Hollywood ? It’s hard to say which is more interesting: M.I.A.’s background or her music. Beginning as a youth on the run from authorities, continuing as a teen refugee in London and now as an artist with what is likely to be one of the most written-about albums of 2005, the 27-year-old daughter of a Sri Lankan rebel has lived a tragic yet extraordinary life.

Already, M.I.A.’s electro-Bollywood-hip-hop has generated gargantuan interest among pop tastemakers, all of it based on a single song. “Galang,” named one of last year’s 10 best singles in Rolling Stone’s critics’ poll, is an intensely rhythmic culture clash that draws heavily on American gangsta rap and Hindi film, Jamaican dancehall, Europop and multiculti gibberish. The song exploded in the United Kingdom a little more than a year ago. It began washing up on American dance floors last summer and is now bubbling up to radio.

M.I.A., the daughter of a militant Sri Lankan activist, is giving world music a makeover with an exotic hip-hop/electronic hybrid that blends a youth spent on the run from authorities with the urban eclecticism she found upon moving to London as a refugee.

M.I.A.’s debut album, “Arular,” out next month on XL Recordings, is a more in-depth exploration of the singer’s refugee eclecticism. From start to finish, it is an unstoppable riot of sound, weaving London street slang with Sri Lankan nursery rhymes, world politics and personal experience.

Vacillating between attitude and innocence, her songs are tough-talking raps, but they’re softened by a Hindi vocal style that ends lines of lyrics with curlicue upswings.

Stardom for M.I.A. is just the next stop in a life that has, quite literally, been all over the map. Born in London, Maya Arulpragasam, as she was then known, moved to Sri Lanka with her family when she was 6 months old. It was 1978, and tensions between the country’s two ethnic groups were growing. M.I.A. and her family were among the minority Tamil population in a country dominated by Sinhalese; her father was part of a militant group seeking independence.

Rebel activities kept her father separated from the family and her family on the run for the next decade. When civil war broke out, they relocated to India, living for a year and a half “in a room surrounded by five miles of empty land,” she says.

With her family close to starvation and her sister sick from typhoid, an uncle helped move M.I.A.’s family back to Sri Lanka. In their native country, they at least had a support system, even if the war was in full swing. The area where they lived was regularly bombed, including the convent where M.I.A. went to school.

Several failed attempts to flee the country ended with M.I.A. and her family moving to India, then London.

Her father stayed behind.