M.I.A. drops full mixtape catalogue online for free
M.I.A. has made her entire mixtape catalogue available to stream online for free, including some of her most celebrated work.
It marks the first time that fans of the British-Sri Lankan artist will be able to access the releases in one place in an official capacity.
The mixtapes included on her independent platform OHMNIMUSIC are ‘Piracy Funds Terrorism Vol. 1’ from 2004 – the result of a collaboration with Diplo and released before her debut album ‘Arular’ the following year with largely uncleared samples – as well as 2010’s ‘VickiLeekx’ and 2023’s ‘Bells Collection’.
Also on the service is ‘Armour’, the standalone track she released in January this year. The reverb-heavy track takes inspiration from the artist’s 2022 conversion to Christianity, and has been described as her “spiritual declaration”.
Check out the releases here.
“It’s all over the place on the internet, people had their time with it, you can just listen to it here on OHMNI,” M.I.A. has said. “A mixtape precedes an era.”
Over the past few years, M.I.A. has received backlash for her controversial statements – from comparing InfoWars host Alex Jones’s falsehoods about the Sandy Hook shooting to celebrities “pushing” COVID-19 vaccines and suggesting the latter, too, should “pay for lying”. She then clarified her stance on COVID vaccines, saying she’s “not really” an anti-vaxxer.
Last year, she endorsed Donald Trump in the US Presidential Election, despite criticising him and his administration in 2017 for having “mental disorders”. “Trump is going to ride America through the most challenging four years coming,” she tweeted in August, adding her wish for Trump “pulling out weed” as president. “RFK will inherit America when God is ready to replant and rebuild it righteously.”
In June, M.I.A. launched OHMNI, which also includes a clothing brand that offers items such as “Protency boxers” which claim to “block electromagnetic frequencies” and boost fertility as well as a “tin foil hat” which allegedly deflects “electromagnetic waves such as Wi-Fi & 5G with up to 99.999 per cent shielding effectiveness.”
M.I.A. talked about the clothing line while appearing as a guest on Infowars. While there, she explained to Jones that the clothing line is designed to protect wearers from nanoparticles and discussed a scrapped album, her supposed “anti-vaxx” views, and being “cancelled”.
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Max Pilley
NME
