Tamil People

"Sleigh Bells:"

"Solange Knowles: "I went to a M.I.A. show and I thought the best moment of her show, is she literally invited anyone who wanted to onstage, just the energy of, you know, being with the crowd, and its people who love your music, it feels really good." September 2008, Jimmy Kimmel Show"

"Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree:"

"Thom Yorke: "I really try to limit [listening to other people's music while working on new songs], but M.I.A.'s first record really seeped in. M.I.A. takes this complete block and chop repeat, chop repeat, chop, not finished [method]. Which really reminds me of that thing of just picking up a guitar and the first three chords you write and being like, yep, that's good. Stop. End. Not sort of sitting there fifteen hours later agonizing over the hi-hat sound. That seems to be what happens with programming and electronica a lot of the time. You can feel the pain going on.""

"Timbaland: "We wanna go to the world. The world is 'Big Pimpin'.' 'Big Pimpin' ' is an international hit, so we wanna do 10 of those. Meaning, some of the songs gonna sound like M.I.A. would rap on some of the beats. You gonna be like, 'Whoa!'""

"Trent Reznor: "The only thing that I play in my car right now is Arular by a girl named M.I.A., the most innovative artist in years." (2005) [Reznor subsequently wanted to collaborate with M.I.A. in 2005, and added her songs "Pull Up The People", "Hombre" and "Galang" to the setlist of Pre-Show Music played at Nine Inch Nails Lights in the Sky concert tour (2008 - 2009). 2005,"

"Vampire Weekend:"

"Wayne Coyne of Flaming Lips: "The new M.I.A. I like the "Born Free" single with the Suicide sample. I didn't like the video that much. But I like her. I think she's a badass. She's a freak. She's cool. She's intense. I think she gets a bit too bitchy sometimes, but I don't care." - on what he was listening to, July 2010, Rolling Stone"

"Carri "Cassetteplaya" Mundane:"

"Donatella Versace: "Her music and style seemed so fresh and innovative. She is a total artist." [for Designer's Musician Muses (2011)"

"Eric Daman and Meredith Markworth-Pollack: "Vanessa is a breath of fresh air. She’s the Lower East Side, Raising Victor Vargas home-girl. One night we saw M.I.A. in concert wearing a sequin sailor suit and were like “Omigod, she is so Vanessa.”" [on M.I.A. being the inspiration for the costumes of character Vanessa Abrams on television series Gossip Girl."

"Jean-Charles de Castelbajac: "I have collaborated with M.I.A. for four years but I also like Metronomy and Ebony Bones. There are a lot of talented people around." 2010"

"Karl Lagerfeld: "Nowadays people give the middle finger quite quickly - it's not the best behaviour. Everybody does that, what's new about that? It's just become a bad habit. People in magazines are 50% bimbo and 50% pregnant women" February 7, 2012 [on M.I.A. flipping the middle finger to the camera during the 2012 Superbowl half-time show]"

"Kesh: "I appreciate M.I.A.. A real artist.""

"Luella Bartley: "She had an unabashed in-your-face craziness that I loved, admired, and identified with.""

"Ryan McGinley: "We had to basically rig a truss for this swing; it was a major production to make sure it was safe. I tried it out. M.I.A. might have gotten there and said, 'I'm not doing this; this is too crazy.' But she got on and just started swinging like it was something normal. "I remember her saying, 'If I'm going to go out, this is an awesome way to go.'""

"Anthony Napolitan: "I think I have a thing for female singers; I like the way they sound. MIA is a very unique one at that. [Paper Planes] is an all-time favorite for me. I just like it!""

"Teddy Geiger: "That's that MIA thing. She has the bombs, they'll make you blow. Simple as that!""

"Mike Shinoda: "On our first Fort Minor tour, Styles of Beyond were touring with me. [Bucky Done Gun] by M.I.A. was practically the theme song that tour. I think our crew was sick of hearing it! At any rate, I think that's what one of my favorite things about music is: those times when hearing a song reminds you of a time in your past, when it connects you directly with the memory every time you hear it. Good song.""

"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."

"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."

"I don't know which is worse. The fact that I saw it in my life has maybe given me lots of issues, but there's a whole generation of American kids seeing violence on their computer screens and then getting shipped off to Afghanistan. They feel like they know the violence when they don't. Not having a proper understanding of violence, especially what it's like on the receiving end of it, just makes you interpret it wrong and makes inflicting violence easier.""

"No one ever gives those kids the microphone and says, 'Tell us, what the fuck is going on.' They don't show them because none of them know how to talk to you. It took me 20 years to get over here, learn the language, become a pop star and say, 'Finally, I get the microphone!' This is what I was going to say if I got it when I was 10."

"My approach to politics is that I never said I'm smart. But why aren't I allowed to write about my experience?"

"I have to be true to that - I can't take certain things away. I do have a political background. I’m only in England, learning this language and building a life in this society, because of political reasons. Why would I deny that?"

"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"

"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."

"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."

"I feel the reason why I'm really like outspoken and stuff is because all of these things were inflicted upon me, and I never went and caused any trouble, you know? I just feel like I was kind of skipping along in some country and somebody decides to drop a bomb and shake up my life and then it's all been survival from then on. And that's the reality for thousands - and millions - of people today. Why should I get censored for talking about a life that half the time I didn't choose to live?"

"I haven't heard honesty in music for so long and this is how I feel, and this is what I think. You don't even have to say words … I was just being as raw as possible. I wanted to make music that you felt in your gut."

"I didn't want to make huge political statements; in fact, I hate preachy shit and people saying, 'This is good; this is bad.' I talk about how I see things as an everyday person in England. I was saying things that were a bit controversial, and I wanted to say that there are some opinions that aren't black and white. Things are confusing and complex. If you really want to be a good person, you understand things from all points of view and you are empathetic towards every opinion and every voice. I was like, 'I'm going to make an album about how it's difficult to make sense of living today, and that is added to by the television and the media, the person at my bank and the person at my mobile phone company.' I want to make sense of all those people and what is going on, and that is what I tried to do lyrically, and not provide a manifesto."

"I was never really affected by it because I don’t have the time to go up to every grime kid and explain the ideology and the lifestyle. It’s too hard....Look at Afrikan Boy, he still has that problem. You have this talent to see something and articulate something new, but you can’t because the arena to do that doesn’t exist. It’s easier to breed movements in England than really support one artist, especially in urban culture."

"I feel like I'm a fucking infomercial for issues around the world this year. I don’t want it to be like that though. I feel like for the first time I'm truly falling in love with music in its own right."

"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."

"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."

"It's important for communities to be put together on a different basis. It's really shitty that we're taught to be really patriotic when 99 percent of the shit that we wear and we use and eat and everything comes from everywhere all the time, and musically, it's the same."

"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."

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

"OK, let's go and explore the rest of the world, and how easy is it to put together music through found objects and stuff, and people, and ideas and certain electricity, certain environments."

"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."

"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."

"I'm more of a realist, than a theorist"

"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."