Top 15 M.I.A. Quotes

M.I.A.: He looks like he always has gel in it. Hold on. [to taxi driver] Can you pull over, please? I’m at Notting Hill Gate station.

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

M.I.A.: I’d love to raid his wardrobe.

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.: If he were a pop star, he’d be, like, Prince or something.

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

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

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?

I can sing about songs with gunshots in the background because I heard them. It's almost like my music has been a way to smoke out the hatred that's been bubbling underneath what's going on in Sri Lanka. If there's 300,000 people who are trapped and they're dying, it should be talked about, it should be brought to the table, and I don't see anything wrong in sticking up for 300,000 dying people.

When I come back to London, I feel really safe and familiar. But sometimes I feel like I'm on standby, waiting to go somewhere else – where something else is happening.

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.

Exactly! Trends picks up issues and makes them so disposable. At the time when I started making my art and my music, terrorism was getting chewed up and spat out by the fashion industry, put on the run way. Face magazine in England was doing fashion shoots with girls holding machine guns and fucking rocket launchers. Yet, when something genuine comes through that, like me, using the same language, it doesn’t apply. That’s what I’m learning because that’s what I’m about. I wanna learn what my limitations are within your value system

I'm here for the people

He asked my mum, 'Why would I devote myself to one woman and three children when I could be helping thousands?' She said: 'If you even have to ask that, you should go.'One of those times, when he came home, he didn't even know what I was called.

The Third World deserves freedom of speech just like everyone else. We want to fight the battle to say what we want, whether to be serious or just make fun of ourselves. That's what "Worldtown" is about, that's what "Paper Planes" is about. It's what people in the third world live through.