with Expensive Taste, stating that the album will include contributions from various musicians including Toko Yasuda,Theophilus London, Kevin Hussein, and Ariel Pink. Banks initially announced that the album's lead single would be a track titled "Miss Amor," and that it would be accompanied by a B-side, "Miss Camaraderie," both produced by Lone.
However, these plans changed when she later announced in January 2013 that the first official single from the album would be a song called "Yung Rapunxel," which was released in March 2013 throughSoundCloud.
In January 2013, rapper Angel Haze initiated a Twitter feud with Banks, referring to her as a "charcoal skinned bitch"; Banks responded by tweeting that "another young black woman is on twitter making fun of my skin color?", to which Haze apologized.
Blogger Perez Hilton joined in the argument by siding with Haze, after which Banks characterized him as "a messy faggot." When queried on the use of this homophobicterm, she tweeted that "A faggot is not a homosexual male. A faggot is any male who acts like a female. There's a BIG difference... As a bisexual person I knew what I meant when I used that word."
Banks' comment was criticized by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation(GLAAD), who stated that regardless of her intent, Banks' use of the word could encourage homophobic bullying.
Banks responded with the claim that GLAAD lacked integrity; she tweeted that they were "media whores" who were "picking and choosing when to be offended" by criticizing her while ignoring other musicians who used the term "faggot".
She compared the public reaction to usage of "nigger" in hip-hop culture, stating, "Why are all these other things like murder, and sex, and violence, and all these other things accepted, but as soon as I call one gay white man a faggot, his feelings are more important."
Banks was publicly backed on Twitter by black gay rappers Le1f and Mykki Blanco.
The following month, Banks was involved in another dispute over her posting a remix of American producer Baauer's song, "Harlem Shake", featuring her added vocals, which Baauer asked her to remove.
After the remix was taken down, Banks later re-posted it along with emails showing Baauer had stated he liked her version, with Banks stating she was asked to take it down as Baauer did not wish to officially release her version, and he wanted to feature rapper Juicy J instead.
After the feud, which included a tweet directed toward Baauer where Banks stated "may you drown in faggotry", LGBT publication The Advocate noted "The last time [she] used a gay slur on Twitter [...] her album sales went up by 18%."
On June 8, 2014, Banks apologized for her use of the words on her Twitter account after performing at LA Pride.
In May 2013, Banks announced that the second single from Broke with Expensive Taste would be "ATM Jam", featuring Pharrell.
The next month, on June 29, Banks debuted the song in a performance at the 2013 Glastonbury Festival, with New York City radio station Hot 97 premiering a clean, shortened version of the studio recording three days later on July 2.
On July 11, 2013, the full studio version of "ATM Jam" was released on BBC Radio 1, and was released for digital download on September 29, 2013.
Banks later confirmed in November 2013 that "ATM Jam" will not be appearing on Broke with Expensive Taste due to poor sales.
In late August 2013, Banks announced that she would be releasing a sequel to her 2012 mixtape Fantasea, titled Fantasea II: The Second Wave. The announcement was accompanied by a track entitled "Count Contessa" being posted to Banks' account on SoundCloud.
In February 2014, Banks stated in an interview with Forbes that Broke with Expensive Taste would be officially released in summer 2014.
Banks announced in mid-July that after a long battle, she had parted ways with Universal Music Group. Banks reportedly has possession and the rights to the work she released with Interscope.
On 28 July 2014 Banks released her new single "Heavy Metal and Reflective", on her own label, Azealia Banks Records. This was followed by "Chasing Time" on 22 September. Banks surprise-released her debut studio album,Broke with Expensive Taste on iTunes on November 6, 2014.
In an interview for NME Magazine, Banks revealed that her third studio album, entitled Business and Pleasure, would be released in 2016, preceded by her second album Fantasea II: The Second Wave in mid 2015.
Personal life
A commentator at Splice Today described Banks as having "that hot New York temper where she will pop off if you cross her the wrong way".
Banks identifies asbisexual. During the few instances where she has discussed her sexuality with the press, Banks has expressed dissatisfaction with society's labeling of others based on sexual orientation. In an interview withThe New York Times, Banks stated, "I'm not trying to be, like, the bisexual, lesbian rapper. I don't live on other people's terms."
Banks has been cited as a gay icon with a predominantly gay fan following. In February 2015, she attracted media attention for publicly criticizing the "gay white media", believing that it uses "homophobia as a means to try and victimize itself and scar the names of its opponents."
She questioned why the gay press had heavily criticized her for using the term "faggot" while gay men colloquially refer to women as "bitches". Noting that both terms were associated with violent abuse, she asked "Do gay men get a special pass to say misogynist things simply because they like dick?".
Banks is known for publicly speaking out on African-American civil rights issues. In December 2014 she called for over $100 trillion to be paid to African-Americans as financial reparations for the enslavement of their ancestors, citing U.S. reparations to Native American communities and the German reparations to Jewish survivors of the Holocaustas a precedent.
Using Twitter, she urged young African-Americans to take an interest in such issues, adding that "We are the children of the people who perished in the name of modern capitalism and we deserve a piece of that fucking pie." She added that reparations could be used to improve educational prospects for black Americans.
Banks has said she admires American recording artists Beyoncé and Aaliyah stating the former "[is] the queen of everything. She's the most remarkable performer and musician. And this is just my humble opinion, but I just think she's better than everyone else making music right now." Banks also cites Bajan pop singer,Rihanna and house singer, Crystal Waters as influences.
Banks is inspired by, and has drawn directly upon, black gay culture, such as the film Paris is Burning, in her music.
AllMusic characterizes Banks as "a stylish vocalist who combines hardcore hip-hop, indie pop, and dance music." In regards to her musical style, Banks has frequently been noted for the use of profanity in many of her songs, particularly her reclamation of the word "cunt", examples including her debut single "212", in which she uses the word more than ten times, or other songs such as "Fierce", in which she refers to herself as the "cunt queen".
Banks attributes this to her upbringing in Harlem, saying, "...I'm from Harlem. I went to art school; I grew up with the cunts. And that term doesn't come from me! People think I invented it, but I didn't. To be cunty is to be feminine and to be, like, aware of yourself. Nobody's fucking with that inner strength and delicateness. The cunts, the gay men, adore that. My friends would say, 'Oh you need to cunt it up! You're being too banjee.' Banjee means unrefined and rough. You need your cunts: they fix your hair for you and do your makeup. They give you confidence and give you life."
In addition, Banks uses the word as a term of endearment for her fanbase, known as the "Kunt Brigade". She is also known for her often fast-paced rapping, or "flow". In a review of Banks' debut EP 1991, Chris Dart of Exclaim! found Banks' rapping speed "remarkable", commenting that she "manages a feat that takes most rappers the better part of a career to master: the perfect marriage of bangin', club-friendly beats and smart, crisply delivered lyrics".
Since writing "212", Banks has adopted an alter-ego named "Yung Rapunxel". This alter-ego was adapted from Banks referring to herself as Rapunzel, due to a long weave she wore while working at Starbucks as a teenager.
Banks discussed this with Rolling Stone saying, "Yung Rapunxel is that girl who pisses people off but doesn't really mean to. She's actually a sweetheart! But people are so taken aback that she's so herself; she's not even trying to be unique or different. She literally just lives in her head; she does what she wants to do. So, the lipstick is here for someone who is happy to be themself."
Controversy
Banks has been involved in numerous public disputes with other artists, typically via social media.
Iggy Azalea
After Iggy Azalea was featured on XXL magazine's fifth annual "Freshman cover", Azealia Banks responded with a series of tweets stating that their choice to include Iggy Azalea in their list was wrong in her opinion and that Iggy Azalea had tried to "trivialize very serious aspects" of African American culture by referring to herself as a "runaway slave master" among other things. Iggy Azalea responded with several tweets stating that she was "pro people".
T.I.
After Banks' comments about Iggy Azalea, Azalea's co worker and fellow rapper T.I. defended Iggy Azalea and said that Banks should "hope to get shelved so she can wait around for next year’s Freshman cover".
Banks responded with a paragraph that dissed T.I.'s involvement in the situation and also said that she was just questioning why other artists like Rapsody, Nitty Scott, and Angel Haze weren't included. Later on, T.I. said ""That's bitch shit, I'ma man.
You ain't got no business addressing me. Get your man to address me, if you got a man, get him to address me and he and I can speak on it."
Mitchell Sunderland
Mitchell Sunderland, blogger and Vice associate editor, wrote a piece titled "My Bizarre Twitter Beef with Azealia Banks and Her Homophobia." In response to the piece, Banks tweeted at Sunderland, "do you know that your mother pushed you out of a pussy?" The two engaged in a heated exchange and traded barbs over a period of days, with Banks stating, "and even if i am a homophobe… so wat? i still make more $ than you.. still have an extra hole.. and still own everything."
In response,Queerty posted an article titled "Azealia Banks Says She’s Too Rich To Care If You Think She’s A Homophobe".
Most of the responses Banks gave during the feud with Sunderland were received negatively, with the media calling them "anti-gay".
James DeWolf Perry
On December 26, 2014, Banks posted comments to her Twitter account, stating that the descendants of prominent slave-trading families "should all have their houses burned and their finances seized."
She also sent direct messages to James DeWolf Perry, a descendant of James DeWolf, who was an eighteenth century politician, and slave-owner, demanding details about his finances, adding "I think white men all need to be locked away in a psych ward… Considering the atrocities committed by white men ON THE WORLD" and "someone should kick your ass, and punch you right in your stupid smiling cracker face."
Other
Banks has also had minor online spats with Kreayshawn,Dominique Young Unique, Lil' Kim,Nicki Minaj, Jim Jones, Angel Haze, Baauer, Diplo, Rita Ora,ASAP Rocky, Lily Allen, Lady Gaga,Pharrell, Action Bronson, Lupe Fiasco, and Perez Hilton.
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
Rapper MIA FACTS
#MIAFACTS
#20 TOP FEMALE RAPPER
ACTIVE: 2000 TO PRESENT
Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam (born 18 July 1975), better known by her stage name M.I.A., is a British recording artist of Sri Lankan Tamil heritage.
She is also a songwriter, painter and director. "M.I.A." is both a play on her own name and a reference to the abbreviation for Missing in Action.
Her compositions combine elements of electronic, dance,alternative, hip hop and world music. Arulpragasam began her career in 2000 as a visual artist, filmmaker and designer in west London before beginning her recording career in 2002.
Since rising to prominence in early 2004 for her singles "Sunshowers" and "Galang", charting in the UK and Canada and reaching number 11 on the Billboard Hot Dance Singles Sales in the US, she has been nominated for an Academy Award, two Grammy Awards and the Mercury Prize.
She released her début album Arular in 2005 and second album Kala in 2007 both to universal critical acclaim. Arular charted in Norway, Belgium, Sweden, Japan and the US, where it reached number 16 on the Billboard Independent Albums chart and number three on the dance/Electronic Albums chart.
Kala was certified silver in the united Kingdom and gold in Canada and the United States, where it topped the Dance/Electronic Albums chart. It also charted in several countries across Europe, in Japan and Australia.
The album's first single "Boyz" reached the Top 10 in Canada and on the Billboard Hot Dance Singles Sales in 2007, becoming her first Top 10 charting single.
The single "Paper Planes" peaked in the Top 20 worldwide and reached number four on the billboard Hot 100. "Paper Planes" was certified gold in New Zealand and three times platinum in Canada and the US where, as of November 2011, it is ranked the seventh best-selling song by a British artist in the digital era.
It has become XL Recordings' second best-selling single to date. M.I.A.'s third album Maya was released in 2010 soon after the controversial song-film short "Born Free". This became her highest-charting album in the UK and the US, reaching number nine on the billboard 200, topping the Dance/Electronic Albums chart and debuting in the Top 10 in Finland, Norway, Greece and Canada.
The single "XXXO" reached the Top 40 in Belgium, Spain and the UK. M.I.A. has embarked on four (soon to be five in 2013) global headlining tours and is the founder of her own multimedia label, N.E.E.T.. Her fourth studio album, Matangi, was released in 2013.
Arulpragasam's early compositions relied heavily on the Roland MC-505 sequencer/drum machine. Her later work marked an evolution in her sound with rare instruments, electronics and unusual sound samples.
Critics have acclaimed a distinctive style to her music. Lyrically incorporating a range of political, social, philosophical and cultural references that have defied existing pop music conventions, Arulpragasam was one of the first acts to come to public attention through the internet. She posted many of her songs and videos from 2002 onwards on platforms such as MySpace.
In 2001, she received an"Alternative" Turner Prize nomination for her visual art.
In both 2005 and 2008, M.I.A. was artist of the year by Spin and UR Band Arulpragasam is named as one of the defining artists of the 2000s decade by Rolling Stone in its "Best of the Decade" list in December 2009. Esquire magazine ranked M.I.A. on its list of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century in January 2010 and also in January 2010 Time magazine named her one of the world's 100 most influential people.
Life and career
1975–2000: Early life and education
Arulpragasam was born on 18 July 1975 in Hounslow in west London to Arul Pragasam, an engineer, writer and activist, and his wife, Kala, a seamstress. When Maya was six months old, her family moved to Jaffna, the cultural, political, and economic capital of the predominantly Tamilnorthern Sri Lanka, where her brother Sugu was born.
There, her father adopted the name Arular and became a political activist and founding member of the Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students (EROS), a political Tamil group affiliated with the LTTE.
The first eleven years of Arulpragasam's life were marked by displacement caused by the Sri Lankan Civil War.
Her family went into hiding from the Sri Lankan army, and Arulpragasam had little contact with her father during this period. She has described her family as living in "big-time" poverty during her childhood but also recalls some of her happiest memories from growing up in Jaffna.
Maya attended Tamil Hindu and Catholic convent schools such as the Holy Family Convent, Jaffna where she developed her art skills – painting in particular – to work her way up her class.
During the civil war, soldiers would put guns through holes in the windows and shoot at the school, what she notes as "bullying exploitation."
Her classmates were trained to dive under the table or run next door to English-language schools that, according to her, "wouldn’t get shot."
Arulpragasam lived on a road alongside much of her extended family and played inside temples and churches in the town.
Due to safety concerns, Arulpragasam's mother, Kala, relocated herself and her children to Madras in Tamil Nadu, India, where they lived in a derelict house and received sporadic visits from their father, Arular, who was introduced to the children as their "uncle" in order to protect them.
The family minus Arular then resettled in Jaffna temporarily, only to see the war escalate further in the northeast. During this time 9-year-old Arulpragasam's primary school was destroyed in a government raid.
Kala then moved with her children back to London in 1986 a week before Arulpragasam's eleventh birthday where they were housed as refugees.
Arular remained on the island and became an independent peace mediator between the two sides of the civil war in the late 1980s–2010.
Arulpragasam spent the rest of her childhood and teenage years living on the Phipps Bridge Estate in the Mitcham district of southwest London, where she learned to speak English, whilst Kala brought the children up on a modest income.
Arulpragasam entered the final year of primary school in the autumn of 1986 and quickly mastered the English language. Despite being the only Sri Lankan family in the area, the family were made welcome and faced no racial abuse during their time on the estate.
While living in the United Kingdom and raising her children, her mother became a practising Christian in 1990 and worked as a commissioned seamstress for the Royal Family for much of her career.
She currently works from her home in Tooting, south London.
Arulpragasam has had a difficult relationship with her father, due to his political activities in the 1980s and complete absence during much of her life. Prior to the release of the first album, which Arulpragasam had named after her father, Arular emailed her: "This is Dad. Change the title of your album. I'm really proud. Just read about you in the Sri Lanka Times. Dad."
Maya chose not to change the album title.
Arulpragasam attended the Ricards Lodge High School in Wimbledon. After leaving school, she completed a degree in fine art, film, and video in June 2000 from London's Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.
Her initial application to the school was rejected, but she was finally admitted and received a scholarship, being told that she "had chutzpah".
2000: Visual art and film
While attending Central St Martins College, Arulpragasam wanted to make films and art depicting realism that would be accessible to everyone, something that she felt was missing from her classmates' ethics and the course criteria.
At college, she found the fashion courses "disposable" and more current than the film texts that she studied. Maya told Arthur magazine "[Students there were] exploring apathy, dressing up in some pigeon outfit, or running around conceptualising... It missed the whole point of art representing society. Social reality didn’t really exist there; it just stopped at theory." She cited "radical cinema" including Harmony Korine, Dogme 95 and Spike Jonze as some of her cinematic inspirations during film school.
As a student, she was approached by director John Singleton to work on a film in Los Angeles after he had read a script she had written, though she decided not to take up the offer.
For her degree, M.I.A. prepared her departmental honours thesis on the film CB4.
Arulpragasam be friended students in the college fashion, advertising and graphics departments. She met Justine Frischmann, front woman of the British band Elastica, through her friend Damon Albarn at an Air concert in 1999, and Frischmann commissioned Arulpragasama to create the cover art for the band's 2000 album, The Menace, and video document their American tour.
Arulpragasam returned to Jaffna in 2001 to film a documentary on Tamil youth, but was unable to complete the project because she encountered harassment.
In 2001, Arulpragasam's first public exhibition of paintings after graduating took place at the Euphoria Shop on London's Portobello Road. It featured graffiti art and spray-paint canvasses mixing Tamil political street art with images of London life and consumerist culture.
The show was nominated for an Alternative Turner Prize and a monograph book of the collection was published in 2002, titled M.I.A.. Actor Jude Law was among early buyers of her art.
2000–07: Musical beginnings and Arular
Arulpragasam cites the radio broadcasts she heard emanating from her neighbours' flats in the late 1980s as some of her first exposures to her earliest musical influences.
From there, she developed an interest in hip-hop and dancehall, identifying with "the starkness of the sound" in records by Public Enemy, MC Shan and Ultramagnetic MCs; and the "weird, distinct style" of acts such as Silver Bullet and London Posse.
In college she developed an affinity for punk and the emerging sounds of Britpop and electroclash. M.I.A. cites the Slits, Malcolm McLaren and the Clash as major influences.
By 2001, Arulpragasam designed the cover for Elastica's last single "The Bitch Don't Work", and went on the road with the band to video document their tour. The tour's supporting act, electroclash artist peaches, introduced Arulpragasam to the Roland MC-505 and encouraged her to make music, a medium in which Arulpragasam lacked confidence.
While holidaying together in Bequia in the Caribbean, Arulpragasam began experimenting with Frischmann's MC-505. She adopted her stage name, "M.I.A.", standing for "Missing In Acton" during this time.
In her 2012 book Arulpragasam writes, "M.I.A. came to be because of my missing cousin. I wanted to make a film about where he was since he was M.I.A. (Missing in Action) in Sri Lanka. We were the same age, went to the same schools growing up. I was also living in Acton at the time. So I was living in Acton looking for my cousin missing in action."
Of her time in Bequia, she told "I started going out to this chicken shed with a sound system. You buy rum through a hatch and dance in the street. They convinced me to come to church where people sing so amazingly. But I couldn’t clap along to hallelujah. I was out of rhythm. Someone said, ‘What happened to Jesus? I saw you dancing last night and you were totally fine.’ They stopped the service and taught me to clap in time. It was embarrassing".
Returning to West London, where she shared an apartment with Frischmann, she began working with a simple set-up (a second-hand 4-track tape machine, the MC-505, and a radio microphone), composing and recording a six song demo tape that included "Lady Killa", "M.I.A.", and "Galang".
In 2003, the independent label Showbiz Records pressed 500 vinyl singles of "Galang", a mix of dancehall, electro, jungle, and world music, with Seattle Weekly praising its a cappella coda as a "lift-up-and-over moment" evoking "clear skies beyond the council flats."
File sharing, college radio airplay, and the rise in popularity of "Galang" and "Sunshowers" in dance clubs and fashion shows made M.I.A. an underground sensation.
M.I.A. has been heralded as one of the first artists to build a large fanbase exclusively via these channels and as someone who could be studied to reexamine the internet's impact on how listeners are exposed to new music.
Major record labels caught on to the popularity of "Galang", and M.I.A. was eventually signed to XL Recordings in mid-2004.
Her debut album, to be titled Arular, was finalized by borrowing studio time.
M.I.A.'s next single, "Sunshowers", released on 5 July 2004, and its B-side ("Fire Fire") described guerrilla warfare and asylum seeking, merging ambiguous references to violence and religious persecution with black and white forms of dissidence. These themes inspired her treatment for the music video, the first she wrote. It was filmed in the jungles of South India, which she has described as her favourite. "Galang" was re-released in 2004. In September 2004, M.I.A was first featured on the cover of the publication The FADER, in its 24th issue.
The music video for "Galang" made in November of that year showed multiple M.I.A.s against a backdrop of militaristic animated graffiti, and depicted scenes of urban Britain and war that influenced her art direction for it. Both singles appeared on international publications' "Best of the Year" lists and subsequently "Best of the Decade" lists. The songs "Pull Up the People", "Bucky Done Gun" and "" were released as12-inch singles and CDs by XL Recordings, which along with the non-label mashup mixtape of Arular tracks, Piracy Funds Terrorism, were distributed in 2004 to positive critical acclaim.
M.I.A. made her North American live debut in February 2005 in Toronto where concertgoers already knew many of her songs.
In March 2005, M.I.A.'s debut album Arular was released worldwide to critical acclaim after several months delay.
The album title is the nom de guerrethat M.I.A.'s father took when he joined the Tamil independence movement, and many of the songs acknowledge her and her father's experiences in Jaffna.
While making Arular in her bedroom in west London, she built tracks off her demos, using beats she programmed on the Roland MC-505. The album experiments with bold, jarring and ambient sounds, and its lyrics address the Iraq War and daily life in London as well as M.I.A.'s past.

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"Galang", "Sunshowers", "Hombre" and the funk carioca-inspired co-composition "Bucky Done Gun" were released as singles from Arular. The release of the latter marked the first time that a funk carioca-inspired song was played on mainstream radio and music television in Brazil, its country of origin.
M.I.A. worked with one of her musical influences Missy Elliott, contributing to the track "Bad Man" on her 2005 album The Cookbook.
Despite initial fears that her dyslexia might pose problems while touring, M.I.A. supported the album through a series of festival and club shows, including the Bue Festival, a free headlining show at Central park summer stage, the Summer Sonic Fest and the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, where she played an encore in response to crowd enthusiasm, a rare occurrence for the festival generally and the first encore following a tent performance at Coachella.
She also toured with Roots Manuva and LCD Sound system, and ended 2005 briefly touring with Gwen Stefani and performing at the Big Day Out festival.
On 19 July 2005, M.I.A. was shortlisted for the Mercury Music Prize for Arular. According to the music review aggregation Metacritic, it garnered an average score of 88 out of 100, described as "universal acclaim".
They reported in 2010 that Arular was the seventh best reviewed album of 2005 and the ninth Best-Reviewed Electronic/Dance Album on Metacritic of the 2000 – 09 decade.
Arular became the second most featured album in music critics’ Year-End Top 10 lists for 2005 and was named best of the year by publications such as Blender, Stylus and Musikbyrån.
2007–09: Kala and world recognition
In 2006, M.I.A. recorded her second studio album Kala, this time named after her mother. Due to censorship and visa complications in the United States, the album was recorded in a variety of locations — India,Trinidad, Liberia, Jamaica,Australia, Japan, and the UK. Eventually the album was completed in the US.
"I think traveling really helps. I know some musicians who have studios in Trinidad. There's a collective of artists and painters there now who went to Central Saint Martins College [in London] with me. They live there and make art. It's neat to see that-[people] not led by money or pretentiousness. It's a small community, but you really have the space to observe and digest the culture. You go to a place where social commentary is rare and important and you can serve people. That's what's inspiring to me-finding someplace where people haven't already seen themselves in a certain light."
—M.I.A., Interview with Kehinde Wiley
Kala featured live instrumentation and layers of traditional dance and folk styles such as soca and the urumee drum of gaana, rave music and bootleg soundtracks of Tamil film music, incorporating new styles into her avant-garde electronic dance music.
The songs, artwork and fashion of Kalahave been characterized as simultaneously celebratory and infused with raw, "darker, outsider" themes, such as immigration politics, personal relationships and war.
In February 2007, the first track from the album to be made available to the public was "Bird Flu", which was posted with an accompanying music video to her MySpace. Later that year, M.I.A. featured in the song "Come Around", a bonus track on Timbaland's 2007 album Shock Value and a track on Kala.
The album's first official single "Boyz" was released in June 2007, accompanied by a music video co-directed by Jay Will and M.I.A., becoming M.I.A.'s first top ten charting song. The single "Jimmy", written about an invitation to tour genocide-affected regions in Rwanda that the singer received from a journalist while staying in Liberia, was released next.
The single "Paper Planes" and the EP Paper Planes - Homeland Security Remixes EP were released digitally in February 2008, the single eventually selling three times platinum in the US and Canada, certified Gold in New Zealand, and becoming the 29th most downloaded song in the digital era in the US and earning a Grammy nomination for Record of the Year. "Paper Planes" is to date XL Recordings' second best selling single, and by November 2011 it had sold 3.6 million copies in the US, currently the seventh best-selling song by a British artist in the digital era.
In 2007, M.I.A. also released the How Many Votes Fix Mix EP which included a remix of "Boyz" featuring Jay-Z.
"Paper Planes" is one of M.I.A.'s most popular songs. On this song she collaborated with Florida-based DJ Diplo. Their work on this song landed him a Grammy nomination for Record of the year and got number three in the U.S. Charts.They also worked together on her first album "Arular" Like its predecessor, universal acclaim met Kala's release in August 2007 and the album earned anormalised rating of 87 out of 100 on the review aggregator MetaCritic.
Kala was a greater commercial success than Arular. To support Kala, M.I.A. performed at a series of music festivals on the Kala Tour featuring performances in Europe, America and Asia. She performed three dates opening for Björk in the US and France.
In 2008, M.I.A. provided guest vocals on Buraka Som Sistema's kuduro song "Sound of Kuduro", recorded in Angola with an accompanying video. The same year, M.I.A. and director Spike Jonze filmed a documentary in Woolwich, South London, in which they both appeared with Afrikan Boy, a Nigerian immigrant rapper and she disclosed plans to launch her own record label, Zig-Zag.
She ended the year with concerts in the United Kingdom. By year end,Kala was named the best album of 2007 by publications including Rolling Stone and Blender.MetaCritic reported in 2010 that Kala was the tenth Best-Reviewed Electronic/Dance Album on Metacritic of the 2000 – 09 decade, one position below her debut album Arular.
M.I.A. performed on the People vs. Money Tour during the first half of 2008. She cancelled the final leg of her tour in Europe through June and July after revealing her intentions to take a career break and work on other art projects, go back to college and make a film.
In 2008, M.I.A. started her independent record label N.E.E.T. Recordings. The first artist signed to the label was Baltimore rapper Rye Rye, who performed with M.I.A. at the Diesel XXX party at Pier 3 in Brooklyn in October 2008 where it was revealed that M.I.A. was pregnant with her first child.
M.I.A. contributed songs for A. R. Rahman's score of the film Slumdog Millionaire, which included the collaboration "O…Saya"; she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song and a World Soundtrack Award for Best Original Song Written Directly for a Film for the song.
M.I.A. was due to perform at the Oscars ceremony two weeks after her Grammy Award performance, but could not as she had just given birth to her son.
M.I.A. is the first person of Asian descent to be nominated for an Oscar and Grammy award in the same year.
2009–10: Maya

M.I.A. performing at the Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival in August 2009
At the 2009 BRIT Awards in February, M.I.A. was a nominee for Best British Female Artist. Seeking to promote new, underground music with N.E.E.T., M.I.A. signed more bands including Baltimore musician Blaqstarr, indie rock band Sleigh Bells and visual artist Jaime Martinez by late 2009.
3D photographic images of M.I.A. by Martinez were commissioned in April of that year. In August 2009, M.I.A. began composing and recording her third studio album in a home studio section in her Los Angeles house.
In January 2010, M.I.A. posted her video for the song "Space". While composing it, she helped write a song with Christina Aguilera called "Elastic Love" for Aguilera's album Bionic.
By April 2010, the song and music video/short film "Born Free" were leaked online. The video-film short was directed by Romain Gavras and written by M.I.A., depicting genocide against red-haired adolescents being forced to run across a minefield and caused controversy due to its graphically violent content.
Although not an official single, the song charted in Sweden and the United Kingdom. M.I.A.'s third album, Maya — stylised as/\/\ /\ Y /\ — was released on 23 June 2010 in Japan with bonus tracks before its release in other countries.
Maya became M.I.A.'s highest charting album globally. Its release in the US was delayed by two weeks. The album garnered a generally favourable, although divided, reception from critics.
A more internet-inspired album illustrating how a multimedia artist worked within the music industry, elements of industrial music were incorporated into M.I.A.'s sound for the first time.
She described the album in an interview with Dazed & Confused as a mix of "babies, death, destruction and powerlessness".
On 11 May 2010, the first official single from Maya, "XXXO", was released and reached the top forty in Belgium, Spain and the UK. "Steppin' Up", "Teqkilla", and "Tell Me Why" were also released as promotional singles exclusively on iTunes in the days leading to the release of Maya, with "Teqkilla" reaching the top 100 in Canada on digital downloads alone.
The video for "XXXO" was released online in August. M.I.A. hinted in an interview to Blitz that a music video is being made with director Spike Jonze for the single "Teqkilla." She completed her live tour dates on the Maya Tour in summer of 2011.
From 2000 until 2010, she directed the video for Elastica single "Mad Dog God Dam" and videos for her songs "Bird Flu", "Boyz", "S.U.S. (Save Ur Soul)", "Space" and "XXXO" as well as personally choosing the directors for the videos of her songs Galang, Sunshowers, which she described in 2005 and again in 2011 as being her favorite video experience and favorite video adaptation of a song of hers, in her words as of 2011, "If you watch only one of my videos, please try Sunshowers", "Jimmy," "Born Free," and "Bad Girls." (which she described as her second favorite).
She directed a video for Rye Rye's "Bang". She judged in the Music Video category at the inaugural Vimeo Festival & Awards in New York in October 2010.
2011–present: Matangi
M.I.A. released her second mixtape, Vicki Leekx, on 31 December 2010, and followed this with Internet Connection: The Remixes, an EP to a bonus track from Maya in January 2011. M.I.A. performed on the song "C.T.F.O." on SebastiAn's albumTotal.
On 21 April 2011, it was reported that M.I.A. had been in the studio with Chris Brown, the Cataracs, Swizz Beatz and Polow da Don.
She co-wrote the song "Give Me All Your Luvin'" with Madonna and Nicki Minaj for the album MDNA and performed it at the Super Bowl XLVI Halftime Show.
Controversially, instead of singing the lyric "shit" in the song, M.I.A. extended the middle finger to the camera. The N.F.L. responded by filing a lawsuit suing M.I.A. for million in damages and demanding a public apology from M.I.A.
Maya and her legal team also responded by saying that the league's claim of "wholesomeness" in the lawsuit is hypocritical since the N.F.L. itself has had multiple situations of their own players and coaches behaving badly as well as health problems within the league, particularly concussions.
In September 2013 Maya released a video statement regarding the lawsuit. In her statement Arulpragasam said, "They're basically [saying] it's OK for me to promote being sexually exploited as a female, than to display empowerment, female empowerment, through being punk rock. That's what it boils down to, and I'm being sued for it."
She's also featured in "B-Day Song", another song included on MDNA.
The first buzz track of her fourth album, "Bad Girls", taken from her Vicki Leekx mixtape, premiered on 30 January 2012, was released globally the day after, and was followed by a music video directed by Romain Gavras on 3 February 2012.
This received nominations for Video of the Year at the 2012 MTV Video Music Awards and at the 55th Grammy Awards. The song become one of M.I.A.'s most successful singles, charting in the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Canada, United States, Switzerland, South Korea and Belgium.
On 29 April 2012 she posted a preview of a new song to YouTube, titled "Come Walk With Me". The full version of Come Walk With Me was shared one and a half year later, on September 2013.
M.I.A. officially signed to Jay-Z's Roc Nation management in May 2012. Rihanna welcomed her to the family, tweeting, "welcome home MIA."
She guested during Jay-Z's set at the Radio 1 Festival in Hackney on 23 June 2012.
In October 2012, M.I.A. released an autobiographical book titled M.I.A. documenting "the five years of M.I.A. art that spans across three LPs: Arular, Kala, and Maya." The book contains artwork as well as a foreword by frequent collaborator Steve Loveridge and various essays by M.I.A. On 3 March 2013, she released an 8-minute mix recording as part of a Kenzo fashion show in Paris.
Matangi, was recorded across the world with different collaborators. In relation to her previous albums, she described her fourth as "basically all of them together", akin to an anthology.
The album was released on Interscope and M.I.A.'s label N.E.E.T. Recordings.
Release dates of 31 January 2013 and later, 15 April 2013 were announced, but the album remained unreleased. M.I.A. later revealed that the original project for Matangi was not accepted by Interscope, which claimed that the record was "too positive".
"Bring the Noize", produced by French producer Surkin and Switch, was announced as the second single and was released on 17 June 2013.
Soon after the single was released, the official video for "Bring the Noize" premiered on 25 June via Noisey.
On 9 August 2013, the album received an official release date of 5 November 2013 after M.I.A. threatened to leak the album due to the numerous delays by Interscope.
Matangi received generally positive reviews from music critics. In its first week of release, the album sold 15,000 copies and peaked at number 23 on the Billboard 200, falling to number 90 in its second week.
Overall, Matangi is M.I.A.'s lowest charting album worldwide.
On 31 December 2013 M.I.A. announced that she's leaving Roc Nation.
M.I.A.'s music features styles such as electro, reggae, rhythm and blues, alternative rock, hip hop, grime, rap ballads and Asian folkand references to her musical influences such as Missy Elliott, Tamil film music, Lou Reed, Pixies,Timbaland, Beastie Boys and London Posse.
She was a childhood fan of Boney M, composer A. R. Rahman and pop artists Michael Jackson and Madonna, also she has cited Björk as an inspiration and has been influenced by The Slits,Public Enemy, Malcolm McLarena nd The Clash.
Noting her early inspirations, she said "When I would go to bed, I’d listen to the radio and dream about dancing and Paula Abdul and Whitney Houston, and that’s how I fell asleep. When my radio was burgled, I started listening to hip hop". She has revealed her ideal karaoke song would be "Germ-Free Adolescents" by X-Ray Spex. M.I.A. describes her music asdance music or club music for the "other", and has been described as an "anti-popstar" for refusing to conform to certain recording industry expectations of solo artists.
M.I.A.'s early compositions relied heavily on the Roland MC-505, while later M.I.A. experimented further with her established sound and drew from a range of genres, creating layered textures of instruments, electronics and sounds outside the traditional studio environment. Artists including Nas, Chuck D and Krist Novoselic of Nirvana have praised her work.
She has also stated she is a fan of Beyoncé Knowles, stating "she's like harder, faster, stronger. In our lifetime, she will be a classic, like how people talk about Aretha Franklin."
Jimmy Iovine, the chairman of M.I.A.'s American distribution label Interscope, compares M.I.A. to Reed and punk rock songwriter Patti Smith, and recalled, "She's gonna do what she's gonna do, I can't tell her shit."
"The really left-of-center artists, you really wonder about them. Can the world catch up? Can the culture meet them in the middle? That’s what the adventure is. It doesn’t always happen, but it should and it could."
Richard Russell, head of XL Recordings, states, "You've got to bend culture around to suit you, and I think M.I.A has done that" adding that M.I.A.'s composition and production skills were a major attraction for him.
As a vocalist, M.I.A. is recognisable by her distinctive whooping, chanting voice, which has been described as having an "indelible, nursery-rhyme swing."
She has adopted different singing styles on her songs, from aggressive raps, to semi-spoken and melodic vocals. She has said of the sometimes "unaffected" vocals and delivery of her lyrics, "It is what it is. Most people would just put it down to me being lazy. But at the same time, I don’t want [that perfection]," saying some of the "raw and difficult" vocal styles she used reflected what was happening to her during recording.
Sasha Frere-Jones, critic of The New Yorker praised the self made "unpretentious, stuck together with Scotch tape" style that M.I.A. achieves with her Roland MC-505 drum machine and keyboard unit, noting that many people had tried to copy the style since.
Her considerable influence on American hip hop music as an international artist is described by Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois in The Anthology of Rap as making her an "unlikely hip hop" celebrity, given that the genre was one of several influences behind M.I.A.'s "eccentric and energizing" music and that the musician's unclassifiable sound was one example of how hip hop was changing as it came into contact with other cultures.
Similarly, Jeffrey H. Wallenfeldt writes in The Black experience in America : from civil rights to the present that no single artist may have personified hip hop in the 21st century better than M.I.A., in her "politically radical lyrics drawing from widely diverse sources around the world".
The Guardian critic Hattie Collins commented of M.I.A.'s influence, "A new raver before it was old. A baile funk/pop pioneer before CSS and Bonde do Rolê emerged. A quirky female singer/rapper before the Mini Allens had worked out how to log on to MySpace. Missing In Action (or Acton, as she sometimes calls herself) has always been several miles ahead of the pack."
The twisting of western modalities in her music style using multilingual, multiethnic soundscapes to make electroclash-pop albums is noted by Derek Beres in Global beat fusion: the history of the future of music (2005) to defy world music categorization.
In the book Downloading Music (2007), Linda Aksomitis notes the various aspects of peer-to-peer file sharing of music in the rise in popularity of M.I.A., including the advantages and disadvantages of the internet and platforms such as MySpace in the launch of her career.
Andy Bennett and Jon Stratton highlight in Britpop and the English Music Tradition (2010) how M.I.A. alongside musicians such as Sway and Dizzee Rascal created music that explored new soundscapes with new technologies, with lyrics expressing anger at Britain's "racialized subordination of minority groups" and that the innovation that generates new musical forms like grime and dubstep are, inevitably, politically engaged. The chart success of grime-influenced artists like M.I.A. is heralded as a signal in the way that white Britons adapted to a new multicultural and plural musical mix in contrast to bands of the Britpop genre.
Furthermore, her work being used as a global resource for the articulation of differently located themes and its connections to many music traditions is noted by Brian Longhurst in Popular music and society (2007) to illustrate such processes of interracial dialogue. Gary Shteyngart writing in GQ notes that "M.I.A. is perhaps the preeminent global musical artist of the 2000s, a truly kick-ass singer and New York-Londony fashion icon, not to mention a vocal supporter of Sri Lanka's embattled Tamil minority, of which she's a member."
M.I.A.'s stage performances are described as "highly energetic" and multimedia showcases, often with scenes of what Rolling Stonecritic Rob Sheffield describes as "jovial chaos, with dancers and toasters and random characters roaming the stage," bringing various crowds with interests in art, music and fashion.
Camille Dodero, writing in The Village Voiceopined that M.I.A. "works hard to manifest the chaos of her music in an actual environment, and, more than that, to actively create discomfort, energy, and anger through sensory overload." Her role as an artist in and voice lender to the subaltern is appreciated by theorists as having brought such ideas to first world view.
USA Today included her on its list of the 100 Most Interesting People of 2007 and she was named one of Time Out 's 40th Birthday London Heroes in 2008. The same year,Esquire listed M.I.A. as one of the 75 Most Influential People of the 21st century, describing her as the first and only major artist in world music, and in 2009 she was cited in Time magazine's Time 100 as one of the world's most influential people for her global influence across many genres.
In December 2010, USA Today listed M.I.A. at number 63 on its list of the "100 People of 2010". M.I.A. placed number 14 on Rolling Stone 's Decade-End Readers' Poll of "Top Artists Of The Decade."Rolling Stone named her one of eight artists who defined the 2000s decade.
Themes and artwork
M.I.A. has become known for integrating her imagery of political violence into her music videos and her cover art. Her politically inspired art became recognized while she exhibited and published several of her brightly coloured stencils and paintings portraying the tiger, a symbol of Tamil nationalism, ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka and urban Britain in the early 2000s. Lyrics on Arularregarding her experiences of identity politics, poverty, revolution, gender and sexual stereotypes, war, and the conditions of working class in London were hailed as new and unorthodox, setting her apart from previous artists.
The album references the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Tamil independence movements and features culture jamming, multi-lingual slang, strident and subtle imagery. Her albums' social commentary and storytelling have incited debate on the "invigoratingly complex" politics of the issues she highlighted in the album, breaking taboos while the West was engaged in the 2003 Iraq War in the Middle East during the Presidency of George W. Bush.
Government visits to her official website following her debut album's release in 2005, and a US refusal to grant M.I.A. a travel visa coupled with her brief presence on the US Homeland Security Risk List in 2006 due to her politically charged lyrics led to her second album Kala being recorded in a variety of locations around the world.
The American Civil Liberties Union described the actions as part of a trend of ideological exclusion by the state which was detrimental to democracy by "censoring and manipulating debate".

Afrikan Boy, anAfrobeat/grime London MC with Nigerian roots supporting M.I.A. at the Rock en Seine Festival, 2007
On Kala, M.I.A.'s songs explored immigration politics and her personal relationships. Many related her experiences during recording sessions in Madras, Angola, Trinidad shantytowns, Liberia and London, and were well acclaimed.
The album's artwork was inspired by African art, "from dictator fashion to old stickers on the back of cars," which like her clothing range, she hoped would capture "a 3-D sense, the shapes, the prints, the sound, film, technology, politics, economics" of a certain time. I-D magazine described the "bleeding cacophany of graphics" on her website during this time as evoking the "noisy amateurism" of the early web, but also embodying a rejection of today's "glossy, professional site design" which was felt to "efface the medium rather than celebrate it."
Jeff Chang, writing for The Nation, described a "Kala for the Nation" and the album's music, lyrics and imagery as encompassing "everywhere – or, to be specific, everywhere but the First World's self-regarding 'here'," stating that against a media flow that suppresses the "ugliness" of reality and fixes beauty to consumption, M.I.A. forces a conversation about how the majority live, closing the distance "between 'here' and everywhere else". He felt that Kala explored poverty, violence and globalization through the eyes of "children left behind."
Her third album, Maya, tackled information politics in the digital age, loaded with technological references and love songs, and deemed by Kitty Empire writing inThe Observer to be her most melancholic and mainstream effort. Her genocide-depicting 2010 video for the single "Born Free" was deemed by Ann Powerswriting in the Los Angeles Times to be "concentrating fully" on the physical horror of gun butts and bullets hitting flesh, with the scenes giving added poignancy to the lyrical themes of the song.
Interpreted as a comment on the Arizona immigration law, America's military might and desensitised attitudes towards violence, others found that the video stressed that genocide still exists and violent repression remains commonplace. Some critics described the film as "sensationalist". Neda Ulaby ofNPR described the video as intended for "shock value" in the service of nudging people into considering real issues that can be hard to talk about.
M.I.A. revealed that she felt "disconnected" during the writing process, and spoke of the Internet inspiration and themes of information politics that could be found in the songs and the artwork.
M.I.A. views her work as reflective, pieced together in one piece "so you can acquire it and hear it." She states, "All that information floats around where we are – the images, the opinions, the discussions, the feelings – they all exist, and I felt someone had to do something about it because I can't live in this world where we pretend nothing really matters."
On the political nature of her songs she has said, "Nobody wants to be dancing to political songs. Every bit of music out there that’s making it into the mainstream is really about nothing. I wanted to see if I could write songs about something important and make it sound like nothing. And it kind of worked."
Censorship on MTV of "Sunshowers" proved controversial and was again criticised following Kala release "Paper Planes".
YouTube's block and subsequent age gating/obscuring of the video for "Born Free" from Maya due to its graphic violence/political subtext was criticized by M.I.A. as hypocritical, citing the Internet channel's streaming of real-life killings. She went on to state, "It's just fake blood and ketchup and people are more offended by that than the execution videos", referring to clips of Sri Lankan troops extrajudicially shooting unarmed, blindfolded, naked men that she had previously tweeted.
Despite the block, the video remained on her website and Vimeo, and has been viewed 30 million times on the internet.
Lisa Weems writes in the book Post colonial challenges in education how M.I.A. pointed out in her music how immigrants, refugees and persons of the third world can and do resist through economic, political and cultural discursive practices.
In light of her influence in modern culture and the historical and political significance embedded in both the instrumental music and lyrics of her songs, J. Gentry ofBrown University instructs a course from summer 2012 titled "Music & Politics: From Mozart to M.I.A.", with the objective of academically exploring and examining the political messages and contexts of music and the way "music has consistently participated in and reflected the political debates of its time".
Fashion and style

M.I.A. performing on the People vs. Money Tour
M.I.A. cites guerrilla art and fashion as major influences. Her mother works as a seamstress in London. An early interest in fashion and textiles – designing confections of "bright fluorescent fishnet fabrics" — was a hallmark of her time at Central Saint Martins College. M.I.A. was a roommate of fashion designer Luella Bartleyand is a long-time friend of designer Carri Mundane.
Clothes from her limited-edition "Okley Run" line — Mexican and Afrika line jackets and leggings, Islamic-inspired and water melon-print hoodies, and tour-inspired designs – were sold in 2008 during New York fashion week.
She commented, "I wanted to tie all my work together. When I make an album, I make a number of artworks that go with it, and now I make some clothes that go with it too. So this Okley run was an extension of my Kala album and artwork."
Spin described her designs as "1000 watt Malcolm McLaren-meets-Basquiat", that complimented her personal style that could "run from futurist aerobic instructor to new wave pirate to queenly candy raver".
Contrary to her present style, M.I.A.'s Arular era style has been described as "tattered hand me downs and patched T-shirts of indigents", embodying the "uniform of the refugee" but modified with cuts, alterations and colours to fashion a distinctly new style and apparel line.
M.I.A. built on this during the Kala era with a "playful" combination of baggy T-shirts, leggings and short-shorts. She incorporated eccentric accessories in bold patterns, sparkle and "over-saturated" neon colour to fashion her signature style which inspired flocks of "garishly-clothed all-too-sassy" new-rave girls with bright red tights, cheetah-skin smock and faded 1980s T- shirts. Her commodifying and performance of this refugee image has been noted to "reposition" perceptions of it in the wider public. Hailed as presenting a challenge to the mainstream with her ironic style, M.I.A. has been praised for dictating such a subcultural trend worldwide, combining "adolescent" frustrations of race and class with a strong desire to dance.
Eddy Lawrence of Time Out commented how her multi genre style contributed to her being beloved of the broad sheet fashionistas yet simultaneously patron saint and pin-up for the Day-Glo nu-rave kids.
Similarly, Mary Beth Ray, in the book Rock Brands: Selling Sound in a Media Saturated Culturewrites that M.I.A.'s hybrid style addressed a number of social and political issues including power, violence, identity and survival in a globalized world, while using avenues that challenged "traditional" definitions of what it meant to be a contemporary popartist.
M.I.A. was once denied entry into a Marc Jacobs party, but subsequently DJed at the designer's 2008 fashion show after party, and modelled for "Marc by Marc Jacobs" in Spring/Summer 2008.
M.I.A.'s fashion and style landed her on Vogue's 10 Best Dressed of 2008. She turned down her inclusion on People magazine's list of the "50 Most Beautiful People in the World" the same year.
M.I.A.'s status as a style icon, trendsetter and trailblazer is globally affirmed, with her distinct identity, style, and music illuminating social issues of gender, the third world, and popular music.
Critics point out that such facets of her public persona underline the importance of authenticity, challenging the globalized popular music market, and demonstrating music's strive to be political.
Her albums have been met with acclaim, often heralded as "eclectic" for possessing a genre all their own, "packaging inherent politics in the form of pleasurable dance music."
M.I.A.'s artistic efforts to connect this "extreme eclecticism" with issues of exile, war, violence and terrorism are both commended and criticized. Commentators laud M.I.A.'s use and subversion of her refugee and migrant experiences, through the weaving of musical creativity, artwork and fashion with her personal life as having dispelled stereotypical notions of the immigrant experience.
This gives her a unique place in popular music, while demanding new responses within popular music, media and fashion culture. M.I.A. has been the muse of designers Donatella Versace and Bartley and photographers Rankin and David Bailey, whose spread documents the British musicians who defined the sound and style of rock 'n' roll.
On 1 July 2012 Maya attended the Atelier Versace Show in Paris, wearing clothing inspired from the designer's 1992 collection.
In 2013 she released her own Versace Collection.
M.I.A.'s albums have generated widespread acclaim. Pop Matters writer Rob Wheaton felt M.I.A. subverted the "abstract, organized, refined" distilling of violence in Western popular music and imagination and made her work represent much of the developing world's decades-long experiences of "arbitrary, unannounced, and spectacular" slaughter, deeming her work an "assault" with realism.
Some detractors criticized M.I.A. early in her music career for "using radical chic" and for her attendance of an art school.
Critic Simon Reynolds, writing in The Village Voice in 2005 saw this as a lack of authenticity and felt M.I.A. was "a veritable vortex of discourse, around most likely irresolvable questions concerning authenticity, postcolonialism, and dilettantism". He continued that while swayed by her chutzpah and ability to deliver live, he "was also turned off by the stencil-sprayed projection imagery of grenades, tanks, and so forth (redolent of the Clash with their strife-torn Belfast stage backdrops and Sandinista cred by association)" while the "99 percent white audience punched the air", admonishing what he perceived as a "lack of local character" to her debut album.
Critic Robert Christgau described Reynolds' argument as "cheap tack" in another article written in the publication, stating M.I.A's experiences connected her to world poverty in a way "few Western whites can grasp". He questioned why M.I.A.'s 2001 Alternative Turner Prize nominated images of pastel-washed tigers, soldiers, guns, armored vehicles, and fleeing civilians that bedeck M.I.A.'s albums and videos were now assumed or analyzed as being incendiary propaganda, suggesting that unlike art buyers, rock and roll fans were "assumed to be stupid".
Reynolds later argued that M.I.A. was the "Artist of the Decade" in a 2009 issue of The Guardian. Music culture writer Michael Meyer opined that M.I.A.'s record imagery, lyrical booklets, homepages and videos supported the "image of provocation yet also avoidance of, or inability to use consistent images and messages." Instead of catering to stereotypes, he felt that M.I.A. "played with them" creating an uncategorizable and hence unsettling result.
Critic Zach Baron felt that it had been shown in her career that M.I.A. had "always been adept at using a larger force against itself."
M.I.A. has been hailed as demonstrating dislocation to be a "productive site of departure" and praised for her ability to transform such a "disadvantage" into a creative form of expression.
Activism
M.I.A.'s commentary on what she takes to be the oppression of Tamils, Palestinians and African Americans has drawn praise and criticism. The United States has restricted her access into and out of the country during her career since the release of her debut album.
M.I.A. notes that the voicelessness she felt as a child dictated her role as a refugee advocate and voice lender to civilians in war during her career.
"Sometimes I repeat my story again and again because it's interesting to see how many times it gets edited, and how much the right to tell your story doesn't exist. People reckon that I need a political degree in order to go, 'My school got bombed and I remember it cos I was 10-years-old'. I think if there is an issue of people who, having had first hand experiences, are not being able to recount that – because there is laws or government restrictions or censorship or the removal of an individual story in a political situation – then that's what I'll keep saying and sticking up for, cos I think that's the most dangerous thing. I think removing individual voices and not letting people just go 'This happened to me' is really dangerous. That's what was happening... nobody handed them the microphone to say 'This is happening and I don't like it'."
—M.I.A., Clash

M.I.A. attributes much of her success to the "homeless, rootlessness" of her early life. A refugee icon, the EMP Museum's 2008 Pop Conference featured paper submissions and discussions on M.I.A. presented on the theme of "Shake, Rattle: Music, Conflict, and Change." She has used networking sites such as Twitter and MySpace to discuss and highlight the human rights abuses and war crimes that Sri Lanka is accused of perpetrating against Tamils, citing news articles, human rights group reports, government reports, her own experiences as a child and on her return to the island in 2001 to support calls for a cease fire.
M.I.A. has spoken of discussions with witnesses during and after the war as reinforcing the need for international intervention to protect and provide justice to Tamil people. As the 2009 Tamil diaspora protests gathered pace, she joined other activists in condemning the actions of the Sri Lankan government against the Tamil populace as a slow "systematic" genocide. Telling TIME that she didn't see anything wrong in sticking up for 300,000 trapped and dying people, M.I.A. stated that international governments were privy to Sri Lanka's use of widespread censorship and propaganda on the rebellion during the island's civil war to aid its impunity in numerous atrocities on civilians, but had no will to end it. Sri Lanka's Foreign Secretary denied that his country perpetrated genocide, responding that he felt M.I.A. was "misinformed" and that "it's best she stays with what she's good at, which is music, not politics." Consequently, she has been accused of being a "terrorist sympathiser" and "LTTE supporter" by the Sri Lankan government. Two weeks before his death, the Tigers' Political Head B. Nadesan told Indian magazine The Week he felt that M.I.A.'s humanitarianism had been a source of strength to Eelam Tamils and fearless, knowingly amidst the "all-powerful Sri Lankan propaganda machinery that demonises any one who speaks for the Tamils." Miranda Sawyer of The Observer highlighted that M.I.A. was emotional and that this could be limiting her, stating that while she was well informed, "you're not meant to get involved when giving information out about war", and that the difficulty for M.I.A. was that the world "doesn't really care."
M.I.A. endorsed candidate Jan Jananayagam at the 2009 European Parliament election, a last-minute candidate standing on a platform of anti-genocide, civil liberties, financial transparency, the environment and women's rights, who became one of the most successful independent election candidates ever despite her loss in the general election.
Hate mail, including death threats directed at M.I.A. and her son, has followed her activism, which she also cited as an influence on the songs on her album Maya.
In 2010, she condemned the Chinese Government's role in supporting and supplying arms to the Sri Lankan government during the conflict in an interview with music magazine Mondomix, stating that China's influence within the UN was preventing prosecutions of war crimes committed during the conflict.

"I'm not coming at it as a politician, it's my own personal experience. And I just think that that's just what people want to put out there, you know, 'You don't have the right to talk about this'. And they use me as a puppet to explain that to you, that only people who, you know, have a PhD in this shit are allowed to talk about this. Or that only politicians are allowed to talk about politics, and that's why we're fucked, because the cycle is constantly kept within that fucking framework. There aren't more people standing up and telling their personal experience... if a normal civilian comes up and says 'Hey, this happened in my village and I'm not happy about it', we're not allowed to talk about it. You have to follow this bureaucratic bullshit to get any sort of action, and it's all part of this cycle. Like back in the day, we had ideals of revolution and fighting back, and most of the time that shit starts with individual people having personal relationships, these experiences. And now it's so disconnected and the media can paint a picture for you...they make so much bureaucracy and politics, and I think taking away the personal aspects, the human aspects of these political issues is really wrong. Whether it's the floods, or starving people in Africa, or whatever. It's all funnelled through this channel, you really are not getting it from the horse's mouth, you know?"
The same year, M.I.A. voiced her fears of the influence of video game violence on her son and his generation, saying, "I don't know which is worse. The fact that I saw it in my life has maybe given me lots of issues, but there's a whole generation of American kids seeing violence on their computer screens and then getting shipped off to Afghanistan. They feel like they know the violence when they don't. Not having a proper understanding of violence, especially what it's like on the receiving end of it, just makes you interpret it wrong and makes inflicting violence easier."
In October 2009, she stated that the President of the United States Barack Obama should give back his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize "like John Lennon sent back his MBE." She said in one interview, playing on the famous Lennon phrase "Give Peace a Chance" - "I'm a bit beyond being an artist who says, 'Give peace a chance.' Part of me is like, 'Give war a chance,' just to stir it up, you know what I mean?".
In 2008, M.I.A. filmed from her Bed Stuy apartment window and posted on YouTube an incident involving a black man being apprehended by white policemen, which in light of the Sean Bell shooting incident, elicited commentary debating the force used for the arrest. She has spoken of the combined effects that news corporations and search engine Google have on news and data collection, while stressing the need for alternative news sources that she felt her son's generation would need in order to ascertain truth.
She told Nylon magazine that social networking site Facebook and Google's development "by the CIA" was harmful to internet freedom. Some criticized the claim as lacking detail.
Following the 2011 United Kingdom anti-austerity protests and the 2011 London riots, during which her cousin's jewellery shop in Croydon was attacked and looted, M.I.A. criticised the UK Government's response to the rioters as failing to address the root causes of them. She recalled the importance of a council funded youth worker she had in her school years, the use of tax money to incentivise a new business job creation program amongst the working class and imprisonment conditions which encouraged consumerism. She stated that the top forty companies in Britain who banked offshore should be made to pay taxes in the UK and "cut the poor people some slack."
M.I.A. has been a supporter of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. In her own book, M.I.A. wrote regarding Wikileaks, "So obviously I love Wikileaks because, after I’d gone through the whole backlash, they were the first news information site to confirm any news on the Sri Lankan war in the truest form; they were the first to release information stating the truth about what had happened to the Tamils as I knew it and to reveal that the United Nations was aware that the Sri Lankan government was lying—war crimes had been committed but their hands were tied because any time anyone tried to impose sanctions, governments would walk out. I support Wikileaks because of that."
She composed the theme to Assange's television show The World Tomorrow and later stood by Assange's side as he held a press conference at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where Assange was successfully granted political asylum by Ecuador in August 2012. "I ask President Obama to do the right thing. The United States must renounce its witch hunt against WikiLeaks," Assange said at the press conference. She posted a photo of Assange from within the embassy, and later tweeted, "hummmm after this day 2 things have 2 happen....., either 500 cops turn up outside every rape case reported even if its without charge. or we get raped by the powerz that be and we deal 4 eva." The tweets were in reference to an arrest warrant the Swedish Prosecutor's Office issued in August 2010 for Assange on two charges: rape and molestation. Earlier in 2012 Britain's Supreme Court denied an appeal by Assange to avoid extradition to Sweden to face these charges.
In November 2013, Assange appeared via Skype to open M.I.A.'s New York City concert. Also, on 18 September 2014 Maya tweeted a link to a documentary on YouTube entitled "The Internet's Own Boy: Aaron Swartz". The documentary is about the life of Aaron Swartz, who was a computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet hacktivist. In the same tweet Maya included a link and invitation to RSVP to a party to launch Julian Assange's new book "When Google Met WikiLeaks".
Ann Powers, in conversation with Billboard revealed that in trying to handle political issues and creating art, the musician did not want to compromise or keep silent. She notes that this method worked for The Clash, but that this was at a certain time and a certain place, that they benefitted from being a band, and that audiences were more used to seeing men being confrontational.
Conversely, Denise Sullivan writing in Keep on Pushing: Black Power Music from Blues to Hip-Hop (2011), noted that in contrast to other rock musicians, M.I.A. furthered the legacy of The Clash, "creating a controversy while doing so".
Critic Jon Dolan of Spin noted M.I.A. may be a "confused revolutionary? brilliant provocateur?" and one of the most polarising yet thrilling figures in pop music today.
Sarahanna, writing in Impose magazine cited composer Igor Stravinsky in describing M.I.A.'s role as an artist who challenged the audience into breaking their mind from a conservative cycle of familiarity.
Baron writing in the Village Voice felt that although M.I.A.'s bloodline, politics and grievance meant that she was more informed than most and gave her "every right to be a partisan and were reason for caution," he praised her efforts for leading thousands of American writers including himself to know of the situation in Sri Lanka as "brilliant", noting her mainly humanitarian angle in her protesting of civilian casualties that had been vastly and disproportionately inflicted on Sri Lanka's Tamil minority and her courage in "putting her success and fame on the line to use every opportunity and avenue possible to remind Americans and people around the globe of this conflict" is pretty much the most admirable thing going in pop music.
On 20 November 2013 M.I.A. appeared on The Colbert Reportand was asked by host Stephen Colbert what she thought of America. After attempting to evade the question Maya ultimately responded with, "Well you know, in my mind, there's no countries, you know it's like; we're all one, we all live on this planet."
On 2 December 2013 Time asked M.I.A. who she would pick for its "Person of the Year" and she said her pick would be N.S.A. whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Media
M.I.A.'s relationship with some media outlets has been controversial. M.I.A. confronted Pitchforkmedia in 2007, citing sexism and racist mechanisms as possible reasons for misattribution of some of her work in her career.
In 2010, M.I.A. tweeted "Fuck the New York Times," after The New York Times published a critical article by Lynn Hirschberg about M.I.A. and the conflict that portrayed the musician as politically naive and hypocritical. Both M.I.A. and several pop culture media outlets were highly critical of Hirschberg's article and reporting. Hirschberg later published a correction, apologizing for reporting quotes made by the artist out of order.
Rob Horning, writing for Pop Matters, believed that Hirschberg's incorrect quotes were a deliberate effort to defame the artist. M.I.A. responded on her Twitter account, posting of a telephone number and asking followers to call in and give feedback on the piece, and the revelatory content of the conversations, which she secretly taped.
In 2010, she expressed disappointment that Wikileaks distributed their documents to other news publications – including the New York Times — to gain wider coverage, as she stated their "way of reporting" did not work.
Philanthropy
M.I.A. supports a number of charities, both publicly and privately. She funded Youth Action International to help youth break out of cycles of violence and poverty in war torn African communities and set up school-building projects in Liberia in 2006.
She supports the Unstoppable Foundation, cofunding the establishment of the Becky Primary School in Liberia. During her visit to Liberia she met the then President of Liberia and rehabilitated ex-child soldiers. She also appeared as part of a humanitarian mission there, hosting a "4Real" TV-series documentary on the post-war situation in the country with activist Kimmie Weeks.
Following her performance at the 2008 MTV Movie Awards afterparty, she donated her performance fee to building more schools in the country, telling the crowd, "It costs to build a school for 1,000." Winning the 2008 Official Soundclash Championships (iPod Battle) with her "M.I.A. and Friends" team, 20% of the following year's championship ticket sales were donated to her Liberian school building projects.
M.I.A. has also donated to The Pablove Foundation to fund paediatric cancer research, aid cancer families, and improve the quality of life for children living with cancer through creative arts programmes.
In 2009, she supported the "Mercy Mission to Vanni" aid ship, destined to send civilian aid from Britain to Vanniand controversially blocked from reaching its destination.
The country's navy announced that it would fire on any ship that entered its waters, and M.I.A. was singled out on the Sri Lankan army's official website after the singer announced her support for the campaign.
In 2011, following her performance at the Roskilde Festival, she donated from the Roskilde Festival Charity Society to help bring justice to Tamil victims of war crimes and genocide and to aid advocacy and ensure legal rights for refugees and witnesses.
After approaching American DJDiplo at the Fabric Club in London, the two became romantically involved for five years.
From 2006 to 2008, M.I.A. lived in the Bedford-Stuyvesantneighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, where she met Benjamin Bronfman (a.k.a. Benjamin Brewer), an environmentalist, founder of Green Owl, musician and member of the Bronfman family.
They became engaged and she gave birth to their son, Ikhyd Edgar Arular Bronfman, on 13 February 2009, just three days after performing at the Grammy Awards. In February 2012, it was announced that she and Bronfman had split.
In a 2013 interview with Ferrari Sheppard, M.I.A. commented on her relationship with Bronfman and his family's wealth: "I think it’s weird. It’s not that I got with Ben and then suddenly I was a billionaire. You know? I got with Ben, and I realized that we do come from different worlds, but it’s interesting that it is more about the concepts of, again, elitism and power. Who Ben is on paper sounds way more powerful than who I am because of where he comes from."
#20 TOP FEMALE RAPPER
ACTIVE: 2000 TO PRESENT
Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam (born 18 July 1975), better known by her stage name M.I.A., is a British recording artist of Sri Lankan Tamil heritage.
She is also a songwriter, painter and director. "M.I.A." is both a play on her own name and a reference to the abbreviation for Missing in Action.
Her compositions combine elements of electronic, dance,alternative, hip hop and world music. Arulpragasam began her career in 2000 as a visual artist, filmmaker and designer in west London before beginning her recording career in 2002.
Since rising to prominence in early 2004 for her singles "Sunshowers" and "Galang", charting in the UK and Canada and reaching number 11 on the Billboard Hot Dance Singles Sales in the US, she has been nominated for an Academy Award, two Grammy Awards and the Mercury Prize.
She released her début album Arular in 2005 and second album Kala in 2007 both to universal critical acclaim. Arular charted in Norway, Belgium, Sweden, Japan and the US, where it reached number 16 on the Billboard Independent Albums chart and number three on the dance/Electronic Albums chart.
Kala was certified silver in the united Kingdom and gold in Canada and the United States, where it topped the Dance/Electronic Albums chart. It also charted in several countries across Europe, in Japan and Australia.
The album's first single "Boyz" reached the Top 10 in Canada and on the Billboard Hot Dance Singles Sales in 2007, becoming her first Top 10 charting single.
The single "Paper Planes" peaked in the Top 20 worldwide and reached number four on the billboard Hot 100. "Paper Planes" was certified gold in New Zealand and three times platinum in Canada and the US where, as of November 2011, it is ranked the seventh best-selling song by a British artist in the digital era.
It has become XL Recordings' second best-selling single to date. M.I.A.'s third album Maya was released in 2010 soon after the controversial song-film short "Born Free". This became her highest-charting album in the UK and the US, reaching number nine on the billboard 200, topping the Dance/Electronic Albums chart and debuting in the Top 10 in Finland, Norway, Greece and Canada.
The single "XXXO" reached the Top 40 in Belgium, Spain and the UK. M.I.A. has embarked on four (soon to be five in 2013) global headlining tours and is the founder of her own multimedia label, N.E.E.T.. Her fourth studio album, Matangi, was released in 2013.
Arulpragasam's early compositions relied heavily on the Roland MC-505 sequencer/drum machine. Her later work marked an evolution in her sound with rare instruments, electronics and unusual sound samples.
Critics have acclaimed a distinctive style to her music. Lyrically incorporating a range of political, social, philosophical and cultural references that have defied existing pop music conventions, Arulpragasam was one of the first acts to come to public attention through the internet. She posted many of her songs and videos from 2002 onwards on platforms such as MySpace.
In 2001, she received an"Alternative" Turner Prize nomination for her visual art.
In both 2005 and 2008, M.I.A. was artist of the year by Spin and UR Band Arulpragasam is named as one of the defining artists of the 2000s decade by Rolling Stone in its "Best of the Decade" list in December 2009. Esquire magazine ranked M.I.A. on its list of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century in January 2010 and also in January 2010 Time magazine named her one of the world's 100 most influential people.
Life and career
1975–2000: Early life and education
Arulpragasam was born on 18 July 1975 in Hounslow in west London to Arul Pragasam, an engineer, writer and activist, and his wife, Kala, a seamstress. When Maya was six months old, her family moved to Jaffna, the cultural, political, and economic capital of the predominantly Tamilnorthern Sri Lanka, where her brother Sugu was born.
There, her father adopted the name Arular and became a political activist and founding member of the Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students (EROS), a political Tamil group affiliated with the LTTE.
The first eleven years of Arulpragasam's life were marked by displacement caused by the Sri Lankan Civil War.
Her family went into hiding from the Sri Lankan army, and Arulpragasam had little contact with her father during this period. She has described her family as living in "big-time" poverty during her childhood but also recalls some of her happiest memories from growing up in Jaffna.
Maya attended Tamil Hindu and Catholic convent schools such as the Holy Family Convent, Jaffna where she developed her art skills – painting in particular – to work her way up her class.
During the civil war, soldiers would put guns through holes in the windows and shoot at the school, what she notes as "bullying exploitation."
Her classmates were trained to dive under the table or run next door to English-language schools that, according to her, "wouldn’t get shot."
Arulpragasam lived on a road alongside much of her extended family and played inside temples and churches in the town.
Due to safety concerns, Arulpragasam's mother, Kala, relocated herself and her children to Madras in Tamil Nadu, India, where they lived in a derelict house and received sporadic visits from their father, Arular, who was introduced to the children as their "uncle" in order to protect them.
The family minus Arular then resettled in Jaffna temporarily, only to see the war escalate further in the northeast. During this time 9-year-old Arulpragasam's primary school was destroyed in a government raid.
Kala then moved with her children back to London in 1986 a week before Arulpragasam's eleventh birthday where they were housed as refugees.
Arular remained on the island and became an independent peace mediator between the two sides of the civil war in the late 1980s–2010.
Arulpragasam spent the rest of her childhood and teenage years living on the Phipps Bridge Estate in the Mitcham district of southwest London, where she learned to speak English, whilst Kala brought the children up on a modest income.
Arulpragasam entered the final year of primary school in the autumn of 1986 and quickly mastered the English language. Despite being the only Sri Lankan family in the area, the family were made welcome and faced no racial abuse during their time on the estate.
While living in the United Kingdom and raising her children, her mother became a practising Christian in 1990 and worked as a commissioned seamstress for the Royal Family for much of her career.
She currently works from her home in Tooting, south London.
Arulpragasam has had a difficult relationship with her father, due to his political activities in the 1980s and complete absence during much of her life. Prior to the release of the first album, which Arulpragasam had named after her father, Arular emailed her: "This is Dad. Change the title of your album. I'm really proud. Just read about you in the Sri Lanka Times. Dad."
Maya chose not to change the album title.
Arulpragasam attended the Ricards Lodge High School in Wimbledon. After leaving school, she completed a degree in fine art, film, and video in June 2000 from London's Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.
Her initial application to the school was rejected, but she was finally admitted and received a scholarship, being told that she "had chutzpah".
2000: Visual art and film
While attending Central St Martins College, Arulpragasam wanted to make films and art depicting realism that would be accessible to everyone, something that she felt was missing from her classmates' ethics and the course criteria.
At college, she found the fashion courses "disposable" and more current than the film texts that she studied. Maya told Arthur magazine "[Students there were] exploring apathy, dressing up in some pigeon outfit, or running around conceptualising... It missed the whole point of art representing society. Social reality didn’t really exist there; it just stopped at theory." She cited "radical cinema" including Harmony Korine, Dogme 95 and Spike Jonze as some of her cinematic inspirations during film school.
As a student, she was approached by director John Singleton to work on a film in Los Angeles after he had read a script she had written, though she decided not to take up the offer.
For her degree, M.I.A. prepared her departmental honours thesis on the film CB4.
Arulpragasam be friended students in the college fashion, advertising and graphics departments. She met Justine Frischmann, front woman of the British band Elastica, through her friend Damon Albarn at an Air concert in 1999, and Frischmann commissioned Arulpragasama to create the cover art for the band's 2000 album, The Menace, and video document their American tour.
Arulpragasam returned to Jaffna in 2001 to film a documentary on Tamil youth, but was unable to complete the project because she encountered harassment.
In 2001, Arulpragasam's first public exhibition of paintings after graduating took place at the Euphoria Shop on London's Portobello Road. It featured graffiti art and spray-paint canvasses mixing Tamil political street art with images of London life and consumerist culture.
The show was nominated for an Alternative Turner Prize and a monograph book of the collection was published in 2002, titled M.I.A.. Actor Jude Law was among early buyers of her art.
2000–07: Musical beginnings and Arular
Arulpragasam cites the radio broadcasts she heard emanating from her neighbours' flats in the late 1980s as some of her first exposures to her earliest musical influences.
From there, she developed an interest in hip-hop and dancehall, identifying with "the starkness of the sound" in records by Public Enemy, MC Shan and Ultramagnetic MCs; and the "weird, distinct style" of acts such as Silver Bullet and London Posse.
In college she developed an affinity for punk and the emerging sounds of Britpop and electroclash. M.I.A. cites the Slits, Malcolm McLaren and the Clash as major influences.
By 2001, Arulpragasam designed the cover for Elastica's last single "The Bitch Don't Work", and went on the road with the band to video document their tour. The tour's supporting act, electroclash artist peaches, introduced Arulpragasam to the Roland MC-505 and encouraged her to make music, a medium in which Arulpragasam lacked confidence.
While holidaying together in Bequia in the Caribbean, Arulpragasam began experimenting with Frischmann's MC-505. She adopted her stage name, "M.I.A.", standing for "Missing In Acton" during this time.
In her 2012 book Arulpragasam writes, "M.I.A. came to be because of my missing cousin. I wanted to make a film about where he was since he was M.I.A. (Missing in Action) in Sri Lanka. We were the same age, went to the same schools growing up. I was also living in Acton at the time. So I was living in Acton looking for my cousin missing in action."
Of her time in Bequia, she told "I started going out to this chicken shed with a sound system. You buy rum through a hatch and dance in the street. They convinced me to come to church where people sing so amazingly. But I couldn’t clap along to hallelujah. I was out of rhythm. Someone said, ‘What happened to Jesus? I saw you dancing last night and you were totally fine.’ They stopped the service and taught me to clap in time. It was embarrassing".
Returning to West London, where she shared an apartment with Frischmann, she began working with a simple set-up (a second-hand 4-track tape machine, the MC-505, and a radio microphone), composing and recording a six song demo tape that included "Lady Killa", "M.I.A.", and "Galang".
In 2003, the independent label Showbiz Records pressed 500 vinyl singles of "Galang", a mix of dancehall, electro, jungle, and world music, with Seattle Weekly praising its a cappella coda as a "lift-up-and-over moment" evoking "clear skies beyond the council flats."
File sharing, college radio airplay, and the rise in popularity of "Galang" and "Sunshowers" in dance clubs and fashion shows made M.I.A. an underground sensation.
M.I.A. has been heralded as one of the first artists to build a large fanbase exclusively via these channels and as someone who could be studied to reexamine the internet's impact on how listeners are exposed to new music.
Major record labels caught on to the popularity of "Galang", and M.I.A. was eventually signed to XL Recordings in mid-2004.
Her debut album, to be titled Arular, was finalized by borrowing studio time.
M.I.A.'s next single, "Sunshowers", released on 5 July 2004, and its B-side ("Fire Fire") described guerrilla warfare and asylum seeking, merging ambiguous references to violence and religious persecution with black and white forms of dissidence. These themes inspired her treatment for the music video, the first she wrote. It was filmed in the jungles of South India, which she has described as her favourite. "Galang" was re-released in 2004. In September 2004, M.I.A was first featured on the cover of the publication The FADER, in its 24th issue.
The music video for "Galang" made in November of that year showed multiple M.I.A.s against a backdrop of militaristic animated graffiti, and depicted scenes of urban Britain and war that influenced her art direction for it. Both singles appeared on international publications' "Best of the Year" lists and subsequently "Best of the Decade" lists. The songs "Pull Up the People", "Bucky Done Gun" and "" were released as12-inch singles and CDs by XL Recordings, which along with the non-label mashup mixtape of Arular tracks, Piracy Funds Terrorism, were distributed in 2004 to positive critical acclaim.
M.I.A. made her North American live debut in February 2005 in Toronto where concertgoers already knew many of her songs.
In March 2005, M.I.A.'s debut album Arular was released worldwide to critical acclaim after several months delay.
The album title is the nom de guerrethat M.I.A.'s father took when he joined the Tamil independence movement, and many of the songs acknowledge her and her father's experiences in Jaffna.
While making Arular in her bedroom in west London, she built tracks off her demos, using beats she programmed on the Roland MC-505. The album experiments with bold, jarring and ambient sounds, and its lyrics address the Iraq War and daily life in London as well as M.I.A.'s past.

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"Galang", "Sunshowers", "Hombre" and the funk carioca-inspired co-composition "Bucky Done Gun" were released as singles from Arular. The release of the latter marked the first time that a funk carioca-inspired song was played on mainstream radio and music television in Brazil, its country of origin.
M.I.A. worked with one of her musical influences Missy Elliott, contributing to the track "Bad Man" on her 2005 album The Cookbook.
Despite initial fears that her dyslexia might pose problems while touring, M.I.A. supported the album through a series of festival and club shows, including the Bue Festival, a free headlining show at Central park summer stage, the Summer Sonic Fest and the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, where she played an encore in response to crowd enthusiasm, a rare occurrence for the festival generally and the first encore following a tent performance at Coachella.
She also toured with Roots Manuva and LCD Sound system, and ended 2005 briefly touring with Gwen Stefani and performing at the Big Day Out festival.
On 19 July 2005, M.I.A. was shortlisted for the Mercury Music Prize for Arular. According to the music review aggregation Metacritic, it garnered an average score of 88 out of 100, described as "universal acclaim".
They reported in 2010 that Arular was the seventh best reviewed album of 2005 and the ninth Best-Reviewed Electronic/Dance Album on Metacritic of the 2000 – 09 decade.
Arular became the second most featured album in music critics’ Year-End Top 10 lists for 2005 and was named best of the year by publications such as Blender, Stylus and Musikbyrån.
2007–09: Kala and world recognition
In 2006, M.I.A. recorded her second studio album Kala, this time named after her mother. Due to censorship and visa complications in the United States, the album was recorded in a variety of locations — India,Trinidad, Liberia, Jamaica,Australia, Japan, and the UK. Eventually the album was completed in the US.
"I think traveling really helps. I know some musicians who have studios in Trinidad. There's a collective of artists and painters there now who went to Central Saint Martins College [in London] with me. They live there and make art. It's neat to see that-[people] not led by money or pretentiousness. It's a small community, but you really have the space to observe and digest the culture. You go to a place where social commentary is rare and important and you can serve people. That's what's inspiring to me-finding someplace where people haven't already seen themselves in a certain light."
—M.I.A., Interview with Kehinde Wiley
Kala featured live instrumentation and layers of traditional dance and folk styles such as soca and the urumee drum of gaana, rave music and bootleg soundtracks of Tamil film music, incorporating new styles into her avant-garde electronic dance music.
The songs, artwork and fashion of Kalahave been characterized as simultaneously celebratory and infused with raw, "darker, outsider" themes, such as immigration politics, personal relationships and war.
In February 2007, the first track from the album to be made available to the public was "Bird Flu", which was posted with an accompanying music video to her MySpace. Later that year, M.I.A. featured in the song "Come Around", a bonus track on Timbaland's 2007 album Shock Value and a track on Kala.
The album's first official single "Boyz" was released in June 2007, accompanied by a music video co-directed by Jay Will and M.I.A., becoming M.I.A.'s first top ten charting song. The single "Jimmy", written about an invitation to tour genocide-affected regions in Rwanda that the singer received from a journalist while staying in Liberia, was released next.
The single "Paper Planes" and the EP Paper Planes - Homeland Security Remixes EP were released digitally in February 2008, the single eventually selling three times platinum in the US and Canada, certified Gold in New Zealand, and becoming the 29th most downloaded song in the digital era in the US and earning a Grammy nomination for Record of the Year. "Paper Planes" is to date XL Recordings' second best selling single, and by November 2011 it had sold 3.6 million copies in the US, currently the seventh best-selling song by a British artist in the digital era.
In 2007, M.I.A. also released the How Many Votes Fix Mix EP which included a remix of "Boyz" featuring Jay-Z.
"Paper Planes" is one of M.I.A.'s most popular songs. On this song she collaborated with Florida-based DJ Diplo. Their work on this song landed him a Grammy nomination for Record of the year and got number three in the U.S. Charts.They also worked together on her first album "Arular" Like its predecessor, universal acclaim met Kala's release in August 2007 and the album earned anormalised rating of 87 out of 100 on the review aggregator MetaCritic.
Kala was a greater commercial success than Arular. To support Kala, M.I.A. performed at a series of music festivals on the Kala Tour featuring performances in Europe, America and Asia. She performed three dates opening for Björk in the US and France.
In 2008, M.I.A. provided guest vocals on Buraka Som Sistema's kuduro song "Sound of Kuduro", recorded in Angola with an accompanying video. The same year, M.I.A. and director Spike Jonze filmed a documentary in Woolwich, South London, in which they both appeared with Afrikan Boy, a Nigerian immigrant rapper and she disclosed plans to launch her own record label, Zig-Zag.
She ended the year with concerts in the United Kingdom. By year end,Kala was named the best album of 2007 by publications including Rolling Stone and Blender.MetaCritic reported in 2010 that Kala was the tenth Best-Reviewed Electronic/Dance Album on Metacritic of the 2000 – 09 decade, one position below her debut album Arular.
M.I.A. performed on the People vs. Money Tour during the first half of 2008. She cancelled the final leg of her tour in Europe through June and July after revealing her intentions to take a career break and work on other art projects, go back to college and make a film.
In 2008, M.I.A. started her independent record label N.E.E.T. Recordings. The first artist signed to the label was Baltimore rapper Rye Rye, who performed with M.I.A. at the Diesel XXX party at Pier 3 in Brooklyn in October 2008 where it was revealed that M.I.A. was pregnant with her first child.
M.I.A. contributed songs for A. R. Rahman's score of the film Slumdog Millionaire, which included the collaboration "O…Saya"; she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song and a World Soundtrack Award for Best Original Song Written Directly for a Film for the song.
M.I.A. was due to perform at the Oscars ceremony two weeks after her Grammy Award performance, but could not as she had just given birth to her son.
M.I.A. is the first person of Asian descent to be nominated for an Oscar and Grammy award in the same year.
2009–10: Maya

M.I.A. performing at the Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival in August 2009
At the 2009 BRIT Awards in February, M.I.A. was a nominee for Best British Female Artist. Seeking to promote new, underground music with N.E.E.T., M.I.A. signed more bands including Baltimore musician Blaqstarr, indie rock band Sleigh Bells and visual artist Jaime Martinez by late 2009.
3D photographic images of M.I.A. by Martinez were commissioned in April of that year. In August 2009, M.I.A. began composing and recording her third studio album in a home studio section in her Los Angeles house.
In January 2010, M.I.A. posted her video for the song "Space". While composing it, she helped write a song with Christina Aguilera called "Elastic Love" for Aguilera's album Bionic.
By April 2010, the song and music video/short film "Born Free" were leaked online. The video-film short was directed by Romain Gavras and written by M.I.A., depicting genocide against red-haired adolescents being forced to run across a minefield and caused controversy due to its graphically violent content.
Although not an official single, the song charted in Sweden and the United Kingdom. M.I.A.'s third album, Maya — stylised as/\/\ /\ Y /\ — was released on 23 June 2010 in Japan with bonus tracks before its release in other countries.
Maya became M.I.A.'s highest charting album globally. Its release in the US was delayed by two weeks. The album garnered a generally favourable, although divided, reception from critics.
A more internet-inspired album illustrating how a multimedia artist worked within the music industry, elements of industrial music were incorporated into M.I.A.'s sound for the first time.
She described the album in an interview with Dazed & Confused as a mix of "babies, death, destruction and powerlessness".
On 11 May 2010, the first official single from Maya, "XXXO", was released and reached the top forty in Belgium, Spain and the UK. "Steppin' Up", "Teqkilla", and "Tell Me Why" were also released as promotional singles exclusively on iTunes in the days leading to the release of Maya, with "Teqkilla" reaching the top 100 in Canada on digital downloads alone.
The video for "XXXO" was released online in August. M.I.A. hinted in an interview to Blitz that a music video is being made with director Spike Jonze for the single "Teqkilla." She completed her live tour dates on the Maya Tour in summer of 2011.
From 2000 until 2010, she directed the video for Elastica single "Mad Dog God Dam" and videos for her songs "Bird Flu", "Boyz", "S.U.S. (Save Ur Soul)", "Space" and "XXXO" as well as personally choosing the directors for the videos of her songs Galang, Sunshowers, which she described in 2005 and again in 2011 as being her favorite video experience and favorite video adaptation of a song of hers, in her words as of 2011, "If you watch only one of my videos, please try Sunshowers", "Jimmy," "Born Free," and "Bad Girls." (which she described as her second favorite).
She directed a video for Rye Rye's "Bang". She judged in the Music Video category at the inaugural Vimeo Festival & Awards in New York in October 2010.
2011–present: Matangi
M.I.A. released her second mixtape, Vicki Leekx, on 31 December 2010, and followed this with Internet Connection: The Remixes, an EP to a bonus track from Maya in January 2011. M.I.A. performed on the song "C.T.F.O." on SebastiAn's albumTotal.
On 21 April 2011, it was reported that M.I.A. had been in the studio with Chris Brown, the Cataracs, Swizz Beatz and Polow da Don.
She co-wrote the song "Give Me All Your Luvin'" with Madonna and Nicki Minaj for the album MDNA and performed it at the Super Bowl XLVI Halftime Show.
Controversially, instead of singing the lyric "shit" in the song, M.I.A. extended the middle finger to the camera. The N.F.L. responded by filing a lawsuit suing M.I.A. for million in damages and demanding a public apology from M.I.A.
Maya and her legal team also responded by saying that the league's claim of "wholesomeness" in the lawsuit is hypocritical since the N.F.L. itself has had multiple situations of their own players and coaches behaving badly as well as health problems within the league, particularly concussions.
In September 2013 Maya released a video statement regarding the lawsuit. In her statement Arulpragasam said, "They're basically [saying] it's OK for me to promote being sexually exploited as a female, than to display empowerment, female empowerment, through being punk rock. That's what it boils down to, and I'm being sued for it."
She's also featured in "B-Day Song", another song included on MDNA.
The first buzz track of her fourth album, "Bad Girls", taken from her Vicki Leekx mixtape, premiered on 30 January 2012, was released globally the day after, and was followed by a music video directed by Romain Gavras on 3 February 2012.
This received nominations for Video of the Year at the 2012 MTV Video Music Awards and at the 55th Grammy Awards. The song become one of M.I.A.'s most successful singles, charting in the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Canada, United States, Switzerland, South Korea and Belgium.
On 29 April 2012 she posted a preview of a new song to YouTube, titled "Come Walk With Me". The full version of Come Walk With Me was shared one and a half year later, on September 2013.
M.I.A. officially signed to Jay-Z's Roc Nation management in May 2012. Rihanna welcomed her to the family, tweeting, "welcome home MIA."
She guested during Jay-Z's set at the Radio 1 Festival in Hackney on 23 June 2012.
In October 2012, M.I.A. released an autobiographical book titled M.I.A. documenting "the five years of M.I.A. art that spans across three LPs: Arular, Kala, and Maya." The book contains artwork as well as a foreword by frequent collaborator Steve Loveridge and various essays by M.I.A. On 3 March 2013, she released an 8-minute mix recording as part of a Kenzo fashion show in Paris.
Matangi, was recorded across the world with different collaborators. In relation to her previous albums, she described her fourth as "basically all of them together", akin to an anthology.
The album was released on Interscope and M.I.A.'s label N.E.E.T. Recordings.
Release dates of 31 January 2013 and later, 15 April 2013 were announced, but the album remained unreleased. M.I.A. later revealed that the original project for Matangi was not accepted by Interscope, which claimed that the record was "too positive".
"Bring the Noize", produced by French producer Surkin and Switch, was announced as the second single and was released on 17 June 2013.
Soon after the single was released, the official video for "Bring the Noize" premiered on 25 June via Noisey.
On 9 August 2013, the album received an official release date of 5 November 2013 after M.I.A. threatened to leak the album due to the numerous delays by Interscope.
Matangi received generally positive reviews from music critics. In its first week of release, the album sold 15,000 copies and peaked at number 23 on the Billboard 200, falling to number 90 in its second week.
Overall, Matangi is M.I.A.'s lowest charting album worldwide.
On 31 December 2013 M.I.A. announced that she's leaving Roc Nation.
M.I.A.'s music features styles such as electro, reggae, rhythm and blues, alternative rock, hip hop, grime, rap ballads and Asian folkand references to her musical influences such as Missy Elliott, Tamil film music, Lou Reed, Pixies,Timbaland, Beastie Boys and London Posse.
She was a childhood fan of Boney M, composer A. R. Rahman and pop artists Michael Jackson and Madonna, also she has cited Björk as an inspiration and has been influenced by The Slits,Public Enemy, Malcolm McLarena nd The Clash.
Noting her early inspirations, she said "When I would go to bed, I’d listen to the radio and dream about dancing and Paula Abdul and Whitney Houston, and that’s how I fell asleep. When my radio was burgled, I started listening to hip hop". She has revealed her ideal karaoke song would be "Germ-Free Adolescents" by X-Ray Spex. M.I.A. describes her music asdance music or club music for the "other", and has been described as an "anti-popstar" for refusing to conform to certain recording industry expectations of solo artists.
M.I.A.'s early compositions relied heavily on the Roland MC-505, while later M.I.A. experimented further with her established sound and drew from a range of genres, creating layered textures of instruments, electronics and sounds outside the traditional studio environment. Artists including Nas, Chuck D and Krist Novoselic of Nirvana have praised her work.
She has also stated she is a fan of Beyoncé Knowles, stating "she's like harder, faster, stronger. In our lifetime, she will be a classic, like how people talk about Aretha Franklin."
Jimmy Iovine, the chairman of M.I.A.'s American distribution label Interscope, compares M.I.A. to Reed and punk rock songwriter Patti Smith, and recalled, "She's gonna do what she's gonna do, I can't tell her shit."
"The really left-of-center artists, you really wonder about them. Can the world catch up? Can the culture meet them in the middle? That’s what the adventure is. It doesn’t always happen, but it should and it could."
Richard Russell, head of XL Recordings, states, "You've got to bend culture around to suit you, and I think M.I.A has done that" adding that M.I.A.'s composition and production skills were a major attraction for him.
As a vocalist, M.I.A. is recognisable by her distinctive whooping, chanting voice, which has been described as having an "indelible, nursery-rhyme swing."
She has adopted different singing styles on her songs, from aggressive raps, to semi-spoken and melodic vocals. She has said of the sometimes "unaffected" vocals and delivery of her lyrics, "It is what it is. Most people would just put it down to me being lazy. But at the same time, I don’t want [that perfection]," saying some of the "raw and difficult" vocal styles she used reflected what was happening to her during recording.
Sasha Frere-Jones, critic of The New Yorker praised the self made "unpretentious, stuck together with Scotch tape" style that M.I.A. achieves with her Roland MC-505 drum machine and keyboard unit, noting that many people had tried to copy the style since.
Her considerable influence on American hip hop music as an international artist is described by Adam Bradley and Andrew DuBois in The Anthology of Rap as making her an "unlikely hip hop" celebrity, given that the genre was one of several influences behind M.I.A.'s "eccentric and energizing" music and that the musician's unclassifiable sound was one example of how hip hop was changing as it came into contact with other cultures.
Similarly, Jeffrey H. Wallenfeldt writes in The Black experience in America : from civil rights to the present that no single artist may have personified hip hop in the 21st century better than M.I.A., in her "politically radical lyrics drawing from widely diverse sources around the world".
The Guardian critic Hattie Collins commented of M.I.A.'s influence, "A new raver before it was old. A baile funk/pop pioneer before CSS and Bonde do Rolê emerged. A quirky female singer/rapper before the Mini Allens had worked out how to log on to MySpace. Missing In Action (or Acton, as she sometimes calls herself) has always been several miles ahead of the pack."
The twisting of western modalities in her music style using multilingual, multiethnic soundscapes to make electroclash-pop albums is noted by Derek Beres in Global beat fusion: the history of the future of music (2005) to defy world music categorization.
In the book Downloading Music (2007), Linda Aksomitis notes the various aspects of peer-to-peer file sharing of music in the rise in popularity of M.I.A., including the advantages and disadvantages of the internet and platforms such as MySpace in the launch of her career.
Andy Bennett and Jon Stratton highlight in Britpop and the English Music Tradition (2010) how M.I.A. alongside musicians such as Sway and Dizzee Rascal created music that explored new soundscapes with new technologies, with lyrics expressing anger at Britain's "racialized subordination of minority groups" and that the innovation that generates new musical forms like grime and dubstep are, inevitably, politically engaged. The chart success of grime-influenced artists like M.I.A. is heralded as a signal in the way that white Britons adapted to a new multicultural and plural musical mix in contrast to bands of the Britpop genre.
Furthermore, her work being used as a global resource for the articulation of differently located themes and its connections to many music traditions is noted by Brian Longhurst in Popular music and society (2007) to illustrate such processes of interracial dialogue. Gary Shteyngart writing in GQ notes that "M.I.A. is perhaps the preeminent global musical artist of the 2000s, a truly kick-ass singer and New York-Londony fashion icon, not to mention a vocal supporter of Sri Lanka's embattled Tamil minority, of which she's a member."
M.I.A.'s stage performances are described as "highly energetic" and multimedia showcases, often with scenes of what Rolling Stonecritic Rob Sheffield describes as "jovial chaos, with dancers and toasters and random characters roaming the stage," bringing various crowds with interests in art, music and fashion.
Camille Dodero, writing in The Village Voiceopined that M.I.A. "works hard to manifest the chaos of her music in an actual environment, and, more than that, to actively create discomfort, energy, and anger through sensory overload." Her role as an artist in and voice lender to the subaltern is appreciated by theorists as having brought such ideas to first world view.
USA Today included her on its list of the 100 Most Interesting People of 2007 and she was named one of Time Out 's 40th Birthday London Heroes in 2008. The same year,Esquire listed M.I.A. as one of the 75 Most Influential People of the 21st century, describing her as the first and only major artist in world music, and in 2009 she was cited in Time magazine's Time 100 as one of the world's most influential people for her global influence across many genres.
In December 2010, USA Today listed M.I.A. at number 63 on its list of the "100 People of 2010". M.I.A. placed number 14 on Rolling Stone 's Decade-End Readers' Poll of "Top Artists Of The Decade."Rolling Stone named her one of eight artists who defined the 2000s decade.
Themes and artwork
M.I.A. has become known for integrating her imagery of political violence into her music videos and her cover art. Her politically inspired art became recognized while she exhibited and published several of her brightly coloured stencils and paintings portraying the tiger, a symbol of Tamil nationalism, ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka and urban Britain in the early 2000s. Lyrics on Arularregarding her experiences of identity politics, poverty, revolution, gender and sexual stereotypes, war, and the conditions of working class in London were hailed as new and unorthodox, setting her apart from previous artists.
The album references the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Tamil independence movements and features culture jamming, multi-lingual slang, strident and subtle imagery. Her albums' social commentary and storytelling have incited debate on the "invigoratingly complex" politics of the issues she highlighted in the album, breaking taboos while the West was engaged in the 2003 Iraq War in the Middle East during the Presidency of George W. Bush.
Government visits to her official website following her debut album's release in 2005, and a US refusal to grant M.I.A. a travel visa coupled with her brief presence on the US Homeland Security Risk List in 2006 due to her politically charged lyrics led to her second album Kala being recorded in a variety of locations around the world.
The American Civil Liberties Union described the actions as part of a trend of ideological exclusion by the state which was detrimental to democracy by "censoring and manipulating debate".

Afrikan Boy, anAfrobeat/grime London MC with Nigerian roots supporting M.I.A. at the Rock en Seine Festival, 2007
On Kala, M.I.A.'s songs explored immigration politics and her personal relationships. Many related her experiences during recording sessions in Madras, Angola, Trinidad shantytowns, Liberia and London, and were well acclaimed.
The album's artwork was inspired by African art, "from dictator fashion to old stickers on the back of cars," which like her clothing range, she hoped would capture "a 3-D sense, the shapes, the prints, the sound, film, technology, politics, economics" of a certain time. I-D magazine described the "bleeding cacophany of graphics" on her website during this time as evoking the "noisy amateurism" of the early web, but also embodying a rejection of today's "glossy, professional site design" which was felt to "efface the medium rather than celebrate it."
Jeff Chang, writing for The Nation, described a "Kala for the Nation" and the album's music, lyrics and imagery as encompassing "everywhere – or, to be specific, everywhere but the First World's self-regarding 'here'," stating that against a media flow that suppresses the "ugliness" of reality and fixes beauty to consumption, M.I.A. forces a conversation about how the majority live, closing the distance "between 'here' and everywhere else". He felt that Kala explored poverty, violence and globalization through the eyes of "children left behind."
Her third album, Maya, tackled information politics in the digital age, loaded with technological references and love songs, and deemed by Kitty Empire writing inThe Observer to be her most melancholic and mainstream effort. Her genocide-depicting 2010 video for the single "Born Free" was deemed by Ann Powerswriting in the Los Angeles Times to be "concentrating fully" on the physical horror of gun butts and bullets hitting flesh, with the scenes giving added poignancy to the lyrical themes of the song.
Interpreted as a comment on the Arizona immigration law, America's military might and desensitised attitudes towards violence, others found that the video stressed that genocide still exists and violent repression remains commonplace. Some critics described the film as "sensationalist". Neda Ulaby ofNPR described the video as intended for "shock value" in the service of nudging people into considering real issues that can be hard to talk about.
M.I.A. revealed that she felt "disconnected" during the writing process, and spoke of the Internet inspiration and themes of information politics that could be found in the songs and the artwork.
M.I.A. views her work as reflective, pieced together in one piece "so you can acquire it and hear it." She states, "All that information floats around where we are – the images, the opinions, the discussions, the feelings – they all exist, and I felt someone had to do something about it because I can't live in this world where we pretend nothing really matters."
On the political nature of her songs she has said, "Nobody wants to be dancing to political songs. Every bit of music out there that’s making it into the mainstream is really about nothing. I wanted to see if I could write songs about something important and make it sound like nothing. And it kind of worked."
Censorship on MTV of "Sunshowers" proved controversial and was again criticised following Kala release "Paper Planes".
YouTube's block and subsequent age gating/obscuring of the video for "Born Free" from Maya due to its graphic violence/political subtext was criticized by M.I.A. as hypocritical, citing the Internet channel's streaming of real-life killings. She went on to state, "It's just fake blood and ketchup and people are more offended by that than the execution videos", referring to clips of Sri Lankan troops extrajudicially shooting unarmed, blindfolded, naked men that she had previously tweeted.
Despite the block, the video remained on her website and Vimeo, and has been viewed 30 million times on the internet.
Lisa Weems writes in the book Post colonial challenges in education how M.I.A. pointed out in her music how immigrants, refugees and persons of the third world can and do resist through economic, political and cultural discursive practices.
In light of her influence in modern culture and the historical and political significance embedded in both the instrumental music and lyrics of her songs, J. Gentry ofBrown University instructs a course from summer 2012 titled "Music & Politics: From Mozart to M.I.A.", with the objective of academically exploring and examining the political messages and contexts of music and the way "music has consistently participated in and reflected the political debates of its time".
Fashion and style

M.I.A. performing on the People vs. Money Tour
M.I.A. cites guerrilla art and fashion as major influences. Her mother works as a seamstress in London. An early interest in fashion and textiles – designing confections of "bright fluorescent fishnet fabrics" — was a hallmark of her time at Central Saint Martins College. M.I.A. was a roommate of fashion designer Luella Bartleyand is a long-time friend of designer Carri Mundane.
Clothes from her limited-edition "Okley Run" line — Mexican and Afrika line jackets and leggings, Islamic-inspired and water melon-print hoodies, and tour-inspired designs – were sold in 2008 during New York fashion week.
She commented, "I wanted to tie all my work together. When I make an album, I make a number of artworks that go with it, and now I make some clothes that go with it too. So this Okley run was an extension of my Kala album and artwork."
Spin described her designs as "1000 watt Malcolm McLaren-meets-Basquiat", that complimented her personal style that could "run from futurist aerobic instructor to new wave pirate to queenly candy raver".
Contrary to her present style, M.I.A.'s Arular era style has been described as "tattered hand me downs and patched T-shirts of indigents", embodying the "uniform of the refugee" but modified with cuts, alterations and colours to fashion a distinctly new style and apparel line.
M.I.A. built on this during the Kala era with a "playful" combination of baggy T-shirts, leggings and short-shorts. She incorporated eccentric accessories in bold patterns, sparkle and "over-saturated" neon colour to fashion her signature style which inspired flocks of "garishly-clothed all-too-sassy" new-rave girls with bright red tights, cheetah-skin smock and faded 1980s T- shirts. Her commodifying and performance of this refugee image has been noted to "reposition" perceptions of it in the wider public. Hailed as presenting a challenge to the mainstream with her ironic style, M.I.A. has been praised for dictating such a subcultural trend worldwide, combining "adolescent" frustrations of race and class with a strong desire to dance.
Eddy Lawrence of Time Out commented how her multi genre style contributed to her being beloved of the broad sheet fashionistas yet simultaneously patron saint and pin-up for the Day-Glo nu-rave kids.
Similarly, Mary Beth Ray, in the book Rock Brands: Selling Sound in a Media Saturated Culturewrites that M.I.A.'s hybrid style addressed a number of social and political issues including power, violence, identity and survival in a globalized world, while using avenues that challenged "traditional" definitions of what it meant to be a contemporary popartist.
M.I.A. was once denied entry into a Marc Jacobs party, but subsequently DJed at the designer's 2008 fashion show after party, and modelled for "Marc by Marc Jacobs" in Spring/Summer 2008.
M.I.A.'s fashion and style landed her on Vogue's 10 Best Dressed of 2008. She turned down her inclusion on People magazine's list of the "50 Most Beautiful People in the World" the same year.
M.I.A.'s status as a style icon, trendsetter and trailblazer is globally affirmed, with her distinct identity, style, and music illuminating social issues of gender, the third world, and popular music.
Critics point out that such facets of her public persona underline the importance of authenticity, challenging the globalized popular music market, and demonstrating music's strive to be political.
Her albums have been met with acclaim, often heralded as "eclectic" for possessing a genre all their own, "packaging inherent politics in the form of pleasurable dance music."
M.I.A.'s artistic efforts to connect this "extreme eclecticism" with issues of exile, war, violence and terrorism are both commended and criticized. Commentators laud M.I.A.'s use and subversion of her refugee and migrant experiences, through the weaving of musical creativity, artwork and fashion with her personal life as having dispelled stereotypical notions of the immigrant experience.
This gives her a unique place in popular music, while demanding new responses within popular music, media and fashion culture. M.I.A. has been the muse of designers Donatella Versace and Bartley and photographers Rankin and David Bailey, whose spread documents the British musicians who defined the sound and style of rock 'n' roll.
On 1 July 2012 Maya attended the Atelier Versace Show in Paris, wearing clothing inspired from the designer's 1992 collection.
In 2013 she released her own Versace Collection.
M.I.A.'s albums have generated widespread acclaim. Pop Matters writer Rob Wheaton felt M.I.A. subverted the "abstract, organized, refined" distilling of violence in Western popular music and imagination and made her work represent much of the developing world's decades-long experiences of "arbitrary, unannounced, and spectacular" slaughter, deeming her work an "assault" with realism.
Some detractors criticized M.I.A. early in her music career for "using radical chic" and for her attendance of an art school.
Critic Simon Reynolds, writing in The Village Voice in 2005 saw this as a lack of authenticity and felt M.I.A. was "a veritable vortex of discourse, around most likely irresolvable questions concerning authenticity, postcolonialism, and dilettantism". He continued that while swayed by her chutzpah and ability to deliver live, he "was also turned off by the stencil-sprayed projection imagery of grenades, tanks, and so forth (redolent of the Clash with their strife-torn Belfast stage backdrops and Sandinista cred by association)" while the "99 percent white audience punched the air", admonishing what he perceived as a "lack of local character" to her debut album.
Critic Robert Christgau described Reynolds' argument as "cheap tack" in another article written in the publication, stating M.I.A's experiences connected her to world poverty in a way "few Western whites can grasp". He questioned why M.I.A.'s 2001 Alternative Turner Prize nominated images of pastel-washed tigers, soldiers, guns, armored vehicles, and fleeing civilians that bedeck M.I.A.'s albums and videos were now assumed or analyzed as being incendiary propaganda, suggesting that unlike art buyers, rock and roll fans were "assumed to be stupid".
Reynolds later argued that M.I.A. was the "Artist of the Decade" in a 2009 issue of The Guardian. Music culture writer Michael Meyer opined that M.I.A.'s record imagery, lyrical booklets, homepages and videos supported the "image of provocation yet also avoidance of, or inability to use consistent images and messages." Instead of catering to stereotypes, he felt that M.I.A. "played with them" creating an uncategorizable and hence unsettling result.
Critic Zach Baron felt that it had been shown in her career that M.I.A. had "always been adept at using a larger force against itself."
M.I.A. has been hailed as demonstrating dislocation to be a "productive site of departure" and praised for her ability to transform such a "disadvantage" into a creative form of expression.
Activism
M.I.A.'s commentary on what she takes to be the oppression of Tamils, Palestinians and African Americans has drawn praise and criticism. The United States has restricted her access into and out of the country during her career since the release of her debut album.
M.I.A. notes that the voicelessness she felt as a child dictated her role as a refugee advocate and voice lender to civilians in war during her career.
"Sometimes I repeat my story again and again because it's interesting to see how many times it gets edited, and how much the right to tell your story doesn't exist. People reckon that I need a political degree in order to go, 'My school got bombed and I remember it cos I was 10-years-old'. I think if there is an issue of people who, having had first hand experiences, are not being able to recount that – because there is laws or government restrictions or censorship or the removal of an individual story in a political situation – then that's what I'll keep saying and sticking up for, cos I think that's the most dangerous thing. I think removing individual voices and not letting people just go 'This happened to me' is really dangerous. That's what was happening... nobody handed them the microphone to say 'This is happening and I don't like it'."
—M.I.A., Clash

M.I.A. attributes much of her success to the "homeless, rootlessness" of her early life. A refugee icon, the EMP Museum's 2008 Pop Conference featured paper submissions and discussions on M.I.A. presented on the theme of "Shake, Rattle: Music, Conflict, and Change." She has used networking sites such as Twitter and MySpace to discuss and highlight the human rights abuses and war crimes that Sri Lanka is accused of perpetrating against Tamils, citing news articles, human rights group reports, government reports, her own experiences as a child and on her return to the island in 2001 to support calls for a cease fire.
M.I.A. has spoken of discussions with witnesses during and after the war as reinforcing the need for international intervention to protect and provide justice to Tamil people. As the 2009 Tamil diaspora protests gathered pace, she joined other activists in condemning the actions of the Sri Lankan government against the Tamil populace as a slow "systematic" genocide. Telling TIME that she didn't see anything wrong in sticking up for 300,000 trapped and dying people, M.I.A. stated that international governments were privy to Sri Lanka's use of widespread censorship and propaganda on the rebellion during the island's civil war to aid its impunity in numerous atrocities on civilians, but had no will to end it. Sri Lanka's Foreign Secretary denied that his country perpetrated genocide, responding that he felt M.I.A. was "misinformed" and that "it's best she stays with what she's good at, which is music, not politics." Consequently, she has been accused of being a "terrorist sympathiser" and "LTTE supporter" by the Sri Lankan government. Two weeks before his death, the Tigers' Political Head B. Nadesan told Indian magazine The Week he felt that M.I.A.'s humanitarianism had been a source of strength to Eelam Tamils and fearless, knowingly amidst the "all-powerful Sri Lankan propaganda machinery that demonises any one who speaks for the Tamils." Miranda Sawyer of The Observer highlighted that M.I.A. was emotional and that this could be limiting her, stating that while she was well informed, "you're not meant to get involved when giving information out about war", and that the difficulty for M.I.A. was that the world "doesn't really care."
M.I.A. endorsed candidate Jan Jananayagam at the 2009 European Parliament election, a last-minute candidate standing on a platform of anti-genocide, civil liberties, financial transparency, the environment and women's rights, who became one of the most successful independent election candidates ever despite her loss in the general election.
Hate mail, including death threats directed at M.I.A. and her son, has followed her activism, which she also cited as an influence on the songs on her album Maya.
In 2010, she condemned the Chinese Government's role in supporting and supplying arms to the Sri Lankan government during the conflict in an interview with music magazine Mondomix, stating that China's influence within the UN was preventing prosecutions of war crimes committed during the conflict.

"I'm not coming at it as a politician, it's my own personal experience. And I just think that that's just what people want to put out there, you know, 'You don't have the right to talk about this'. And they use me as a puppet to explain that to you, that only people who, you know, have a PhD in this shit are allowed to talk about this. Or that only politicians are allowed to talk about politics, and that's why we're fucked, because the cycle is constantly kept within that fucking framework. There aren't more people standing up and telling their personal experience... if a normal civilian comes up and says 'Hey, this happened in my village and I'm not happy about it', we're not allowed to talk about it. You have to follow this bureaucratic bullshit to get any sort of action, and it's all part of this cycle. Like back in the day, we had ideals of revolution and fighting back, and most of the time that shit starts with individual people having personal relationships, these experiences. And now it's so disconnected and the media can paint a picture for you...they make so much bureaucracy and politics, and I think taking away the personal aspects, the human aspects of these political issues is really wrong. Whether it's the floods, or starving people in Africa, or whatever. It's all funnelled through this channel, you really are not getting it from the horse's mouth, you know?"
The same year, M.I.A. voiced her fears of the influence of video game violence on her son and his generation, saying, "I don't know which is worse. The fact that I saw it in my life has maybe given me lots of issues, but there's a whole generation of American kids seeing violence on their computer screens and then getting shipped off to Afghanistan. They feel like they know the violence when they don't. Not having a proper understanding of violence, especially what it's like on the receiving end of it, just makes you interpret it wrong and makes inflicting violence easier."
In October 2009, she stated that the President of the United States Barack Obama should give back his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize "like John Lennon sent back his MBE." She said in one interview, playing on the famous Lennon phrase "Give Peace a Chance" - "I'm a bit beyond being an artist who says, 'Give peace a chance.' Part of me is like, 'Give war a chance,' just to stir it up, you know what I mean?".
In 2008, M.I.A. filmed from her Bed Stuy apartment window and posted on YouTube an incident involving a black man being apprehended by white policemen, which in light of the Sean Bell shooting incident, elicited commentary debating the force used for the arrest. She has spoken of the combined effects that news corporations and search engine Google have on news and data collection, while stressing the need for alternative news sources that she felt her son's generation would need in order to ascertain truth.
She told Nylon magazine that social networking site Facebook and Google's development "by the CIA" was harmful to internet freedom. Some criticized the claim as lacking detail.
Following the 2011 United Kingdom anti-austerity protests and the 2011 London riots, during which her cousin's jewellery shop in Croydon was attacked and looted, M.I.A. criticised the UK Government's response to the rioters as failing to address the root causes of them. She recalled the importance of a council funded youth worker she had in her school years, the use of tax money to incentivise a new business job creation program amongst the working class and imprisonment conditions which encouraged consumerism. She stated that the top forty companies in Britain who banked offshore should be made to pay taxes in the UK and "cut the poor people some slack."
M.I.A. has been a supporter of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. In her own book, M.I.A. wrote regarding Wikileaks, "So obviously I love Wikileaks because, after I’d gone through the whole backlash, they were the first news information site to confirm any news on the Sri Lankan war in the truest form; they were the first to release information stating the truth about what had happened to the Tamils as I knew it and to reveal that the United Nations was aware that the Sri Lankan government was lying—war crimes had been committed but their hands were tied because any time anyone tried to impose sanctions, governments would walk out. I support Wikileaks because of that."
She composed the theme to Assange's television show The World Tomorrow and later stood by Assange's side as he held a press conference at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where Assange was successfully granted political asylum by Ecuador in August 2012. "I ask President Obama to do the right thing. The United States must renounce its witch hunt against WikiLeaks," Assange said at the press conference. She posted a photo of Assange from within the embassy, and later tweeted, "hummmm after this day 2 things have 2 happen....., either 500 cops turn up outside every rape case reported even if its without charge. or we get raped by the powerz that be and we deal 4 eva." The tweets were in reference to an arrest warrant the Swedish Prosecutor's Office issued in August 2010 for Assange on two charges: rape and molestation. Earlier in 2012 Britain's Supreme Court denied an appeal by Assange to avoid extradition to Sweden to face these charges.
In November 2013, Assange appeared via Skype to open M.I.A.'s New York City concert. Also, on 18 September 2014 Maya tweeted a link to a documentary on YouTube entitled "The Internet's Own Boy: Aaron Swartz". The documentary is about the life of Aaron Swartz, who was a computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet hacktivist. In the same tweet Maya included a link and invitation to RSVP to a party to launch Julian Assange's new book "When Google Met WikiLeaks".
Ann Powers, in conversation with Billboard revealed that in trying to handle political issues and creating art, the musician did not want to compromise or keep silent. She notes that this method worked for The Clash, but that this was at a certain time and a certain place, that they benefitted from being a band, and that audiences were more used to seeing men being confrontational.
Conversely, Denise Sullivan writing in Keep on Pushing: Black Power Music from Blues to Hip-Hop (2011), noted that in contrast to other rock musicians, M.I.A. furthered the legacy of The Clash, "creating a controversy while doing so".
Critic Jon Dolan of Spin noted M.I.A. may be a "confused revolutionary? brilliant provocateur?" and one of the most polarising yet thrilling figures in pop music today.
Sarahanna, writing in Impose magazine cited composer Igor Stravinsky in describing M.I.A.'s role as an artist who challenged the audience into breaking their mind from a conservative cycle of familiarity.
Baron writing in the Village Voice felt that although M.I.A.'s bloodline, politics and grievance meant that she was more informed than most and gave her "every right to be a partisan and were reason for caution," he praised her efforts for leading thousands of American writers including himself to know of the situation in Sri Lanka as "brilliant", noting her mainly humanitarian angle in her protesting of civilian casualties that had been vastly and disproportionately inflicted on Sri Lanka's Tamil minority and her courage in "putting her success and fame on the line to use every opportunity and avenue possible to remind Americans and people around the globe of this conflict" is pretty much the most admirable thing going in pop music.
On 20 November 2013 M.I.A. appeared on The Colbert Reportand was asked by host Stephen Colbert what she thought of America. After attempting to evade the question Maya ultimately responded with, "Well you know, in my mind, there's no countries, you know it's like; we're all one, we all live on this planet."
On 2 December 2013 Time asked M.I.A. who she would pick for its "Person of the Year" and she said her pick would be N.S.A. whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Media
M.I.A.'s relationship with some media outlets has been controversial. M.I.A. confronted Pitchforkmedia in 2007, citing sexism and racist mechanisms as possible reasons for misattribution of some of her work in her career.
In 2010, M.I.A. tweeted "Fuck the New York Times," after The New York Times published a critical article by Lynn Hirschberg about M.I.A. and the conflict that portrayed the musician as politically naive and hypocritical. Both M.I.A. and several pop culture media outlets were highly critical of Hirschberg's article and reporting. Hirschberg later published a correction, apologizing for reporting quotes made by the artist out of order.
Rob Horning, writing for Pop Matters, believed that Hirschberg's incorrect quotes were a deliberate effort to defame the artist. M.I.A. responded on her Twitter account, posting of a telephone number and asking followers to call in and give feedback on the piece, and the revelatory content of the conversations, which she secretly taped.
In 2010, she expressed disappointment that Wikileaks distributed their documents to other news publications – including the New York Times — to gain wider coverage, as she stated their "way of reporting" did not work.
Philanthropy
M.I.A. supports a number of charities, both publicly and privately. She funded Youth Action International to help youth break out of cycles of violence and poverty in war torn African communities and set up school-building projects in Liberia in 2006.
She supports the Unstoppable Foundation, cofunding the establishment of the Becky Primary School in Liberia. During her visit to Liberia she met the then President of Liberia and rehabilitated ex-child soldiers. She also appeared as part of a humanitarian mission there, hosting a "4Real" TV-series documentary on the post-war situation in the country with activist Kimmie Weeks.
Following her performance at the 2008 MTV Movie Awards afterparty, she donated her performance fee to building more schools in the country, telling the crowd, "It costs to build a school for 1,000." Winning the 2008 Official Soundclash Championships (iPod Battle) with her "M.I.A. and Friends" team, 20% of the following year's championship ticket sales were donated to her Liberian school building projects.
M.I.A. has also donated to The Pablove Foundation to fund paediatric cancer research, aid cancer families, and improve the quality of life for children living with cancer through creative arts programmes.
In 2009, she supported the "Mercy Mission to Vanni" aid ship, destined to send civilian aid from Britain to Vanniand controversially blocked from reaching its destination.
The country's navy announced that it would fire on any ship that entered its waters, and M.I.A. was singled out on the Sri Lankan army's official website after the singer announced her support for the campaign.
In 2011, following her performance at the Roskilde Festival, she donated from the Roskilde Festival Charity Society to help bring justice to Tamil victims of war crimes and genocide and to aid advocacy and ensure legal rights for refugees and witnesses.
After approaching American DJDiplo at the Fabric Club in London, the two became romantically involved for five years.
From 2006 to 2008, M.I.A. lived in the Bedford-Stuyvesantneighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, where she met Benjamin Bronfman (a.k.a. Benjamin Brewer), an environmentalist, founder of Green Owl, musician and member of the Bronfman family.
They became engaged and she gave birth to their son, Ikhyd Edgar Arular Bronfman, on 13 February 2009, just three days after performing at the Grammy Awards. In February 2012, it was announced that she and Bronfman had split.
In a 2013 interview with Ferrari Sheppard, M.I.A. commented on her relationship with Bronfman and his family's wealth: "I think it’s weird. It’s not that I got with Ben and then suddenly I was a billionaire. You know? I got with Ben, and I realized that we do come from different worlds, but it’s interesting that it is more about the concepts of, again, elitism and power. Who Ben is on paper sounds way more powerful than who I am because of where he comes from."
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