I guess piracy truly does fund… the arts ?
It was May 2021,
I took a leap of faith and moved to London from home. I was doing a foundation at the time but due to travel restrictions I never quite got the opportunity to move here and be physically present for said course.(UAL I’d still like a refund for that because that was a flop year.)
So fresh eyed and filled with optimism, I had so many idealized daydreams of what this city was going to offer. As if the yearning and daydreaming couldn’t get worse, this was the time period when you had covid restrictions. I was in an air bnb where I was with the expectation to stay there for ten days, test every other day and to expect that track and trace people to visit me at some point. Me being the paranoid good girl I was I stayed in for the first three days. I’d occasionally go out for booze or to pick up weed (a friend luckily dropped me a contact), to which my surprise no one prepared me for how strong the weed in this country is. See I used to be a stoner.
During this week I also received the news that I wasn’t accepted into the BA fashion course at CSM the following year, devastated I was, but I think I was more determined to do whatever it took to get a place anywhere. I remembered hearing through TikTok about M.I.A.’s time in Saint Martin’s in the early 2000s and the story of how she angrily pleaded to admissions how if they didn’t let her in she’d become a street walker, film a documentary about the torture, then send it to them. I mean not saying I was willing to go that far but I constantly would joke that I’d take that route. After getting bored off my tit and doomscrolling YouTube for the remainder of the week I came across one of her earliest projects which is what got her noticed by XL recordings.
“Piracy funds terrorism” read the title of the shit 480p quality mixtape on YouTube. What I recognized is that it was all demos to her first album Arular. I’d been a casual listener up until this point but hearing all the influences that led to such an amazing album had me HOOKED. Miss maya had just finished her little Csm course, would smoke with diplo and come up with some of the richest and wide ranged samples from all ends that just flow seamlessly throughout the project.
I wondered, see maybe what I study won’t exactly dictate what I’m capable of achieving and doing. There I was again, in a constant state of day dreaming and with the strongest weed accessible to 19 year old me(and access to Grindr in central London😳)
What I loved about this era of hers is that she plays into all these stereotypes that English people place onto immigrants, almost like a jester portraying what they see her as through her music in some trolling way. In some songs she’s cosplaying war lords, in another song she’s held captive sipping rubicons. A humor that I instantly got! Lyrics about crackheads combined with the most clever sampling worked to her benefit. And all so effortlessly. Favorite samples being the use of favela Brazilian funk layered with ‘walk like an Egyptian’. While this mixtape felt multicultural it also felt very political given the time period she did it in. Notable tracks that I still revisit to this day are
Baile funk One
Baile funk two
Galang demo
Sunshowers (Diplo mix)
China girl
URAQT
Bingo
Throughout the week after getting bored and hyped by this little find, I gained the courage to sneak out of this quarantine accommodation. I decided it was time anyways. Headphones in, blunt smoked, anxiety rushing, sensory overload boots-
I think the first place I went to was some art shop. And there it was, the first time stepping out and seeing Londoners, (the dreariness in their eyes wasn’t surprising it had been raining all week) with young M.I.A. In my ears I felt like the fear evaporated and gained the angriest stomp known to central London. No one could touch me. I felt like such hot shit!
Oh Miss DSS if only you knew your stubbornness and devotion to this mixtape would get you places. You might have not done fashion that year but you did make moves.
Here’s a decent link to the mixtape, it constantly gets taken down so do try your best to keep a good link ha-
She’s truly a masterclass
Loved this. I knew that you had it in you.