Photographs by Greg Kadel

M.I.A. is pregnant. And not just with revolutionary ideas for her next record. The British-Sri Lankan vocalist/visual artist/producer/record-label founder/clothing designer, born Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam, is due to give birth in February, and despite what you may have read online, it's not Kanye's baby. (Daddy is indie-rock guitarist Benjamin Brewer, son of Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr.) As for the sex of the child? She's pretty sure she knows, because, well, a clairvoyant bird told her. "In India, they have these parrots who tell your fortune," says M.I.A., lowering herself into a folding chair at the spartan home studio of her Los Angeles–based production partner Switch. She's in town to do some work on her next record and hear a new Jay-Z remix of her track "Boyz." "They come and pick up cards for you. The guy who read my cards said, 'When you were born, your parents thought you'd be a boy, so you came out with a lot of male energy. You can do a lot of things that men can do. You're brave, like a dude.' There's a lot of male energy in me that needs to be exorcised, that's how I know it's gonna be a boy."

Forget seeking advice from Madonna's ob-gyn, because M.I.A. has her own unorthodox ideas on how to proceed, and that's what makes her recent commercial success all the more remarkable. Nearly a year and a half after the release of her critically acclaimed second album, Kala, the 31-year-old is grabbing the attention of a public who should consider her culture-jamming ways far too weird. Go ahead -- try to think of an artist who's combined Baltimore club beats, separatist slogans, Bollywood homages, multilingual slang, Clash samples, and vivid refugee tales on one album and made it out of her bedroom, let alone onto a major label or high on the Billboard charts? Unlike her peers, many of whom still sound staunchly rooted in the prosperous Clinton years (Gwen and Missy among them), M.I.A. clearly lives in our post-NAFTA/9-11/Abu Ghraib/AIG world.

Still, it took a Trojan horse called Pineapple Express -- and some serendipity -- to launch her into the mainstream. A trailer for the stoner comedy featured the gun-shot-and-cash-register chorus of her "Paper Planes," and suddenly this woman who'd rapped about Darfur, the PLO, and Trinidad's hardest shantytowns was playing back-to-back on your local morning zoo with that sugary breakfast cereal known as the Jonas Brothers. The unlikely hit, which includes the hook "All I want to do [bang, bang, bang, bang, ka-ching] is take your money," leaked into the American consciousness right about the time those mortgage companies -- who'd been taking our money -- imploded, bringing the economy down with them. At press time, she'd sold 1.3 million downloads of "Paper Planes," and Kala had risen to No. 1 on Billboard's electronic album chart and No. 8 on the hip-hop chart. (This month she'll debut a digital EP featuring the Jay-Z track.)

Suddenly, the five-foot-three artist's power-to-the-people slogans felt as marketable as "Get Ur Freak On" did ten years earlier. "I'm glad 'Paper Planes' happened when it did," she says, sipping a Cherry 7-Up. Her maternity wear is a pastiche of stretchy pieces from her nonpreggie wardrobe: a Day-Glo leopard-print bathing suit under a sheer lavender sundress, accented by a pair of worn tiger-striped high-tops. On anyone else, this combo would induce nausea. On M.I.A., it looks cutting-edge cool. "The goods were there to back it up," she continues. "It was much more relevant than when people were like, 'Yeah, I got my Hummer and things are good.' "