M.I.A.: "U.S immigration wont let me in!!!!!"

U.S. Immigration has refused Brit-SriLankan Baile rapper M.I.A. a visa. She protests:

"Roger roger do you here me over!!!! the U.S immigration wont let me in!!!!! i was mennu work with timber startin this week, but now im doin a Akon "im locked out they wont let me in" im locked out! they wont let me in! Now Im strictly making my album outside the borders!!!!

I just don't know how i feel about it.

Back in 2004, just before she exploded all over the US music scene, Sasha Frere-Jones had this article about M.I.A. in the New Yorker and a friend e-mailed it to me--'cos she and i shared the name "Maya."

Oh, how i fell in crush with her on the basis of that article--

Then came her music, and other than the oddly endearing clackety-clack of Galang it didn't totally grab me like i needed it to, but hey, identity loyalty kicked in--she was brown, we had the same name, she looked like my awesome Sri Lankan sisters-in-law...

And then, sadly, she was all over MTV with the lamest of excuses for the LTTE, seeming to either not know or not care about their war crimes, their conscription of children, their rule of terror in Jaffna...

All this while glibly marketing herself in terms of her father's LTTE code name (Arular) and using LTTE motifs--the running tiger, the camouflage clothes, the soldier two-step--and referring to suicide-bomber attacks in Sunshowers...

So my crush receded for political reasons more influential than skin color. But she's still pretty funny.

Excerpt:
Every year my mum learns one new English word and it opens up a whole world. So last year she learnt the word, ‘lesbian.’ Because I didn’t have a job and I wasn’t married, she got a phone call saying, ‘Maybe your daughter’s a lesbian.’ So she learnt the word and then she used it on me. And she was like, ‘Are you lesbian?’ And I was like, ‘No, I’m making music. And things are really intense for me right now. I just don’t want to take time out to marry this like fat guy in Sri Lanka with a moustache just right about now.’ And then this year, it’s been ‘underground.’ But she didn’t know ‘underground,’ she thought it was ‘underworld.’ So she rang me up and she was like, ‘My friends in church think you’re underworld, now what is this?’ I was like, this is what happens when you sign to XL.