User:ColinStutz/MIA

Meeting Diplo and Piracy Funds Terrorism, Volume 1

After hearing his single, "News Flash", Arulpragasam tracked down Diplo, a Mississippi-born DJ originally named Wesley Pentz, to work on some material. She says of his song now: "It had that same homelessness about it. It didn't have a particular genre, which is what people always say to me: Your song doesn't fit anywhere. So I went on a mad mission to find other people like that, because then we could make a home.". "Besides me being a white dude from Florida and her being a Sri Lankan girl in England, everything else was the same: [We were both] film graduates, [listened to] all the same music when we were kids, were going in the same direction right now in music, it was amazing," he said of their meeting. Coincidentally, when Arulpragasam first met Diplo he was playing her single "Galang" as she entered the Fabric Club in London, which he got from a worker at i-D magazine.

The next month, Arulpragasam left for Philadelphia to work on the production of her first composition and the hidden track on her album, M.I.A., with Diplo, and to also collaborate on new material. Nothing worthwhile came of it, until Diplo began experimenting with a capellas of the tracks on Arular, remixing, sampling and mashing them up with already famous rappers and musicians, eventually using the material created during the sessions to build the mixtape Piracy Funds Terrorism.

The mashup Piracy Funds Terrorism was initially only given to the press and handed out at early live shows, but because of the album's huge underground success, Turntablelab.com began releasing the mixtape exclusively through their website around December, 2004. The mixtape added to the already building hype of Arulpragasam's debut album and also forced people to acknowledge the mixtape subculture in general. It also established M.I.A.'s growing fanbase within the music and MP3-sharing blogosphere.

Diplo later produced the third track on Arular, "Bucky Done Gun" which mixes the raucous baile funk sound from Rio de Janeiro with a sample from the "Theme From Rocky". The two were romantically involved for 3 years and briefly toured together, but eventually broke up. While Diplo was heralded as "the mastermind behind M.I.A.'s politics!", Arulpragasam countered those allegations saying, "I find it kind of insulting that I can't have any ideas on my own because I'm a female, or that people from undeveloped countries can't have ideas of their own unless it's backed up by someone who's blond-haired and blue-eyed."