'Matangi / Maya / M.I.A.' Documents A Complex Life In Pop Atop An Unrelenting World

Watching Steve Loveridge's new documentary, Matangi / Maya / M.I.A., it was impossible not to be transported back to October 2004, to the very first thing that Maya Arulpragasam and I bonded over.

We were 20 minutes into M.I.A.'s second American interview, and what I then expected would be little more than a cursory chat with a young musician, one who had already began revealing a deeply unlikely back-story and oversized moxy. She was excited to talk, I was excited to listen, the occasion expected key notes revealing themselves on schedule, the media interaction humming. Yet the perfunctory chit-chat between journalist and pop-star-in-waiting swerved into territory that was unexpectedly personal, and anecdotes poured out.

You had to recognize and process the telling details, the calculated self-deprecations and worlds-colliding examples for them to come into a familiar focus; but here we were, at an unforeseen understanding of the immigrant experience. For all the differences between Eastern Bloc boys and South Asian girls that expat life in Western cities accentuates, our similarities