M.i.a. quotes

I wanted to represent a different decade, and I wanted someone who goes back further than me. I go back the furthest on this thing, I never really noticed that before. I'm going to have to fix that or I'm going to look really old.

Just make music; don't talk about politics.

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.

Now, [hip-hop/grime artists] Stormzy, Skepta, or the Section Boyz have to be validated by Drake, Rihanna or Beyoncé. They're rolled into this one urban culture bubble; it's not really to do with, "I'm specifically f - ked off about my country and what's going on in my town." We're very much only showing success to artists who impress American artists, and I'm one of them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My statements aren't incomplete, they're just in-progress. It's a debate and a discussion.

Instead of going to war, we should put the money into arts and culture and let creative people define what Britain is.

Nike is the uniform for kids all over the world, and African design has been killed by Nike. Africans no longer want to wear their own designs.

I dont like the idea of spirituality done the way its done. The only way I could understand it was through creativity, not by going to an Ashram, or finding a guru or joining a temple. I made work out of it.

If music's a political place, I'm out.

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.

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.

I've documented a lot of things myself as a filmmaker. If you want a rockumentary, that's in there.

Any piece of art, when you're putting it on a certain platform, if the platform becomes a political place, you can manipulate things.

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.

Before the Greeks were the Tamils. The Tamils are one of the oldest civilizations thats still surviving.

I feel like a mirror reflecting back everyones perception of me.

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.

In England right now you're not good enough until you get validated.

I hate the idea of street art. With music, I just needed my brain and my voice, which didn't cost anything.

My uncle was the first brown person to have a market stall on Petticoat Lane in the 1960s. He worked his way up from the street. He was homeless, but eventually he got a car so he could sell from the boot. And by the 1980s, he was a millionaire wholesaling to companies like Topshop. So in a way, fashion put me in England.

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.

That's what I miss, being a real human.

When I came to England in '86, my first week of school was terrible because I would put my hand up to answer things, and no one would choose me because they couldn't say my name.

What's wrong with hip-hop [is that] it became so one-dimensional; it became like a businessman thing. It's run out of creativity. It went so far off about making money that now everyone can do it.

Businessmen in society are not going to be the ones that promote anything outside of money.

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.

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.

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.

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. But I did it in the most creative way possible.

Confidence takes constant nurturing, like a bed, it must be remade every day.

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. Right up until then, though, I think, "Of course everybody feels this way. This song's the same as the Greek national anthem."

If you narrow the playing field, the next generation has less to put out, to eat and regenerate from.

That's what's inspiring to me - finding someplace where people haven't already seen themselves in a certain light.

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.

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.

I named my first album after my dad because I wanted to find him. My second album was named after my mom because I felt like I learned all my creative talents I learned from her.

Whoever's inside is inside; whoever's out is out.

Across the world, on your phone, everybody gets the same list of things to read, listen to, and watch.

I fly like paper, get high like planes If you catch me at the border, I got visas in my name

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.

Art is supposed to be about creativity. But the same people are the same art darlings every month, and it's a bit annoying. It's supposed to be diverse and interesting and conceptual and have weird concepts in a comfortable place.

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.

Besides, isn't it more exciting when you don't have permission?

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.

Everyone has that moment where they just rebel.

You have to constantly redefine who you are.

I am the bridge between the East and the West. I don't want to abandon one for the other.

Music that was made in the 60s and 70s did come from a really soulful place. The seed for the songs written in the 90s were planted in those songs, even though they were samples.

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?"

Creativity needs time to harness before it goes out, and because that's difficult, memes have become the creative language.

That divide between the rich and poor is so crazy, because even white kids are suffering now.

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."

Predominantly in the West, if you can only have creative voices that are either black or white, I'm going to say whatever the f - k I want, because no one's going before you, and if no one's coming after you, I'm just going to be the freakiest of all freaks!

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 . . ."

I think people were genuinely addicted to hip hop in the 90s, addicted to the idea of empowerment. I think it came from [the fact that] the rappers in the 90s, their parents coming from the 70s, had such a rich variety of records to sample.

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.

I dont support terrorism and never have. As a Sri Lankan that fled war and bombings, my music is the voice of the civilian refugee.

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.

Uncomfortable silences. Why do we feel it's necessary to yak about bullshit in order to be comfortable?

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.

People say we're similar with Lady Gaga, that we both mix all these things in the pot and spit them out differently, but she spits it out exactly the same! None of her music's reflective of how weird she wants to be or thinks she is. She models herself on Grace Jones and Madonna, but the music sounds like 20-year-old Ibiza music, you know? She's not progressive, but she's a good mimic.

What really drives me mad about art is that, in America, the only thing you can do is to take it apart.

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.

I find the new Justin Bieber video more violent and more of an assault to my eyes and senses than what I've made.

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.

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.

I feel like I can't really have a comment.

I get called "ISIS" now. Why don't we have a name-and-shame weapons dealership website? Instead, we're like, "Oh my God, are you really talking about the refugees again, making yourself into a caricature?" And it's like, "Until you stop the person in your country who's making billions of dollars from selling weapons, yeah, I have to talk about refugees." Whatever I say will get twisted or messed with.

When mayors get together they probably have better conversations and have better notes to share about running different cities, and just do what suits. Basically, like when you combine all the religions and take the best bits, you should be able to combine all the cities and take the best bits, the information, the tried and tested things.

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.

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.

It's the only thing to do when you're in London - hang out in a taxi.

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.

Rage and grief are savage companions, but despair is the final undoing.

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.

Retirement: a brand new beginning! How wonderful!

Even if you're frustrated, how do you express yourself? There's no subculture like back in the day.

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.

With homogenized culture, even if you feel frustrated, you'd have to write a Taylor Swift song to get heard.

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."

If right now, culture's so divisive, it just leaves these millions of people like me out.

The music industry is so tied up politically. They're afraid they might let other voices in.

We know that those huge U.S. brands do have political sway.

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.