M.I.A. Quotes

“My dad grew up in a mud hut and studied by candlelight. He was 14 when he got a scholarship to Russia. He was super clever - the cleverest person. He landed in 5ft of snow, and was alone at 14, studying science and engineering. He didn't have a bed, and he slept on a table.”

— M.I.A.

“I don't intentionally go: 'Ooh, what is provocative,' and try to do that. I just do stuff, and people go: 'Ooh, that's provocative.'”

— M.I.A.

I feel like people either love me or hate me, which is good, because that was the point of what I do. The point of M.I.A. is to be - it's either to be loved or hated. At least you evoke that much of a strong opinion about music.

— M.I.A.

“I don't like the idea of spirituality done the way it's done. The only way I could understand it was through creativity, not by going to an Ashram, or finding a guru or joining a temple. I made work out of it.”

— M.I.A.

“Nike is the uniform for kids all over the world, and African design has been killed by Nike. Africans no longer want to wear their own designs.”

— M.I.A.

“Madonna did amazing songs. She had an amazing sense of style, without a stylist. And she was flawed, and sometimes she admitted it. I'll fight the fight for Madonna. I think she should send me some chocolates or something to thank me.”

— M.I.A.

“I feel like a mirror reflecting back everyone's perception of me.”

— M.I.A.

“I don't 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.

“I am the bridge between the East and the West. I don't want to abandon one for the other.”

— M.I.A.

“I don't consider myself a musician. I'm an artist.”

— M.I.A.

“I have no ties to my dad. I had no communications with him; it didn't shape who I am or anything like that. I'm actually a product of my mom.”

— M.I.A.

“You have to constantly redefine who you are.”

— M.I.A.

“'Paper Planes' was an accident. It wasn't a song we made for the masses. It took two years to get popular, and there were many fights about censoring the gunshot sounds.”

— M.I.A.

“The first 10 years of my life, I lived as 'Matangi.' 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. My auntie came from Europe to visit us, and she was like, 'Just call yourself something else.'”

— M.I.A.

“I don't think immigrants are that threatening to society at all. They're just happy they've survived some war somewhere.”

— M.I.A.

“I was shot at for being a Tamil in Sri Lanka, and then, everyone was calling me a Paki in London, and I'm not even Pakistani.”

— M.I.A.

“Before the Greeks were the Tamils. The Tamils are one of the oldest civilizations that's still surviving.”

— M.I.A.

When we moved to England in 1986, I was ten years old and I didn't know anything about punk or hip hop. The only words I knew in English were 'dance' and 'Michael Jackson.' We got put in a flat in Mitchum, and the council gave us second hand furniture, second hand clothes and a second hand radio that I took to bed with me every night.

— M.I.A.

“At first, I found the music I was making really hard to find a home for. I felt like my attitude was really British, but not the actual sounds I was making. Back in 2003, when I made 'Galang,' there were no clubs that had an 'anything and everything' attitude.”

— M.I.A.

“I remember taking my demo to every dance person in London. People were like, 'We don't know what this is!' The first people to champion me were a club in Manchester.”

— M.I.A.

“I was part of the generation that pushed the Internet. In fact, I broke as an artist in the U.S.A. because of the Internet.”

— M.I.A.

“Basically, when I went to school in Sri Lanka from age five onward, the classes there were sometimes sorted into a hierarchy of your skin tone. So the fairer-skinned kids sat at the front row, and the darker-skinned kids sat at the back by the poor ones who played out in the street all day long.”

— M.I.A.

“As an artist, you want to play around with mediums and see if you can get the point across in different way.”

— M.I.A.

“I never pigeonhole myself into any religion, but I feel it has found me. I am trying to make sense of it ... the essence of the Mathangi concept.”

— M.I.A.

It's interesting, because 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. All the survival stuff, too. And then the next album is 'Maya,' which is not my real name. It's fake.

— M.I.A.

“In my head, I actually think my songs are pop songs. I think, 'Damn, that's a pop song!' I can practice in front of the mirror with my hairbrush for as long as I want to. But when it finally comes out, it sounds avant-garde to people.”

— M.I.A.

“My record label always says you shouldn't talk about money because it makes people extremely uncomfortable. Refugees can't talk about money. Rappers can talk about money; refugees can't talk about money.”

— M.I.A.

“You have, in America, you have gang signs. Well, 5,000 years ago, there was thing called a mudra, which is your sitting position when you do yoga or you're meditating or you're praying or whatever. And there's not a lot of them that are named after gods and goddesses, but the middle-finger is specifically named the Matangi mudra.”

— M.I.A.

“Human beings around the world have to be taught to go, 'Tamil equals Tamil civilians first, and the Tamil Tiger is a separate thing.' And both of those groups are different. It's like a square and a circle.”

— M.I.A.

The theme of counterfeits, of those that produce and sell them, has always been part of the culture of M.I.A. When I was contacted by Versace, it seemed a great idea to invert the circle. Versace's designs have always been copied; now it's Versace that copies the copies, so those that copy must copy the copies. So this will continue.

— M.I.A.

“When I started off in England, HMV or Tower Records would come to meetings and be, like, 'We just don't know what this genre is.' I don't really fit in between Rihanna and Beyonce.”

— M.I.A.

“Confidence takes constant nurturing, like a bed, it must be remade every day.”

— M.I.A.

“I'm still working out my opinions - it's always a question mark. I leave loads of space open, and people don't like that.”

— M.I.A.

“Just make music; don't talk about politics.”

— M.I.A.

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.

I fly like paper, get high like planes
If you catch me at the border, I got visas in my name

— M.I.A.

“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.

I think when something becomes a comfortable genre, it's against what street art stood for in the beginning - breaking out of genres and taking art out of galleries. Now street art is in the gallery, and it's all made up into a nice, packaged concept.

— M.I.A.

“Everyone has that moment where they just rebel.”

— M.I.A.

“Businessmen in society are not going to be the ones that promote anything outside of money.”

— M.I.A.

“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.

“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.

“That's what New York is like - you can't have real art happen in an institution because rich people can make the world stop. The stuff on the street is a lot more interesting.”

— M.I.A.

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.

“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.

I've documented a lot of things myself as a filmmaker. If you want a rockumentary, that's in there.

— M.I.A.

“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 ...”

— M.I.A.

“The consequence of making it a business thing and making an artist the same as a Wall Street trader is that you do get a robot by the end of it. It becomes more robotic as opposed to being more soulful.”

— M.I.A.

“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.”

— M.I.A.

“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.