M.I.A. Quotes
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Sri Lanka is an island off the coast of India. There's two ethnicities there; one the Sinhalese, which is the majority and the government, and the minority, who are the Tamils. That's where I'm from. And my lifetime sort of began there; I spent 10 years, and I was there during when the war started and fled as a refugee to England.
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In New York, everyone's really neurotic and talks about themselves all the time.
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My record label always says you shouldn't talk about money because it makes people extremely uncomfortable. Refugees can't talk about money. Rappers can talk about money; refugees can't talk about money.
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In my head, I actually think my songs are pop songs. I think, 'Damn, that's a pop song!' I can practice in front of the mirror with my hairbrush for as long as I want to. But when it finally comes out, it sounds avant-garde to people.
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I feel like I'm living in the dead weeds of hip-hop. I live in the graveyard of what went wrong with hip-hop.
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In the beginning [of my career] I definitely felt a responsibility because I was representing a bunch of people [Sri lankans] who never got represented before. I felt this responsibility to correct that situation, to be like, "Look, you can't discriminate against refugees and Muslim people and blah, blah, blah . . ."
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I remember taking my demo to every dance person in London. People were like, 'We don't know what this is!' The first people to champion me were a club in Manchester.
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My giving birth was nothing when I think about all the people in Sri Lanka that have to give birth in a concentration camp.
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I feel so terrible for the kids now. In London, even people in their forties can't afford to buy a house or have kids.
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I'd be very controversial if I said why, and I don't do controversial anymore. That's too passé. So last year. Being controversial is boring now.
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When I first came out, I was a film student, and my mom sewed clothes. I was already doing a million things then, whatever it took to survive. If I had to braid someone's hair to get one pound for my lunch money, that's what I did.
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I find the new Justin Bieber video more violent and more of an assault to my eyes and senses than what I've made.
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The mentality has taken over because of the way we've promoted things. It's been accepted, to live with fear, and to fear that it's going to be terrible, prepare for the worst. The meat and potato of our existence right now is influenced by what happened after 9/11 - we put our thinking into protecting borders.
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Creativity needs time to harness before it goes out, and because that's difficult, memes have become the creative language.
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That's what New York is like - you can't have real art happen in an institution because rich people can make the world stop. The stuff on the street is a lot more interesting.
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As an artist, you want to play around with mediums and see if you can get the point across in different way.
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By the time it came to the 90s, the late 90s, being a businessman was the beacon to uphold. We've been having the concept of the best rapper equals the best businessman.
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Everything I think seems to be controversial, so I feel like I need to just go away for a second and put it all down on paper until the storm passes.
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Somebody told me that if you wake up every day and do stuff that's easy, then you're doing the wrong thing. If you wake up every day and do stuff that's really hard and you manage to get through to people, then you're doing the right thing. They might have just fooled me by telling me that, but it worked. I think that's my philosophy.
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There's a bit of hope that a song can be about anything. If you want to write a song about anything, you can, and you don't have to put it through the process of having it be trendy or cool or generic pop or these types.
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I never pigeonholed myself - the only reason you'd want to pigeonhole is to monetize your business and, as a person, I don't see the importance of doing that. My music took off above the rest of those things: You can just make a song, put it on a CD, and get it out to all these people.
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You have to have your fashion stylist person not sell out and sell your s - t to another pop star because they can pay them twice as much, and do it for the belief and the love of art.
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I'm still working out my opinions - it's always a question mark. I leave loads of space open, and people don't like that.
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What really drives me mad about art is that, in America, the only thing you can do is to take it apart.