M.I.A. (Mathangi Arulpragasam) has released her first solo song in over a year, accompanied by a video, which can be viewed here. The track, which has been titled “Babylon“, was dropped last Friday and seems to be her usual mix of socially conscious lyrics and cynicism. Despite this, the video itself is simply a series of home videos featuring M.I.A. and her family doing tasks such as driving and having a family get together. For more on the run-up to the track’s release, you can read about it here.
BABYLON DROPS TOMORROW pic.twitter.com/6ilc6iuuZ1
— MATAverseANGI (@MIAuniverse) November 11, 2021
As well as making new music, M.I.A. has been active in other areas, namely the newly burgeoning market of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens). NFTs allow artists to sell their work purely on a digital basis, giving a unique seal of ownership to one particular file so it has value above other copies, similar to how in physical art, only the original will fetch up a high price. This technology can be used to sell things such as online art, music or even gifs, stopping other online copies from having the same value since they lack a unique digital signature. To find out more, you can read an informative article here or see the video below. Suffice to say, it’s changed the relationship between the artist and their market, as well as the very idea of what can be seen as a sellable piece of work, with the likes of video clips on YouTube and tweets being sold for thousands and even millions of dollars. M.I.A. announced her involvement with the NFT market last April, using it to launch her NFT GARAGE DANCE series. Following this, she released her first-ever digital artwork, titled KALA COYN, which she first made back in 1996. Also, last Friday, M.I.A. auctioned off both “Babylon” and an extended version of her 2010 mixtape Vicki Leekx as NFTs, which you can again read about here.
In a recent interview with CoinDesk, M.I.A. says she auctioned Vicki Leekx as an NFT because “I always saw the “Vicki Leekx” mixtape as a piece of art rather than a piece of music, just because it was very serendipitous, of everything and events that was going on in the world.” She argues that people have been empowered by recent technological innovations, being freed financially. In response to accusations of environmental harm from the NFT market, she had this to say: “If you think about what’s happening in America right now… it’s sort of debatable what’s destroying the world and what’s not destroying the world…The military-industrial complex, the consumption of beef and the fashion industry are the top three polluters of this planet. So for us to be against NFTs, we also have to be against these things. It’s such a confusing area because it’s, like, shifting your priorities and your values to adjust to the time.”
As for M.I.A.’s future, a follow up to her 2016 album AIM is due for 2022, entitled Mata. She went to social media to explain the title choice, saying “To reflect what I am, and what we wanna build, I’m proud to announce, starting today, my LP is now Mata.” According to the Oxford Leaner’s Dictionaries, Mata can refer to a mother, or be “a title that is used before the name of a female Hindu spiritual leader or the mother or wife of a Sikh spiritual leader”. But in terms of the NFT technology, we’ll just have to wait and see what’s in store for the future, for both M.I.A. and other artists in general.
