M.I.A.’s Provocative Pop

Later this month, the inaugural London offshoot of Afropunk Fest—the forward-thinking musical event, held annually in Brooklyn, that explores race, identity, and visual art in black counterculture—will take place. Initially, the headliner was to be Maya Arulpragasam, the forty-one-year-old pop star known as M.I.A. The pairing seemed natural, if not inevitable: M.I.A., a Londoner of Sri Lankan descent, has long been guided by the notion that her music is inextricably linked to sociocultural concerns. And Afropunk organizers have begun to expand the festival’s vision to encompass more people of color, not just African-Americans. Yet the choice of M.I.A. drew immediate criticism, owing mostly to a comment that she had made to the Evening Standard, in April, about the Black Lives Matter movement. “It’s not a new thing to me—it’s what Lauryn Hill was saying in the nineteen-nineties, or Public Enemy in the nineteen-eighties,” she said. “Is Beyoncé or Kendrick Lamar going to say Muslim Lives Matter? Or Syrian Lives Matter? Or this kid in Pakistan matters?” Soon afterward, the festival announced that M.I.A. had been removed from the bill and replaced by Grace Jones.