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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.

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
Film
Hour
Nothing
Gonna
Films
Long
Teaching
Stilettos
Make
College
Garde
Like
Turn
Avant
Hours
Refused
Turns
Filmmaker

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If you narrow the playing field, the next generation has less to put out, to eat and regenerate from.
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Everyone has that moment where they just rebel.
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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.
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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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Creativity needs time to harness before it goes out, and because that's difficult, memes have become the creative language.
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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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Whoever's inside is inside whoever's out is out.
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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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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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Across the world, on your phone, everybody gets the same list of things to read, listen to, and watch.
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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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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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We know that those huge U.S. brands do have political sway.
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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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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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If music's a political place, I'm out.
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With homogenized culture, even if you feel frustrated, you'd have to write a Taylor Swift song to get heard.
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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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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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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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