MUSIC: A REFUGEE GONE M.I.A.

She has the voice of a Jamaican dancehall singer and the looks of a Bollywood star, but the music M.I.A. (a.k.a. Maya Arulpragasam) makes is all her own. The 28-year-old's dance-savvy blend of bass-laden hip-hop, Caribbean raga and cut-and-paste politicism is so unique, it's made her new CD, "Arular," one of the most talked-about debuts this year.

But it hasn't been an easy road for M.I.A.: she grew up poor during Sri Lanka's civil war, and her father abandoned the family to found a militant Tamal group. Her family relocated to London when she was 11. "I was too embarrassed to say I was a refugee," says Arulpragasam. "For 10 years I told everyone I was Trinidadian." She attended art school in London and became known for her guerrilla-style collages and fashion sense. Images of tanks, machine guns and grenades are pitted against bright tribal colors on the sleeve of "Arular"; onstage last week M.I.A. wore a sequined track suit with a camouflage-graffiti T shirt.

Her music is equal mix house-party fun and freedom-fighter ire. "How can an artist not address politics?" says Arulpragasam. "The more we make it an out-of-reach subject, like it's just something for boring old men, the more we're f---ed." M.I.A. just signed to Interscope Records after a bidding war, a coup for such a genre-defying artist. She sees it as a way to drop more sonic bombs. "What can we do on a ground level except be open-minded--think over here, over there," says Arulpragasam. "It's a big world, with lots of choices. Why sit in one place?"