During “Space,” the dreamy future-shock ballad that closes her upcoming third album, M.I.A. repeatedly coos, “My lines are down/You can’t call me,” over a gently percolating beat that sounds like a Sega Genesis practicing its pillow talk. It’s just one of the many observations on our data-drenched Infotainment Age that crop up throughout “/\/\ /\ Y /\,” a stunning, more-or-less self-titled effort from the 34-year-old Sri Lankan native born Maya Arulpragasam. Yet in a telephone interview with Billboard last week, the lyric is taking on another, more literal meaning, as M.I.A. travels on a Eurostar train from Brussels to London during a hectic round of European promotion. Namely, her cell phone keeps dropping our call whenever her train enters a tunnel.When the line goes dead for the fourth time-hey, it’s Europe; there are lots of tunnels-it’s tempting to wonder if M.I.A. has perhaps hung up on purpose. After all, she’d just been asked about the massive attention paid to journalist Lynn Hirschberg’s less-than-fawning cover profile of her in the New York Times Magazine last month, and M.I.A.’s subsequent responses. Maybe she’s tired of discussing the story’s focus on her supposed radical chic: a comfortable, even posh personal life allegedly at odds with her firebrand art and politics. Maybe she’s fed up with talking about why she tweeted Hirschberg’s cell phone number, or later posted a covert recording of one of her and Hirschberg’s conversations. Maybe she’s sick of the term “Trufflegate” (so coined after Hirschberg made hay out of M.I.A. ordering truffle-oil-flavored French fries) and figures that simply avoiding the topic might help it die a speedy death.
Read the five page interview here – http://www.billboard.com/news/m-i-a-the-billboard-cover-story-1004097689.story#/news/m-i-a-the-billboard-cover-story-1004097689.story?page=1
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