M.I.A. | Taylor Hill/Getty Images
British rapper M.I.A. has been making music for nearly two decades, and using her voice to call attention to various issues for just as long. After the release of her 2016 album AIM, the polarizing “Paper Planes” rapper expressed her desire to retire from music altogether. Since the turn of this decade, however, she’s been gearing up to release a new album.
MATA, M.I.A.’s sixth studio album and first in six years, is out today via Island Records. But rather than the attention being on her new music, much of the focus has been on statements she made on Twitter in the days leading up to the album’s release likening Alex Jones’ billion-dollar defamation verdict to celebrities promoting COVID-19 vaccines. “If Alex Jones pays for lying shouldn’t every celebrity pushing vaccines pay too?” she wrote, adding, “If you have no critical thinking faculty, this is about as crazy as we should get before a nuclear war wipe[s] out the human race.”
On MATA, the rapper shows from the get-go that she’s more liberated than ever, for better or worse. The album kicks off with the two-part “F.I.A.S.O.M.”, which stands for “Freedom Is a State of Mind.” On songs like “Beep” and closing track “Marigold,” M.I.A. points out that there are indeed countless issues facing the world, but reminds the listener she’s “not a politician and not UN.”
When speaking to The Guardian about women in music who’ve been lambasted over the years like Sinéad O’Connor and The Chicks, M.I.A. emphasizes that her statements have upset more people than ever before. “Everyone is more scared of me than any of those artists,” she said. “We’re living through a time where people are seeing the hyper-inflated nature of capitalism and the destruction it causes, and even though I don’t have that kind of monetary power, I do feel like people fear me for some reason.”
