M.I.A. Album in Limbo

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The much-anticipated debut album from Sri Lankan rapper M.I.A., Arular, slated to hit stores on February 22nd, has been delayed until at least mid-March. The record has been riding a wave of positive pre-release press, including a four-star review in the current issue of Rolling Stone dubbing it "one of the new year's most remarkable albums."

According to a spokesperson for record label Beggar's Banquet, legal issues over a sample used on the record are postponing the release.

The twenty-eight-year-old Londoner, born Maya Arulpragasam, spent the first nine years of her life in the jungles of Sri Lanka in the midst of a violent civil war, before emigrating to the U.K. in 1986 with her mother and siblings. "The two years before I came to England were a mess," M.I.A. told Rolling Stone last month. "My school got burned down. Loads of people I knew were killed." (In December, Sri Lanka was devastated by the Asian tsunami.)

Having lived through so much, M.I.A. was undaunted by her prospects in music. "How I sing is like how a tone-deaf person would sing," she continued. "But I was like, 'I'm just gonna keep writing songs.' I had to understand that it's all about just being brave with who you are . . . I like taking people on. I'm a third-world refugee terrorist or whatever."

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Song Stories

“Everyday People”

Sly and the Family Stone | 1968

"Everyday People" managed to trailblaze in two different ways -- it was one of the first pop hits to deal with the subject of racial harmony, and it utilized Larry Graham's "slap" technique on the bass guitar, which would soon be copied by countless other bassists. Graham once said about his pulsating style, "I'd never done that before … that's where the freedom of creativity came in for the band, that we'd be allowed to do that." In 1978, the song's line "Different strokes for different folks" would be borrowed for the title of the hit television show Diff'rent Strokes.

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