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9:12 · 1,581 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- The commercial facts: number four on the Hot 100, her first top ten, a Grammy nomination and an Oscar nod, platinum in Canada, the US and the UK.
▶ 00:00:22
- Her debut was shaped by her father, who led the Tamil resistance movement in Sri Lanka, a minority seeking independence after persistent discrimination.
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- Her US work visa was refused and she spent most of a year dealing with Homeland Security, told she matched a terrorist profile.
▶ 00:01:40
- A British citizen with no criminal record, she attributed it to her skin, her name and most likely her public criticism of the Sri Lankan government.
▶ 00:01:55
- Shut out of America, she recorded elsewhere instead, working with drummers in Liberia, musicians in India, Aboriginal players in Australia and musicians in Trinidad.
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- The visa fight is what gave the record its third-world perspective, and the single grew from frustration at how British and American natives treat immigrants.
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- She finished the track in Bed-Stuy in 2007, where she noticed the assumption that immigrants and refugees add nothing to a culture.
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- The sample is The Clash's Straight to Hell from 1982, itself about the treatment of third-world immigrants, which makes the borrowing an argument rather than a hook.
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- The gunshots and cash registers were chosen as sound rather than words so listeners would supply their own reading, standing both for the stereotype of the leeching immigrant and for what life in a war zone actually sounds like.
▶ 00:04:43
- The narrator is not her but a constructed figure, the sum of the prejudices about foreigners, an immigrant's daydream of becoming a gangster because the minimum-wage job does not cover it.
▶ 00:05:34