M.I.A. Quotes
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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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I felt pissed off because I realized that you have to teach people in a clichéd way how to be happy-and happiness has become too one thing in American media. Achieving happiness is not really about having a flat stomach and the best car.
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Nowadays, [young musicians] are so quick to be like, "OK, fine, I'll take the cheque, or I'll get the stamp from XYZ, and I'm expanding my brand," rather than thinking, "I'm part of this space over here, and in order for it to grow, you can't have it assimilated by this bigger bubble or corporate brand."
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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.
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The music industry was invented, like, 100 years ago. I'm talking about the goddess Matangi, who invented music 5,000 years ago. She was the only thing that inspired me.
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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.
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Instead of going to war, we should put the money into arts and culture and let creative people define what Britain is.
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You can't turn up at college in stilettos and say you're gonna be a filmmaker. In the college, they were teaching me avant-garde filmmaking, where I had to make films that were, like, an hour long about nothing. I just refused to do it.
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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.
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Culturally, I found myself in a very weird situation: you were the person that had made that journey to the West, and then you were going back to comment on something, and then suddenly you were questioned and told, "You can't touch that now because you're a pop star."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Uncomfortable silences. Why do we feel it's necessary to yak about bullshit in order to be comfortable?
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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.
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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.
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Across the world, on your phone, everybody gets the same list of things to read, listen to, and watch.
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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.
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Any piece of art, when you're putting it on a certain platform, if the platform becomes a political place, you can manipulate things.
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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?"