M.I.A. bringing 'spirit of punk' to Philly

Maya Arulpragasam doesn't want to be a proper pop star.

"I think people want me to become like Katy Perry," says the agitpop rapper and instigator known to the world as M.I.A., who scored a surprise pop hit with 2008's gunshot-and-Clash-sampling "Paper Planes."

"It's like people want me to become some kind of Cinderella," says M.I.A., 35, who will be found headlining the Electric Factory on Sunday, with her protege Rye Rye opening the show.

Talking on the phone this week from Montreal, where Arulpragasam was preparing for the start of a U.S. tour in support of her confrontational third album, Maya, she spoke about "the spirit of punk, of not lying down and accepting things."

"They gave me the slipper," says the British-born provocateur, who is of Sri Lankan descent. "But I gave it back. I just don't want it."

Maya is the follow-up to Kala, the 2007 album named after Arulpragasam's mother that made M.I.A. a household word of sorts, thanks both to "Paper Planes" - produced by her ex-boyfriend, Philadelphia DJ Diplo - and to "Swagga Like Us," the "Paper Planes"-sampling song she performed with T.I., Lil Wayne, Jay-Z, and Kanye West while nine months pregnant on the 2009 Grammys.

Maya, though, throws the brass ring back at the listener, starting with the subversive "Born Free," the album's leadoff single, which samples the punk-era electro band Suicide. The video featured red-haired youth being rounded up by U.S. paramilitary forces and either being forced to run across a field of land mines or shot.

"I didn't know any other way to make that video than the way it was made," she says. "But unfortunately people are . . . freaked out by ketchup and fake blood."

M.I.A. recorded Maya in Los Angeles, where she lives with her boyfriend Ben Bronfman, heir to the Seagram's fortune, and their son Ikhyd, whom she calls "the world's youngest roadie."

Being a mother "kind of goes to prove that I'm not this scary evil person that everyone's making me out to be," she says. "It makes me laugh. And having a child makes it more important to do what I can in my lifetime to just be one voice that says something, whether it's big or small."

While making Maya, M.I.A. says, "I was influenced by the Internet. That was the only thing I had that connected me to the world. I didn't want to make a world-music album because I wasn't in the rest of the world. And I felt like it was OK to make an album about America that's half pretty and half not, because that's what America is. And it's been really difficult for people, because sometimes the truth is a little bit hard to digest."

M.I.A., who calls herself "the ultimate refugee," says concern that she wouldn't be allowed back in the country if she left is one reason she recorded all of Maya in L.A. "The only other solution was to get married, and I wasn't ready to get married, and I don't want to be forced to get married for my visa." Her current work visa expires in December, though, so perhaps dramatic action is called for. "I've got about three months left. So maybe we'll get married on stage," she says, jokingly, "at the Philly show."