M.I.A. Took Us Through Her Hard Drives And Her Own Frustrating, Brilliant Psyche

"It's nice that I can show my refugee ways," Matangi "Maya" Arulpagasam aka curious and polarizing rapper M.I.A. said to a post-Sandy, clamoring crowd inside the Performance Dome at Long Island City's MoMA PS1. M.I.A. was there to give an artist lecture on her new eponymous book (out now on Rizzoli). She had nothing prepared, just came with the three laptops she used to make each of her albums in tow.

Her desktops are just as disorganized as everyone else's but filled with small wonders, like pre-Arular/ video loops, or pre-GIFs as she referred to them as, of her twerking in her friend Steve's basement in 2000--making these videos were her way of learning how to use a computer--as well as folder filled with screengrabs of everything from her iChat conversations to tweets from "lovers and haters" from when she was crafting her Internet-obsessed third album /\/\/\Y/\.

With the open and close of each MacBook, M.I.A. materialized into the version of herself she was at the time creation. Whether it was an affectation or a genuine exercise in public nostalgia is debatable, but those hard drives caused an external change in the musician if nothing else. For the exploratory Arular, she was wide-eyed and bashful. When speaking about Kala, she got slightly more internal, explaining that she spent most of the time working on that record by herself and sharing images with friends over iChat. "If you didn't get it, you don't get me." There were head-scratching moments when she started talking about the sonic k-hole that is /\/\/\Y/\. M.I.A. loves to fight The Man, but when she went on a rant about refusing to turn her fans into a database by making a website that is easy to navigate but not in tune with her aesthetics--"I didn't want it to look like Pitchfork.com"--it was hard to forget that despite her anti-Pitchfork fascination, she once took over the site's Twitter feed to help publicize an album and that her free mixtape Vickileekx cost an email address to download, essentially the same currency as keeping someone on your website. If you go to miauk.com now, it's extremely manageable, unlike its previous incarnations, which have been so jarringly animated it would be unwise for someone prone to seizures to visit.

But M.I.A. is a weirdo, he work continually offering the duality of an inquisitive artist and a super paranoid activist. It's the reason that she went off the grid for a little while, citing that she wanted to find a happy medium between being an "art-freak person" and the "spokesperson for children dying in the jungle." That meant going to India to make art, work on her fourth album and find spirituality. Still, even if she's in a more enlightened place, the talk proved she's still one for playfully putting her foot in her mouth, whether digging at others or bolstering her own past to give herself a better-than status. Read some of the better ones below.

KEY QUOTES:

—"Refugees don't sunbathe and read books." - on being extremely bored babysitting her detoxing heroin addict roommates on a deserted island and accidentally vocalizing the criticisms a lot of people have about her.

—"Stenciling is the poor man's Photoshop."

—"[I didn't have to] deal with interpersonal relationships, which I have trouble doing." - on making Kala primarily via iChat.

—"You're not going to stop Jamaicans from wearing Ed Hardy, but you can try to [have an] affect." - on politicizing her art.

—"I didn't like Facebook 'cuz it was boring-looking." - on getting into social media and preferring MySpace because it "helped share aesthetics."

—"Even Mad Decent looks like Pitchfork to me." - on the saminess of web design.

—"The aesthetic of [my record label] N.E.E.T. was to make it look as shit as possible."

—"I didn't go to an ashram… I was on Google." - on her recent search for spirituality.

@clairevlo