M.I.A. quotes

M.I.A. is a British musician, songwriter, and visual artist known for her eclectic style and political lyrics. Her music blends elements of hip hop, electronic, world, and dance music, often addressing issues like immigration and social justice. She has achieved international fame with hits like "Paper Planes" and remains an influential figure in modern music. Here are 75 of her quotes:

You have to constantly redefine who you are.

M.I.A.

I feel like a mirror reflecting back everyones perception of me.

M.I.A.

Sri Lanka is an island off the coast of India. There's two ethnicities there; one the Sinhalese, which is the majority and the government, and the minority, who are the Tamils. That's where I'm from. And my lifetime sort of began there; I spent 10 years, and I was there during when the war started and fled as a refugee to England.

M.I.A.

M. I. A.: No. My fashion icon is Colonel [Muammar al-] Gaddafi, and he always has been. He's rock 'n' roll.

M.I.A.

Google's more powerful than any government now – people think it's God. They're storing all our data and one day they're going to turn against us.

M.I.A.

GAVRAS: So let's talk a little bit about being a fashion icon. Do you think, for example, that Saddam Hussein was a fashion icon?

M.I.A.

I call bullshit on any system that holds me down. If the system changed my life the way it did and it totally abused my life and my family, then I'm willing to stand up against it. My goal is to bring people into the system. If I have to use some shocking imagery or if I have to use some honest up-front language to get in and wake people up, so be it. At least, it has sparked up some discussion and young people feel like they have the right to talk. That's all you can hope for, to induce discussion and then make people feel like they have the right to discuss political issues.

M.I.A.

I used to see songwriting like editing a film or something. You can edit music like you can edit a film. Or if I was painting or making a picture or something, that night I could sit down and write a song. I think it really helps to break things up. Sometimes when you sit down to write songs, you write three or four songs in a row feeling the same sort of vibe. But if you stop in-between that time and change something, you break the pattern – you prevent yourself from unconsciously falling into a format.

M.I.A.

I think I just kind of thought about all the artists that I really respected throughout the - just any genre of music really and I think everybody that I respected and liked. They were just them. You know, they're people who always stuck to who they were, and were true and honest about who they were. So I think that kind of gave me a real like confidence to just stick at it. Just thinking about people like Bjork - you know, I don't know, Bob Dylan, you know artists that truly were strong in themselves.

M.I.A.

I performed at a show at the MoMA. There was this big dinner there, and I was seated in this hall with the mayor of New York and all these extremely wealthy art-supporting and art-buying people. There was a piece of work hanging in the hall-it was a fan. This fan was supposed to swing by the momentum of its own propeller. So, while we were having dinner, the fan was stopped, and the guy next to me, a curator at P. S.1, said, "Look, this is what art symbolizes today." Like, that piece of art is supposed to be moving, but just to have dinner we've stopped the art. That's what New York is like today. 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.

GAVRAS: I'd love to have his hair. He has very good curly, shiny hair.

M.I.A.

I'm not sure, but music now should be like sonic massage. You want to really feel it, internally. The police [sic] use sound cannons at public protests that explode people's insides with a single note – human beings have to come up with the opposite of that.

M.I.A.

Who the hell is huntin' you? In the BMW How the hell they find you? 1 4 7'd you Feds gonna get you Pull the strings on the hood One Paranoid you Blazing through the Hood.

M.I.A.

Kala is about my mum and her struggle–how do you work, feed your children, nurture them and give them the power of information?

M.I.A.

Yeah manmade power Stood like a tower Higher Higher, Hello And the higher you go you feel lower, oh I was close to the edge Staying undercover, staying undercover And with my nose to the ground I found my Sound.

M.I.A.

It's good. You know, it's nice coming out and actually meeting all your fans - you make this thing in your bedroom and you don't really know who is going to get it or relate to it or anything, you know? And you just pour your heart out kind of thing, and then you find out you relate to people and that's the final process of it. You know, to meet people who are actually like you and that you connect with, you know what I mean? That's kind of cool. That's the best thing about touring.

M.I.A.

Nobody wants to be dancing to political songs. Every bit of music out there that's making it into the mainstream is really about nothing. I wanted to see if I could write songs about something important and make it sound like nothing. And it kind of worked.

M.I.A.

They wanted me to be the face of Coca Cola. I was like 'Wow. Have you guys got any idea what you're talking about?' Then Pepsi called me the next week. My mother-in-law called me and said 'Oh my God, Maya, they're offering you so much money.

M.I.A.

I saw firsthand where the music we made ended up. It turned up in sterile bullshit clubs in LA, separated from the spirit we made it in.

M.I.A.

GAVRAS: Yeah, he's the best-dressed man on the planet.

M.I.A.

GAVRAS: Well, he's bigger than a pop star. I mean, when he came to Paris in 2007, he was supposed to stay at the Hôtel de Marigny, which is the best hotel. But Gaddafi came with a tent. It was this huge flagged tent-just him and his army guards, who were all girls. They were in these crazy leopard outfits. I mean, Gaddafi is way better dressed than any pop star in the world.

M.I.A.

As soon as I came to England, really, I must have about spent two or three months bouncing around the pop world trying to get an idea of what England was. I wasn't really motivated by anything else. And nothing really inspired me. I was really confused about who I was and where I stood in society, you know what I mean? You come there and you just don't know what the hell is going on. And then I remember the first house we stayed in and I watched 'Top of the Pops' and it was like- woah! It was the first music show that I saw on TV. I saw Madonna, Whitney Houston. It was amazing.

M.I.A.