somehow ephemera is warping into an m.i.a. fanblog, oops.

excerpt from m.i.a. interview with village voice, Cleared for Takeoff

"At one point, when Interscope played 'Boyz,' will.i.am and Pharrell and Timbaland were all in one room, and I was just coming from India, working in a little studio with cockroaches and little kids using my blank CDs as Frisbees and shit," she remembers. "And then I sat in a million-pound studio with T.I. and Britney next-door. They were playing my stuff, and I felt like I've done this to the point where I can bring it to Interscope. And now they can hear what little kids in Australia sound like, which they're not going to actively go out and seek because everyone's in their comfort zone. And at the same time, I was like, 'If I can already do that, what's the point of working with big-name producers?' "

That's an odd statement from an artist so openly infatuated with American pop music, but Kala is more an interrogation than an imitation. On "Hussel," a sort of answer song to Rick Ross's Southern-rap hit "Hustlin'," she asks, "Why's everybody got hustle on their mind?"

"When I was in Liberia, you get into the huts, and little kids are listening to that shit," she says. "And it's cute to see them dancing to it, like, 'Wow, yeah, the 'Hustlin' song, that's so cool!' And then it's like, 'Actually, it's not fucking cool.' You have to give them something else as well. If it's about working or if you're talking about money, then I don't think that 99 percent of music should stress that. So at the time, I was just asking somebody that question. I don't want to live like that."

HUSSEL IS AN ANSWER TO RICK ROSS'S HUSTLIN?? holy shit. kala just gets better and better.