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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.

M.I.A.

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M.I.A.
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: July 18
Activist
Actor
Composer
Fashion Designer
Model
Music Video Director
Musician
Painter
Photographer
Rapper
Record Producer
Singer-Songwriter
Ventura County
California
Mathangi Arulpragasam
Maya Arulpragasam
Wear
Design
Nike
Longer
Africans
Kids
Designs
World
Uniform
Uniforms
African
Killed

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I feel like a mirror reflecting back everyones perception of me.
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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.
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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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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.
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Besides, isn't it more exciting when you don't have permission?
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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.
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That's what I miss, being a real human.
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If music's a political place, I'm out.
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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.
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That divide between the rich and poor is so crazy, because even white kids are suffering now.
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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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It's the only thing to do when you're in London - hang out in a taxi.
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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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What really drives me mad about art is that, in America, the only thing you can do is to take it apart.
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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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Creativity needs time to harness before it goes out, and because that's difficult, memes have become the creative language.
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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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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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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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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.
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