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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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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
Person
Pigeonholed
Reason
Importance
Make
Took
Things
Rest
Never
Song
People
Business
Persons
Monetize
Music
Pigeonhole

More quotes by M.I.A.

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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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I feel like a mirror reflecting back everyones perception of me.
M.I.A.
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That's what I miss, being a real human.
M.I.A.
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Across the world, on your phone, everybody gets the same list of things to read, listen to, and watch.
M.I.A.
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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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If music's a political place, I'm out.
M.I.A.
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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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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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My statements aren't incomplete, they're just in-progress. It's a debate and a discussion.
M.I.A.
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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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We know that those huge U.S. brands do have political sway.
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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.
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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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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.