M.I.A. Quotes
-
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.
-
I come from a generation where you put the art out and had the luxury to sit back and watch the world deconstruct it, and that was valued. Unfortunately now the work lives in a weird context.
-
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.
-
I think when something becomes a comfortable genre, it's against what street art stood for in the beginning - breaking out of genres and taking art out of galleries. Now street art is in the gallery, and it's all made up into a nice, packaged concept.
-
I just think that funerals are a lot like death itself. You can have your wishes, your plans, but at the end of the day, it's out of your control.
-
What really drives me mad about art is that, in America, the only thing you can do is to take it apart.
-
Here we are at the edge of the world, the very edge of Western civilization, and all of us are so desperate to feel something, anything, that we keep falling into each other and f*****g our way toward the end of days.
-
Uncomfortable silences. Why do we feel it's necessary to yak about bullshit in order to be comfortable?
-
I think I have to expand my creativity a bit, because it's difficult for critics to be, "Oh, this person writes their own lyrics and sometimes writes their own beats and sometimes makes her own videos." They funnel me through, "Oh, is it as good as blah-blah's record, which has had 50 million writers on it?"
-
If you're talking about coexisting and tolerance then you have to live by example, and you can't have shiny people all the time everywhere, which is what breeds that sort of thinking - this is better than this, that is better than that.
-
The consequence of making it a business thing and making an artist the same as a Wall Street trader is that you do get a robot by the end of it. It becomes more robotic as opposed to being more soulful.
-
My experience has to be funnelled through a black experience or a white experience, or it doesn't exist, because that's how we're going to deal with the world.
-
Instead of going to war, we should put the money into arts and culture and let creative people define what Britain is.
-
Across the world, on your phone, everybody gets the same list of things to read, listen to, and watch.
-
I'm not sticking up for white kids - I'm going to have a barrage of hate mail - but it's true. If you're poor, you're really poor.
-
I don't really see a difference in independent and major labels. To me, it's pretty much the same. There used to be a difference between indies and major labels, but I don't think there is anymore.
-
You need everyone to get together and just believe in it, and lead by example that it is possible to be outside the system, and that's really super-f - king hard, and I'm sure there's some geniuses out there who can achieve it.
-
Creativity needs time to harness before it goes out, and because that's difficult, memes have become the creative language.
-
I don't have a community like a black community to belong to [with] a musical platform that's been built for years and years and years, or the film-making culture, and I don't have the white one to belong to.
-
I already feel that I am making a political statement by sticking around in music, when I am doing it so differently to everyone else.
-
If it's just politics that's running music, f - k that. I'm out of here! I can't think of anything more boring.
-
There has been an effect of business rap on the output of today's rap music. But I don't think that's the modern day rapper's fault.
-
Any piece of art, when you're putting it on a certain platform, if the platform becomes a political place, you can manipulate things.
-
It could be the sort of declining grip of the American MTV-nation culture-the fact that MTV doesn't play so much music anymore.