During "Space," the dreamy future-shock ballad that closes her upcoming third album, M.I.A. repeatedly coos, "My lines are down/You can't call me," over a gently percolating beat that sounds like a Sega Genesis practicing its pillow talk. It's just one of the many observations on our data-drenched Infotainment Age that crop up throughout "/\/\ /\ Y /\," a stunning, more-or-less self-titled effort from the 34-year-old Sri Lankan native born Maya Arulpragasam. Yet in a telephone interview with Billboard last week, the lyric is taking on another, more literal meaning, as M.I.A. travels on a Eurostar train from Brussels to London during a hectic round of European promotion. Namely, her cell phone keeps dropping our call whenever her train enters a tunnel.

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When the line goes dead for the fourth time-hey, it's Europe; there are lots of tunnels-it's tempting to wonder if M.I.A. has perhaps hung up on purpose. After all, she'd just been asked about the massive attention paid to journalist Lynn Hirschberg's less-than-fawning cover profile of her in the New York Times Magazine last month, and M.I.A.'s subsequent responses. Maybe she's tired of discussing the story's focus on her supposed radical chic: a comfortable, even posh personal life allegedly at odds with her firebrand art and politics. Maybe she's fed up with talking about why she tweeted Hirschberg's cell phone number, or later posted a covert recording of one of her and Hirschberg's conversations. Maybe she's sick of the term "Trufflegate" (so coined after Hirschberg made hay out of M.I.A. ordering truffle-oil-flavored French fries) and figures that simply avoiding the topic might help it die a speedy death.

Fact is, M.I.A. is forthright in addressing last week's media cause célèbre. Does she regret doing the Times story?

"Not really," she replies. "I kind of knew what it was going to be.

"I said, 'Fuck the New York Times,' " she continues, referring to a series of tweets earlier this year in which she objected to the newspaper's coverage of the conflict in Sri Lanka between Sinhalese and Tamil factions. (Although M.I.A.'s mother moved herself and her children to London when M.I.A. was young, the artist's father remained in war-torn Sri Lanka, taking part in various Tamil opposition efforts.) "Of course they weren't going to be like, 'Hi! How you doing? We love you!' "

Whatever else it demonstrated, the Truffle Kerfuffle made it clear that at some point between the 2007 release of her second album, "Kala," and approximately two weeks ago, M.I.A. underwent an unlikely transformation from underground phenom to Very Big Deal.

"She's trying to do politics and she's trying to do art," Los Angeles Times pop critic Ann Powers says. "And she doesn't want to compromise or keep silent. That worked for the Clash, but that was a certain time and a certain place. And it partly worked for them because they were a band, and we're used to seeing guys be confrontational. If it works for her, I think she's even more important than we thought."

"I always forget that she has this sort of celebrity side to her," says Rusko, one of M.I.A.'s principal collaborators on her new album. "On a Tuesday night me and [longtime M.I.A. producer] Switch can go down and lurk around at [Los Angeles nightspot] Cinespace, and it's pretty chill. Maya can't do that-she's in that next realm now."

The shift is one she's still coming to grips with. "It's weird that I can make a joke and it becomes so controversial and people want to write about it," she says over the muffled squawk of a Eurostar conductor's announcement. "Some thing I say really flippantly gets this full-on rampage of stuff happening. It's amazing to me that people will do that."

NEXT: Behind M.I.A.'s New Album