Well, as it turns out, the British tabloids got it right. The only thing I’m going to give Madonna credit for is that she waited five days to throw M.I.A. under the bus. Just to recap, during the Super Bowl Half-Time show, Madonna performed her new (terrible) song “Give Me All Your Luv” with Nicki Minaj and M.I.A. You know exactly why Madge “collaborated” with Minaj and M.I.A. Madonna knows why she collaborated with them too. Because she’s 50-something years old and she desperately wants to be young again, and failing that, she’s trying to “borrow” the youth of performers like Nicki and M.I.A. Anyway, during the half-time show, M.I.A. slipped the bird to the camera while singing “I don’t give a sh-t…” Here’s the video again:

The British tabloids claimed that Madge was seriously pissed off at M.I.A. for basically stealing focus from her – classic Madge, right? What would Madge be if not a giant vacuum of narcissism? As it turns out, the tabloids were right – Madonna really is pissed off at M.I.A. She said so during an interview with Ryan Seacrest yesterday:

Sounds like M.I.A. made a very powerful enemy in Madonna. Backing up the pop legend alongside Nicki Minaj at last Sunday’s Super Bowl halftime show, the British/Sri Lankan rapper nearly hijacked the spectacle when she flipped her middle finger; the obscene gesture aired on live TV as over 100 million viewers watched.

But this wasn’t a provocative move planned in advance with Madonna a la her infamous VMAs kiss with Britney Spears. “I was really surprised. I didn’t know anything about it,” Madonna, 53, told Ryan Seacrest Friday during a radio chat for On Air With Ryan Seacrest. “I wasn’t happy about it.”

Explained the singer, who invited M.I.A. (real name: Mathangi Arulpragasamand) and Minaj to perform on “Gimme All Your Luvin’,” the lead single off her album MDNA: “I understand it’s punk rock and everything, but to me there was such a feeling of love and good energy, and positivity it seemed negative.”

“It’s such a teenager…irrelevant thing to do,” she sniped. “There was such a feeling of love and unity there. What was the point? It was just out of place.”

Besides, Madonna was nervous enough for her big moment without M.I.A.’s unexpected gesture. Her most stressful moments? “When my throne docked on the stage,” she said of her dramatic entrance. “Then getting my cartwheels on the bleachers right.”

By the time the 12-minute set concluded with “Like a Prayer” (with Cee Lo Green singing alongside her), “I was overwhelmed,” she said. “I started crying. I felt an incredible sense of warmth, love, and support. To see an entire stadium light up like candles it was…like a religious experience.”

[From Us Weekly]

“It’s such a teenager…irrelevant thing to do…” Is it wrong to admit that I agree with the argument Madge is making (but not WHY she is making it)? It was just a dumb, immature thing for M.I.A. to do. But that’s not why Madonna is pissed off. Madge is pissed off because A) She didn’t think of doing it first and B) Doing “teenage” things is Madonna’s game, bitch and C) No one was talking about MADONNA!!!!!!!!! Waaaaah!

Photos courtesy of WENN.

I still don’t know why people are so upset about M.I.A.’s bird-flipping at the Super Bowl Half-Time show. It was JUST a middle finger. Yes, it revealed to the world that M.I.A. is an immature person, but I don’t get the hand-wringing. One of the unfortunate side effects of the M.I.A. controversy is that it became the “topic” when discussing Madonna’s performance. People were no longer talking about how well or how badly Madge did, they were only talking about MIA’s middle finger. And Madonna won’t stand for that! She will not be ignored.

MADONNA is livid after British rapper M.I.A upstaged her at the Super Bowl by flicking a middle finger and swearing. Madonna, 53, had no idea M.I.A, 36, was going to make the obscene gesture while singing the line: “I don’t give a s***”.

The Queen of Pop had invited her on stage as a guest vocalist at the family American football event — the most watched programme in US history with 111.3 million American viewers.

A source said: “Madonna wasn’t impressed. She prides herself on professionalism. M.I.A did nothing similar in rehearsals. Nobody knew she was going to pull this stunt. Madonna wanted to put on a world-beating performance. But everyone ended up talking about this girl’s middle finger.”

M.I.A, of Mitcham, South London — famous for her hit Paper Planes — was singing on the track Give Me All Your Luvin’, off Madge’s new album MDNA at the Indianapolis show.

A source close to M.I.A — real name Mathangi Arulpragasam, blamed the finger gesture — on “adrenaline”. The source said: “She wasn’t thinking. She was caught in the moment and she’s incredibly sorry.”

M.I.A could be hit with a huge fine, because artists are said to sign a liability clause with TV network NBC.

Powerful watchdog The Parents Television Council called Sunday’s gesture the “selfish act of a desperate performer”.

Chief Tim Winter said: “M.I.A used a finger shamelessly to bring attention to herself, effectively telling an audience filled with children, ‘**** you.’ “

[From The Sun]

Ugh, it was JUST A MIDDLE FINGER. Calm down. Kids see worse crap all the time, and if I was a parent, I think I would have been more peeved with Madonna’s grandma-hip-thrusts.

In other M.I.A. news that possibly only interests me, she and her billionaire baby-daddy have split, according to the NYDN. MIA was with Benjamin Bronfman, son of Edgar Bronfman Jr., for years, and they’re now living in separate cities – she’s in London and he’s in NYC. Apparently, Benjamin is pretty much raising their son Ikhyd on his own – sources claim MIA “sometimes goes six weeks without seeing” Ikhyd.

Photos courtesy of WENN.

So M.I.A. is still giving crazy interviews. And when reporters simply transcribe the crazy, M.I.A. throws a childish tantrum and tweets their actual phone number. Case in point: M.I.A. was interviewed by Lynn Hirschberg for the New York Times in a piece calling “M.I.A.’s Agitprop Pop”. Clever. Anyway, there’s a lot of politics in the interview, as there was in her recent Complex Magazine interview. M.I.A. drops lines like, “And my giving birth is nothing when I think about all the people in Sri Lanka that have to give birth in a concentration camp.” She also says that the Los Angeles Sinhalese community was harassing her after she began to speak out on Sri Lankan issues, saying, “We went to the Grammys, we had the baby and we bought the house… A month later, all this stuff was happening in Sri Lanka… and I started speaking up against it. And then, within a month, I found out my house was being bugged, my phones were being tapped and my e-mails were being hacked into. I was getting death threats, like ‘hope your baby dies.’ The biggest Sinhalese community is in Santa Monica, people who are sworn enemies of the Tamils, which is me.”

There’s more stuff in the piece, but suffice to say, M.I.A. did not appreciate being quoted, I suppose. So she tweeted Hirschberg’s phone number (which I’m not going to print) with the message “CALL ME IF YOU WANNA TALK TO ME ABOUT THE NYT TRUTH ISSUE, ill be taking calls all days bitches.” As Gawker notes, “The poor writer is probably being besieged by confused fauxhemians right now and will have to screen her calls for months or change her number. It would be really awesome if Hirschberg retaliated by Tweeting M.I.A.’s number, but we have a feeling that there are still people out there with some tact.”

By the way, would anyone like another taste of M.I.A.’s crazy? From her Complex Mag interview (the one where she kind of says Jay-Z is a sell-out)… here is M.I.A.’s thoughts on Google:

“Google is the most powerful corporation in the world, and why do you think that is? It’s ’cause they log the most data and they collect the most information and that’s the thing that everyone’s gonna want and that’s the thing that no one’s gonna have. That’s what it’s about and it’s important to tell people in the street or poor people to arm themselves with knowledge ’cause that sh-t’s a commodity… America’s not raising its generations saying, “Knowledge is currency.” Corporations are raising themselves saying, “Knowledge is currency, and we’re gonna collect it all.” And the people are not being told that. Do you get that from watching My Super Sweet 16 or reality TV, that they’re trying to tell the masses that it’s about knowledge? No. You can Google the words “Sri Lanka” and it doesn’t come up that all these people have been murdered or bombed, it’s pages of: “Come to Sri Lanka on vacation, there are beautiful beaches.” You’re not gonna get the truth ’til you hit like page 56, you know what I mean? When Ikhyd goes on the Internet and taps in some words, he’s gonna get exactly what they want him to get.”

[From Complex Magazine]

I know what point she’s trying to make – about media and corporations and who controls the news, et cetera. And Google does do some sketchy sh-t (and I say that knowing that we have Google ads – MY BAD GOOGLE GODS). But to call Google “the most powerful corporation in the world”? How limited is her scope? That’s kind of the point of the NYT piece too – Hirschberg quotes Ahilan Kadirgamar, the spokesperson for the Sri Lanka Democracy Forum, at length and his point seems to be overwhelmingly that M.I.A. is out-of-touch and lacking in a wide-ranging comprehension of the vastness of Sri Lankan politics specifically and international politics in general. At one point he says: “People in exile tend to be more nationalistic… And Maya took a very simplistic explanation of the problems between Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese government and the Tamils. It’s very unfair when you condemn one side of this conflict. The Tigers were killing people, and the government was killing people. It was a brutal war, and M.I.A. had a role in putting the Tigers on the map. She doesn’t seem to know the complexity of what these groups do.” Probably because at this point, she’s just the wife/fiancee of a billionaire’s son who spends her days drinking wine with reporters from the New York Times?

Photos courtesy of The NYT.

M.I.A. has a new interview in Complex Magazine to promote her new album (the one with the ginger-holocaust song). There’s only one part of the interview that’s being widely circulated (at MTV and Bossip), but the full online interview is pretty good. I just skimmed it, but M.I.A. is an interesting woman. She’s just come off a hiatus from her career, having gotten married to Ben Bronfman, the son of Warner Music Group CEO and billionaire Edgar Bronfman Jr. Oh, she had a baby too – if you married the son of a billionaire, wouldn’t you get knocked up in a hurry too? Anyway, the biggest quotes are about Jay-Z and Nas. Ruh-roh.

M.I.A. has shared her thoughts on the difference between Jay-Z and Nas in a recent interview.

The rapper/singer explained that both of the rap stars took different routes to success.
She told Complex Magazine: “Jay became the biggest representation of rap music who’s still alive, started dating Beyoncé, everything was so much bigger and better with Jay-Z. I hope people don’t think that that wins.”

“The fact that Nas didn’t become all this sort of stuff changes people’s perception about the music and the work he achieved in his lifetime. I don’t wanna say Jay-Z sold out, but I just feel like we have to wait another 10 years to see what happens.”

“Jay-Z’s ambition was to become like Frank Sinatra, a household name all over the planet, and own a casino in Vegas and stuff like that. And I think Nas was really sticking to knowledge. I still think the biggest point about hip-hop is in there somewhere, what happens to those two artists.”

[From MTV]

Is Jay-Z a sellout? Yes, maybe, of course, not really, something like that. Personally, I think Jay-Z has “sold out” in a relatively minor way – it’s not like he’s out shilling Pro-Active or something. Jay’s a smart businessman, and that’s one of the reasons he appeals to me, at least. Plus, girls who marry sons of billionaires shouldn’t pontificate on keepin’ it real, I think.

Photos courtesy of Complex (more photos in the slideshow).

**The video above is very NSFW, it contains obscene lyrics, nudity and extreme violence**

This video just blew my mind. Sort of. It’s definitely got production value, and it’s definitely trying to say something, I suppose. I just can’t tell what it is exactly. This is M.I.A.’s new video for her new song “Born Free”. The video is about violence against gingers, a ginger genocide, a ginger Holocaust, perhaps? Sad gingers, being oppressed, revolutionary gingers, freedom fighter gingers, gingers that get shot or blown up or beaten to hell. I think it’s probably a complicated political statement, about the power of gingers…? Gawker thinks so too, kind of:

The almost-nine-minute mini-movie for M.I.A.’s single “Born Free” came out today and it’s already been taken down from YouTube in the U.S. It’s definitely NSFW, but it’s also her latest attempt to drum up some attention.

First of all, the track kicks ass. The Bed-Stuy by way of Sri Lanka musician takes a break from her usual hip-hop/world beat sound to make something that’s basically a hard-driving rock track—full of heavy guitar hooks and a driving, dismal beat—and adds her signature spoken-style lyrics. How that fits into a video that’s about a ginger genocide complete with children being shot in the head and bodies blown up by landmines, well, we’re not quite sure.

As the video starts, a group of soldiers ransack an apartment building, bypassing an old man smoking crack and barging in on a couple having sex. When the soldiers find a young man and start hauling him out of the building, it seems like it’s going to be another tired video about the brutality of war. Then the young man is thrown into a bus and we see that it’s full of other red-headed young men. Ah, a twist. As the bus pulls away, some ginger militants can be seen throwing bottles at the bus in front of a mural that depicts red-headed men holding guns aloft.

When the bus arrives at its final destination, a dusty minefield, the military men tell the carrot tops to run across a minefield. When they don’t budge, we see the officer in charge shoot what appears to be a 12-year-old in the head at point blank range. It is graphic and shocking. As the men run across the field, the soldiers pursue both on foot and in an armored van while shooting at their prisoners. One of the runners hits a mine and we see his body explode. Finally the soldiers catch up with the initial man from the apartment building and they beat him, presumably to death. There is no happy ending or redemption here. The movie just ends.

M.I.A.’s video has already been pulled from YouTube for both its sexuality and violence, and she tried to kick start the controversy engine by blaming Universal Music Group for barring the video from YouTube, redirecting people to her website to watch. (She soon recanted without further explanation.)

Controversy sells, though, and in these cases we often remember the stories around the videos long after we remember the songs or videos themselves. Which might be why M.I.A., who has a history of bilking her violent past for attention, is courting it so closely.

Ironically, the video comes on the heels of an attention-grabbing interview in which M.I.A. blasted Lady Gaga—who can be thanked for the resurgence of 9-minute video as an art form—for being a mimic rather than progressive.

M.I.A’s sci-fi dystopian vision is certainly startling. It can be seen as a comment on the senselessness of genocide or the state of immigration in the U.S. Closer to M.I.A.’s home, it can been viewed as an analogy to the Sri Lankan civil war and the government’s crackdown on the Tamil people, a subject she’s tackled—controversially—on numerous occasions and a cause she’s used her fame to draw attention to. But she’s no longer the daughter of a penniless “freedom fighter”: Her husband is Benjamin Brewer, the son of billionaire mogul (and Warner Music chairman) Edgar Bronfman, Jr.

Is the video too violent? Probably. The imagery is not for the squeamish, and personally I’d find it hard to watch that young boy get shot in the head again. But it’s no worse that what one can see in most rated-R movies or even on some prime-time television shows (24 can be downright gory!). And is this little piece of entertainment—a music video, for heaven’s sake—worse than what the people who have actually survived immigration nightmares, police brutality, or genocide had to witness in their actual lives? Certainly not. I can’t fault any artist for creating something that’s designed to spur debate, but for those who don’t want their summer jams tainted by a helping of questionable-politics, it’s going to be a turn-off.

[From Gawker]

My first thought was “Iraq” actually, but the Sri Lankan thing makes some sort of sense. Does Sri Lanka have oppressed gingers? No, I jest. I guess the video could also be about Israel and Palestine, maybe? Why do I feel dumb for trying to figure this out? I know M.I.A. meant for us to understand! Either that or she just got high and watched South Park? Either/or.

Two weeks ago there was a story that British singer M.I.A had chosen the unusual name Ickitt for her son. M.I.A.’s baby came into the world on February 11, just a few days after the heavily pregnant star performed at the Grammy Awards. M.I.A. denied her new baby’s name in an amusing all-caps post to her MySpace blog, saying “”MY BABY IS NOT CALLED ICKITT, PICKIT OR LICKIT THANK YOU VERY MUCH. HES A BABY, HE DONT NEED PRESS!”

She didn’t specify at the time what she did name the baby, and there may be a good reason for that. TMZ has obtained the baby’s birth certificate and his actual name isn’t that far off from Ickitt. He’s called “Ikhyd.” Is that like “I kid you not, that’s my real name”?

We got our hands on singer M.I.A’s new baby’s birth certificate and, as she disputed on her blog, the baby’s name is not Ickitt. That’s just ridiculous, who in their right mind would name their baby that? The real name happens to be Ikhyd.

According to the document, Mathangi Maya Arulpragasam officially named her son Ikhyd Edgar Arular Bronfman, common spelling.

[From TMZ]

Maybe M.I.A. pronounces it like Ickitt, and that’s why there was some initial confusion. It’s a strange name, and the pronunciation will make a difference. I don’t think it’s a common name in any variation in any culture, but people will point out that what sounds odd to us may not be out of the ordinary for another language and/or country. M.I.A. is from the UK and her family is from Sri Lanka.

If you google “Ikhyd” there are only 1,350 results and the google-suggested variation, Ikhide, has only 6,650 results. “Ikhide” seems to be an an African name, but there aren’t that many results for it so it must not be that popular. Ikhyd is original, that’s for sure. At least he won’t have to worry about other kids in his class having the same name.

Header of M.I.A. at the Grammy awards on February 8th. Image thanks to BauerGriffinOnline.

Anyone who watched this year’s Grammys felt overwhelming sympathy for British musical star M.I.A. She performed with T.I., Kanye West, Jay-Z and Lil’ Wayne on Grammy night – which was her due date. She was a real trooper.

Thank goodness her baby was a little overdue, or else there would have been a big mess on that stage. M.I.A. gave birth to a son a few days after the Grammys, and she’s just got around to announcing the boy’s name now. What is it? Ickitt. It speaks for itself, right? OK! has more:

It’s been almost a month since British music star M.I.A. strutted her 9-months pregnant stuff on the stage at the Grammys. The Oscar-nominated singer gave birth to a baby boy a few days later on Feb. 11, but a name for the tot was never revealed — until now.

According to Latina Magazine, M.I.A. — real name Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam — and her fiancé Benjamin Brewer have decided to go with the… unique name of Ickitt for their newborn son.

No explanation for exactly what — if anything — “Ickitt” might mean. But in a world where rock stars can name their children Bronx Mowgli without having to undergo court-ordered psychiatric exams, anything is possible.

[From OK! Magazine]

The name reminds me of the character names from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Like Ichabod Crane, only it’s “Ickitt”. Maybe it’s short for something? Icksander? Ickington? Icktastic? I have no idea. M.I.A. sorta seems like a strange bird to me, but hopefully she’ll be a great mom.

Header of M.I.A. at the Grammy awards on February 8th. Image thanks to BauerGriffinOnline.

Update: Update: No, M.I.A. didn’t name her son Ickitt. Despite Ok! and other sources “confirming” the name, it’s not true. She confirmed on her MySpace blog that she did not, and she will not be releasing the name of her son. People has the story.