In journals from 1838, the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a self-reprimand challenging his personal understanding of critical discourse: "Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted." Nearly 200 years into the future, that mistake has seemingly become the default mode of debate in the town squares of social media and the celebrity complex, as well as the particular cross born by the oft-controversial, lately embattled British musician M.I.A.
On Monday, the 50-year-old rapper and singer was officially booted from Kid Cudi's Rebel Ragers Tour, on which she'd been an opening act. The dismissal followed her May 2 performance on the tour's Dallas stop, where fans booed comments she made onstage — first about having been "canceled" for supporting Republicans, and then a more cryptic line: "We can't do 'Illygirl,'" she said, referring to her 2010 track that played on the word "illegal" to tell a loaded immigration tale, "because some of you could be in the audience." When the crowd voiced its disapproval, she clarified: "I am illegal. Half of my team are not here because they didn't get the visa, OK? Don't listen to what the bots say on the internet. Once you're this, you're always that. ... We should be above politics."
As a refugee of Sri Lanka's civil war, who has had her own struggles obtaining a U.S. visa, M.I.A. seemed to be clumsily commiserating with the sense of displacement felt by the undocumented under Western governments. She hinted at such after the fact: "I wrote 'Borders' and 'Illygal' and 'Paper Planes' before you thought immigrant rights were cool. I've had thses [sic] battles by myself without the help of millions of fans backing me," she wrote in an online statement on Monday. "I don't need a virtue signal era to erase an entire life I've led." Still, to those who have followed her work since the beginning, the moment shook loose an unsettled feeling about her career. The comments she made during the show might feel convoluted or contradictory, but they are arguably no less so than her politics have always been.
M.I.A.'s early albums, Arular and Kala, were groundbreaking in their disruption of the pop sphere, representing what critic Robert Christgau, who has called Kala his favorite album of the 21st century, once called "an unbowed international underclass that proves how smart it is just by stating its business, which includes taking your money." She has taken that ambassadorship seriously ever since, to mixed reception — especially in recent years, as the daughter of a Tamil revolutionary has newly emerged as a born-again Christian and noncommittal vaccine skeptic. Fans have despaired that she has abandoned her post as a radical artist, whose world-coalescing music once appeared to push progressivism. But fundamentally, she remains the same kind of button-pusher — just one whose original message now seems warped by a martyr mindset.
The Cudi tour moment felt like a dam breaking, underscoring a years-long public descent into the darker corners of conspiracy theorizing, through which her positioning relative to a revolutionary ethic has dramatically changed. "Revolution ain't political / It's more spiritual," she sang on "Marigold," from her 2022 album Mata. That vibes-based insurgent philosophy has proven permeable to red-pilled rabbit-holing, where reasonable skepticism becomes irrational apophenia and a slippage from WikiLeaks to InfoWars is only a matter of degrees.
Well before NPR's Turning the Tables series named 2007's "Paper Planes" the greatest song made by 21st century women and nonbinary artists, M.I.A. had already been argued over ad nauseum as both era-defining artist and polarizing personality. But that song still captures what initially made her so captivating, channeling real-world guerrilla dissidence into a smirking salvo against class conflict that itself hopped borders — from The Clash to African folk to "Rump Shaker" — and was censored on MTV. Her success brought both raves and snark, but a thing that could boldly be said of her whole deal was that it was aligned with counterculture even as it was subsumed by the mainstream.
The New York Times called it "agitprop pop"; she had positioned herself as an inside woman who infiltrated the industry and smuggled the developing world along with her. "I put people on the map that never seen a map," she rapped elsewhere on Kala. "Paper Planes," and the 2009 Grammy performance that ushered M.I.A. under a much brighter spotlight, used its paradoxical nature to impressive commentarial effect. "It brought her music to the very mass American audience she was critiquing, a central tension within M.I.A.'s oeuvre that has kept her music so vital," Julianne Escobedo Shepherd wrote of the moment for NPR. "She understood that colonization was the antagonist, capitalism was the vessel, and that she could subvert them both to get her point across."
Soon, though, subverting the latter became less of a prerequisite — and the deeper she waded into imperial waters, the murkier things got. In the decade following that breakthrough, she got engaged to a scion of the Bronfman and Lehman families, collabed with Italian luxury fashion house Versace and was made a member of the Order of the British Empire. She criticized her lack of a platform, as she ascended to bigger and bigger ones. The higher she climbed the social and class strata, the more her directionality seemed to erode.
However slippery the ideology became, and however paranoid she would be painted as by those in her public, it's worth noting that M.I.A.'s assertions during this era were not entirely baseless, and on occasion would be retroactively justified. In 2013, when reports revealed that the National Security Agency had direct access to user data on Google, Apple and Facebook, M.I.A. took the opportunity to mock the critics who had called her delusional years prior.
On a song called "The Message," she had made what felt like a prescient connection: "Headbone connected to the headphones / Headphones connected to the iPhone / iPhone connected to the internet / Connected to the Google / Connected to the government." In a review of the album MAYA for Pitchfork, Matthew Perpetua called the song "a bad demo with a simplistic, paranoid rap that's as rhetorically effective as someone in a dorm room ranting about the C.I.A. inventing A.I.D.S." "Who said this three years ago?" she posted on Tumblr with a collage of critical pans, including Perpetua's, as if vindicated. She circled back again in 2018, during the investigations into Cambridge Analytica. "It's nice when you end up the smart one at the end of the day. Not some paranoid crazy person," she wrote on Twitter.
It seems as if M.I.A. has spent much of her career trying to be "the smart one" and not "some paranoid crazy person," the inherent tension of which has only served to isolate her. The artist has been dogged in her support of refugees in crisis and the Tamil people specifically (something Anderson Cooper once acknowledged wasn't getting enough U.S. coverage in a 2012 Twitter exchange with her). And comments like those she made about activism during a 2017 Oxford Union Q&A hint at the maddening effects of feeling like your calls for justice are being perpetually sidelined: "I fight for a really obscure little thing," she sighed, "and everyone is like, 'What the hell is a Tamil?'" That kind of thing can obviously lead someone to retreat into a self-sustaining cocoon of indignation. But anger and distrust are reasonable only to a point, and eventually M.I.A. took more active steps into being unreasonable.
"I have to imagine that being hated at that scale on the internet — as someone who has been hated on the internet before — it is traumatic," says Abbie Richards, a misinformation researcher. "And even if the internet's right, just being the center of that much angry energy is awful."
Richards has extensively covered conspiracy theories, even designing a chart to document the snowball effect that pushes people from beliefs grounded in reality to those completely detached from it. "It does start with a perception of very real injustice and real power abuse — first researching actual instances of real conspiracies," she says. "I think what it does for people, and the reason why it's so powerful, is that it meets some sort of emotional need for them and it gives them a sense of control. It's kind of like offering an easier solution than engaging in the hard, meaningful work of systemic change."
There has been a gradual buildup to M.I.A.'s current posture, moving along a spectrum of provocation. In the early 2010s, she faced off with corporate mega-brands for perceived misuse of their trademarks, waging war with the NFL in court and being served a complaint by French soccer club Paris Saint-Germain, moves aligned with the rebellious "Paper Planes" spirit. In 2016, she was dropped from her headlining slot at London's first Afropunk festival for comments about the Black Lives Matter movement — "Is Beyoncé or Kendrick Lamar going to say Muslim Lives Matter? Or Syrian Lives Matter? Or this kid in Pakistan matters? That's a more interesting question" — that read to many as unduly factional, even actively antagonistic to the coalition-building she claimed to seek. By 2020, she had ventured far out enough to no longer be participating in meaningful discourse at all, when she began pushing 5G and chip conspiracies during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Slowly, her journey down the backlash spiral has migrated her tangle of beliefs from contentious to obnoxious, leading her to rub shoulders with fellow fringe political operators: going on far-right influencer Candace Owens' then-Daily Wire show to decry "cancel culture" and her BLM controversy once again, going on InfoWars to launch a purported 5G-blocking clothing line, and endorsing Donald Trump in 2024 with the explicit goal of enabling the agenda of his eventual health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., another prominent conspiracy theorist. (A post Cudi tour development, relayed on X: She has since swapped RFK Jr. for Republican Congressman Thomas Massie as her north star.)
More recently, the artist has insisted that she is simply someone resisting binary thinking, and that there's no dogma in her association with extremists in the new media commentariat. "M.I.A., as a concept, was already way past the point of left and right, and knowing it's all just a game. So to put me in that zone and that's where they're going to drag me on? It can't be real," she told Australian newspaper The Age in October, as part of a statement defending Owens. "Everything to me is cause and effect, and you have to appreciate free-thinkers on all sides. Everyone's got the same battle at this point, and it's not the time to point fingers and drag each other over little things." But in this supposed rejection of partisanship, she has simply succeeded in becoming politically abstract, at a level too unmoored from daily reality to meaningfully debate with.
"When you're dealing with public figures who have any experience of being 'canceled,' there's a huge trend of them leaning into right-wing conspiracy theories, leaning into a religious persona. We've seen the exact same transition with Russell Brand," Richards says, nodding to another person with whom M.I.A. has talked about truth and censorship. "They're able to figure out how to exploit the emotional experiences they have in common, of feeling persecuted, from that pushback and accountability. … I watched some of the Candace Owens interview with M.I.A. They start off with this whole thing about, 'We might have different views, but I'm here for respectful debate' — and then I never saw them disagree on anything. I think that whole posturing about handling a difference of opinion is really speaking to what they feel like they've emotionally been through, being the internet's enemy for the day."
"Censor me 'cause you can't make sense of me," M.I.A. rapped on the Mata song "Energy Freq." There is a sense now that she has not heeded Emerson's warning — seeing all pushback as persecution, which has naturally drawn her into the orbit of figures with little regard for fact-checking or peer-reviewed opinion, those willing to embrace her in the post-critical realm of cancellation. Thus far, her takeaway from the Cudi tour moment has been to rhetorically nail herself to the cross she's been carrying. "CRUCIFIED FOR WORDS," she posted on X, before later adding the Bible scripture Matthew 5:11: "Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me."
In some ways, M.I.A. feels like a proxy for what is currently happening to many online. "Research shows that if you hold one conspiracy belief, you're also more likely to simultaneously hold a contradictory belief," Richards says. "And that ability to hold multiple truths in your mind at the same time is a very specific feature of this conspiratorial worldview. Then you get into constantly seeking out information that will affirm it, and then the fact that you're presented with information that counters it is perceived as reinforcement of your belief in itself." M.I.A. followed the conspiracy pipeline from anti-state to anti-infrastructure to post-science, and eventually went from seeing herself as a revolutionary agent of counterculture to seeing conspiracy theorists as the new counterculture, reading their anti-establishment posturing as a similar rejection of the status quo.
Only a few months after M.I.A. released Arular in 2005, Stephen Colbert coined the term "truthiness" to mean a belief that follows what you feel without regard for fact. The outspoken rapper has often asserted her own personal truth, and seen its invalidation in conversation with others. "I think removing individual voices and not letting people just go 'This happened to me' is really dangerous," she told Clash magazine in 2010. But what happens when one's own truth comes at the expense of others' — when truthiness becomes misinformation, at odds with actual evidence? At that point, it isn't the "virtue signal era" erasing an entire life lived. It's an unwillingness to honestly scrutinize the life itself.
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