Quote

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.

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
Kids
Going
Barrage
Really
Sticking
Mail
Poor
White
Hate
True

More quotes by 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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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 . . .
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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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.
M.I.A.
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We know that those huge U.S. brands do have political sway.
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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If music's a political place, I'm out.
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 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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My statements aren't incomplete, they're just in-progress. It's a debate and a discussion.
M.I.A.
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That's what I miss, being a real human.
M.I.A.
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Whoever's inside is inside whoever's out is out.
M.I.A.
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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.
M.I.A.
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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?
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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Everyone has that moment where they just rebel.
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.
M.I.A.
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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.
M.I.A.
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It's the only thing to do when you're in London - hang out in a taxi.
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.
M.I.A.