M.I.A. Quotes

Our songs did not transcend being R&B hits. They were R&B hits that white kids were attracted to. And if people bought it, it became rock & roll. That's marketing. Why couldn't it still be R&B? The bass pattern didn't change. The song didn't change. It was still 'Yakety Yak' and 'Searchin'.'

Musicians exist independent of any of the marketing terms or the categorization.

I don't quite know how the urban music category came about, but I suspect it had something to do with trying to maximise sales.

I'm trying to break down preconceptions about what pop music is.

The music industry is saying, This is the format, and if you'll fit into this format, you can be on radio, and if radio will play you, MTV will expose you, and MTV will expose you, we'll sell records.

Genre boundaries are good for marketing but they all but disappear when you're a player.

Pop music will never be low brow.

The whole point of 'Acid Rap' was just to ask people a question: does the music business side of this dictate what type of project this is? If it's all original music and it's got this much emotion around it and it connects this way with this many people, is it a mixtape? What's an 'album' these days, anyways?

I think it's ridiculous to try to sell records to teenagers, because teenagers don't buy my records. And there ain't that many teenagers out there in the marketplace.

It's not for me to determine what a country artist has in common with a hip-hop artist. You go for those with long-lasting careers. And that's what I've had as my target all my life.

Even for the people in the business who are real music lovers it's really about putting things in the right boxes, and my style doesn't fit into a box.

Well, I was making a record, and I had to choose a name, because they said, you know, you can't make a record under the name of Reg Dwight, because it's never going to - you know, it's not attractive enough.

I remember auditioning for record labels and having them tell me, 'Well, the country-radio demographic is the thirty-five-year-old female housewife. Give us a song that relates to the thirty-five-year-old female, and we'll talk.'

All that stuff about heavy metal and hard rock, I don't subscribe to any of that. It's all just music. I mean, the heavy metal from the '70s sounds nothing like the stuff from the '80s, and that sounds nothing like the stuff from the '90s. Who's to say what is and isn't a certain type of music?

Pop comes from the word 'popular,' which means that it could be anything that appeals to any group of people. When you talk about general masses, I think there's elements in every kind of music that can reach a broad audience.

Pop music seems to be the way radio programming has chosen to support female artists. They have chosen not to support a more provocative voice from women, which I find disappointing.

Dance music is Madonna's base. It's what she likes, it's what she listens to. It's not anything other than that. She doesn't read what's on the charts. And if it's on time, great. This is who she is.

I was very disenchanted in the industry for a long time before I met GaGa. Everyone wanted a 'Single Ladies' for their artist, or a Puffy move.

Nirvana was pop. You can have distorted guitars and people say it's alternative, but you can't break out of pop music's constructs and still get extensive radio play and media coverage.

When I hear other artists talk, they talk about 'How come radio's not playing my song?' Well, you have to look at it under a microscope and know that each station is just trying to do what's right for their market, and it's scary for a radio station to add a song that they don't know how well it's gonna do for them.

I was really amazed when I started hearing 'Songbird' on the radio. I couldn't believe that the record company promotion department had actually convinced radio music directors to play it -because there wasn't anything like it on the radio at the time.

Until it's on the radio or online, it's not real. With U2, our album isn't finished until it's in the stores.

People in the record business would say, Well, Pras, you know, you haven't been out in a while, maybe you should get today's hottest producer or rapper to do something.

In the late '90s, R&B was dominant in the radio, and the white kids were taking it mainstream.

Pop music I have always loved best. But the more extreme, fascist-led examples of the music business I tend to detest the most.