Anthony Augustine

Interview with M.I.A.

Here is an interview that I did with M.I.A. three and a half years ago for Uptown Magazine. Seems fitting to repost it.

A portion of this interview was also used as a Quote of the Day on Perez Hilton.

When you have one foot in the underground and one in the mainstream, it can be a difficult battle trying to maintain your identity and still continue to reach out to new audiences. Few musicians have been able to navigate this minefield better than Sri Lanka-born, England-based MC/producer/artist/fashion designer/label owner Maya Arulpragasam (aka M.I.A.). 

It’s obvious from M.I.A.’s politically charged lyrics and outspoken views that she is not only challenging the status quo - she’s out to smash it. 

“The biggest thing coming out of England right now are singers like Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen,” says the 30-year-old MC over the phone from New York, prior to a five-hour photo shoot for the Sonar festival. “I think questioning the status quo for them is doing lines of cocaine in the toilet.” 

Although Arulpragasam is fiercely independent, making some of her own beats, building her own websites, making her own videos and handling all the art work for her albums, tours and merchandise, there are immense pressures on her to start bridging the gap between her faithful underground fan base and her new mainstream following. Even though her genre-bending music explores universal issues of suffering, struggle and revolution, she is still courted by fashion magazines and designers who want to her to model and strut her stuff on the red carpet. 

“I fight for creative control every day. I wake up and the first two hours of my day are fighting for that little bit of space to do what I feel is right. It’s really weird. It’s a fine line. Half the time I don’t do shit because I am actually genuinely busy doing crappy little things that make me happy,” Arulpragasam says. “I want to make my little pictures, do my little paintings, build my own little website and do my little videos. That actually takes time. I think that works out for me in the long run because it means that I don’t have time to sit around and do fashion spreads in magazines, which is a good thing.

“You just have to prioritize and realize what is important. At the end of the day, I have to make music or art because it actually helps me. It is the only therapy that I can afford to do. If I am trying to work shit out to try and help myself figure shit out and you help other people in the process, than that’s a good thing. I don’t know if I am helping anyone by looking good in a magazine.” 

While Arulpragasam has been able to live in these two very different worlds successfully, it hasn’t come without a price. 

“It is really difficult. There are sacrifices you have to be willing to make,” she says. “You have to understand you are never going to fucking be U2 and fucking sell out stadiums. 

“At the end of the day, bands like The Clash could question the status quo, but it helped that they were white. I think it is really difficult to be the other voice and get away with questioning shit without people getting pissed off. You have to be able to take the fucking punches as well.”

Interview with DJ AM (Uptown Magazine)

At 34, Adam Goldstein (aka DJ AM) has already avoided being a Hollywood cliché who got on the fast track only to crash and burn.

Although he battled a serious crack cocaine addiction that threatened to derail his career early on, AM has been clean and sober for over nine years and is one of the most in-demand club DJs in North America.

Tackling his demons and coming out on top has not only shaped who Goldstein is, it’s also given him a deeper understanding of how to deal with problems he faces in his day-to-day life.

“Age is a matter of feelings, not years. So the more I experience, feel and go through, the older and wiser I get and the more my character is shaped by what I felt,” the DJ explains from his apartment in New York.

“Not even so much how you felt, but how you dealt with it. If you stuff it down or run and hide, you don’t really grow the way you do if you allow yourself to go through it. I have been through some shit, but so has everyone.”

Goldstein’s struggles with his weight, addiction and his relationships with Nicole Richie and Mandy Moore are well-known, thanks to the celebrity-driven media circus that L.A. has become - but what’s never really brought up in stories on the DJ is that AM actually knows his way around the turntables. Even if the A-listers at the Oscar after-party or hipsters at LAX can’t tell the difference, the time Goldstein spent honing his craft is obvious when you hear him spin.

“No DJs really looked to other DJs to learn from. I was the guy who was playing in the clubs, but also watching battle videos,” Goldstein says. “I was really big on watching DJs who were better than me. I knew that I couldn’t learn something from people who knew less than me. I always wanted to be a versatile, all-around DJ as opposed to just being the guy who wanted the cool job and to hang out where the girls are.”

Despite his obvious skills, Goldstein recognizes that he’s living under the spotlight more for who he is than what he can do behind the decks.

“At first it was just strange and it made me really self-conscious. I started thinking about image and what people are going to think about me. It is really easy to get affected by that. I know it was for me,” he says.

“I just had to keep telling myself that none of this means anything. At the end of the day, I am the same dude. I can see how for some people it could just keep escalating and escalating and turn into something where you think you are something that you aren’t.”

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Originally published in Uptown Magazine. Feb/08

Also appeared as Quote of the Day on Perez Hilton.