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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.

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
Really
Teach
Achieving
Way
American
Flat
People
Happiness
Flats
Happy
Stomach
Felt
Realized
Become
Car
Best
Achieve
Pissed
Thing
Media
Clich

More quotes by M.I.A.

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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.
M.I.A.
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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.
M.I.A.
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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.
M.I.A.
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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.
M.I.A.
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That divide between the rich and poor is so crazy, because even white kids are suffering now.
M.I.A.
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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.
M.I.A.
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With homogenized culture, even if you feel frustrated, you'd have to write a Taylor Swift song to get heard.
M.I.A.
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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.
M.I.A.
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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.
M.I.A.
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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.
M.I.A.
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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.
M.I.A.
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Confidence takes constant nurturing, like a bed, it must be remade every day.
M.I.A.
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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.
M.I.A.
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If music's a political place, I'm out.
M.I.A.
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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.
M.I.A.
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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.
M.I.A.
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I fly like paper, get high like planes If you catch me at the border, I got visas in my name
M.I.A.
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In England right now you're not good enough until you get validated.
M.I.A.
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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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Creativity needs time to harness before it goes out, and because that's difficult, memes have become the creative language.
M.I.A.