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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.
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M.I.A.
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: July 18
Activist
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Ventura County
California
Mathangi Arulpragasam
Maya Arulpragasam
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More quotes by M.I.A.
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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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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Whoever's inside is inside whoever's out is out.
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We know that those huge U.S. brands do have political sway.
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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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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.
M.I.A.
Instead of going to war, we should put the money into arts and culture and let creative people define what Britain is.
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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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If music's a political place, I'm out.
M.I.A.
Besides, isn't it more exciting when you don't have permission?
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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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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.
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.
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.
Creativity needs time to harness before it goes out, and because that's difficult, memes have become the creative language.
M.I.A.
Somebody told me that if you wake up every day and do stuff that's easy, then you're doing the wrong thing. If you wake up every day and do stuff that's really hard and you manage to get through to people, then you're doing the right thing. They might have just fooled me by telling me that, but it worked. I think that's my philosophy.
M.I.A.
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.
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.
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.
