Artist · chart history
M.I.A.
Solo artist Hounslow United Kingdom hip hop artist Maya Arulpragasam
M.I.A. is an artist from Hounslow. M.I.A. has 55 chart appearances on 50 radio countdowns from 24 stations on RockLists, spanning 2007–2026. The most successful song on radio countdowns is “Paper Planes”, which appears on 43 lists with a best position of #2. The station that charted M.I.A. most often is WYEP (Pittsburgh, PA), with 11 appearances. The artist’s biggest year on year-end countdowns was 2008.
M.I.A. took her name from "Missing in Acton", and the woman behind it, Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam, has spent her career mashing up borders like they were never there. Born in London in 1975 to Sri Lankan Tamil parents, she was taken to Jaffna as a baby and lived through the upheaval of the Sri Lankan Civil War before the family came back to London as refugees when she was 11. That war runs through everything she makes.
She started out as a visual artist, filmmaker and designer, began recording in 2002 and became one of the first acts to break through online, with "Sunshowers" and "Galang" in 2004. Arular in 2005 and Kala in 2007 won rave reviews for their collisions of hip hop, electronics and sounds from around the globe. "Paper Planes", which she co-produced with Diplo, is the one everybody knows: a lazy, loping, sly thing that sounded like nothing else on the radio. It climbed to number four on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned a Record of the Year nomination at the Grammys.
Maya followed in 2010 with "XXXO", Matangi's "Bad Girls" won acclaim at the MTV Video Music Awards, and she later turned up on Travis Scott's "Franchise" and released Mata in 2022. She was the first person of South Asian descent nominated for an Academy Award and a Grammy in the same year, and she was made an MBE in 2019.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs by M.I.A. on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Paper Planes | 43 | #2 | – | 2008 | |
| 2 | XXXO | 4 | #7 | – | 2010 | |
| 3 | Galang | 2 | #101 | – | – | |
| 4 | Paper Planes (DFA Remix) | 1 | #2 | – | 2008 | |
| 5 | Sunshowers | 2 | #221 | – | – | |
| 6 | Bad Girl | 1 | #22 | – | 2013 | |
| 7 | Bucky Done Gun | 1 | #477 | – | – | |
| 8 | Bad Girls | 1 | #99 | – | 2012 |
Albums with charting songs
Where each song was first released, from MusicBrainz.
Year-end chart timeline
Combined year-end countdown points per year. Taller bars mean more songs placing higher across more stations.
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