M.I.A.
M.I.A.
bed clothes council england english flat gave hand hip knew moved punk radio second ten took
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.
difficult good great hip hop lily music people song understand
I don't understand why people make me want to make music that's a join-the-dots thing by numbers. I find it really difficult when people say, 'Aw, you should have made a really big hip hop record, that would have been really good for you' or, 'You should have made a song like Lily Allen, that would have been so great.'
gods meditating named praying yoga
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.
fit genre tower
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.
brown car companies eventually lane market sell uncle worked
My uncle was the first brown person to have a market stall on Petticoat Lane in the 1960s. He worked his way up from the street. He was homeless, but eventually he got a car so he could sell from the boot. And by the 1980s, he was a millionaire wholesaling to companies like Topshop. So in a way, fashion put me in England.
age classes five front hierarchy kids played poor sat school skin sorted street
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.
imply otherwise wrong
My father had no influence on my political beliefs, and to imply otherwise is wrong and irresponsible.
manhattan peaked
Manhattan seems pretty developed, you know what I mean? Like, it has peaked in culture.
broke pushed
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.
album bounce cent girl people per political wanna
Me, it was always about being able to bounce around to where I wanna be. Like, with 'Arular,' people always say it's so political, but I think 50 per cent of the album is not very political at all. It's just really a shouty, shouty girl thing.
extremely label money people rappers record says
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.
hand life mike onstage pushed recorded songs three time worst
In 2004, I went onstage for the first time. They put a mike in my hand and pushed me out the door into the crowd. I did the three songs I had recorded and got out. It was the worst day of my life.
music
It is a coincidence that Mathangi is the Goddess of Music and the spoken word, which can be rap.
Before the Greeks were the Tamils. The Tamils are one of the oldest civilizations that's still surviving.