Boyz (song) - Background

Background

"So when I started this album, I really thought, “I don’t know why I’m doing this, I don’t know who I’m doing it for. I don’t know anything. I’m out of this relationship, Timbaland, that dream and hope, is not gonna happen, and I probably don’t even wanna make music.” I was exhausted, and then this album just came out from that weird place. I just didn’t care what anyone was going to think. And it just ended up being what it is because it came out from a time of just trying to survive, in music, as a woman"

– M.I.A. talking to the magazine The List about the background to the recording of her second album Kala.

Written and produced by Maya "M.I.A." Arulpragasam and Dave "Switch" Taylor, "Boyz" was the first official single to be released from M.I.A.'s second studio album Kala and one of the first songs composed for the album. During an interview with The Big Issue following the release of debut album Arular, M.I.A. stated that she was looking forward to writing her second album the next year, spending six months in Jamaica and collaborating with high profile American producers.

The songwriter was unable to gain a long-term work visa to enter the US in 2006 and access the demos she had composed and stored at her New York flat. With the visa denial, she ended up couch-surfing, sleeping at other people's houses in London, as her constant touring on dates in Canada, Argentina and Brazil meant that she no longer had a home in England. She said in an interview "I had to start from scratch with what was around me. The thing is, I get bored easily, and I don’t see the point of doing something twice. I made Arular in London; I’d already made a real London album. I just thought, fuck it. If I’m gonna couch-surf in London, I might as well go and couch surf in India or Liberia." M.I.A. opted to record the album at a variety of locations around the world, beginning by travelling to India following the release of "Bucky Done Gun" and the last date of her Arular Tour in Japan in February 2006. She said of her decision "I wanted to get out of people’s view: to go and spend time learning about myself and trying to be better. Not really technically better, but I just wanted to be better as a human being. And it’s really hard to do that when you make club music."

M.I.A. initially travelled to Chennai, India to meet A. R. Rahman, but found it hard to communicate her ideas to him and the planned musical collaboration did not take place. Rahman did, however, provide M.I.A. with a number of instrumentalist contacts and allow her to use his studio AM Studios to record songs for Kala. The singer was amused during recording the song in India that she needed her brother Sugu to repeat some of her instructions to the instrumentalists for them to play, saying "you have to have somebody who’s male, who looks like you, standing next to you like a Siamese twin that’s attached at the hip, and they have to be your mouth." Producer Switch, who met the songwriter in Trinidad had later travelled to India purely to engineer more planned sessions, but ultimately became involved in the composition of "Boyz" and other Kala tracks. On this second trip to India, M.I.A. recorded in Kovalam, Tamil Nadu, during which the pair recorded the song and others in a cupboard with a broken monitor due to lack of recording space in the music studio. The singer was able to record the song further in Trinidad again, in Jamaica and later America. She described Trinidad, where she also recorded songs such as "Big Branch" and World Town" for the album, as where the inspiration to put the "meat" of all the songs of Kala together came from, saying "Trinidad is halfway between Jamaica and India. It was nice to see a new Indian approach to life—like Indian people going Jamaican, and the music that comes out is something totally different and weird. There’s something that’s so approachable about Trinidad and then something that’s so dark—people don’t really know that. When I was there, it was 50–50, all the time." The song, which epitomises "a world-weary sarcasm that pervades" much of the lyrical content of Kala, began from M.I.A.'s frustration and exhaustion following touring for Arular and her experiences as a woman recording her album.