The 7 Classiest Quotes From M.I.A.’s ‘Billboard’ Cover Story
As the release date for her upcoming album /\/\ /\ Y /\ draws nearer, controversial Lady Gaga/Ke$ha/Twilight/New York Times-bashing artist M.I.A. is stepping up (literally!) the promotion for the LP. One such publication she chose to talk to is Billboard, who put the “Born Free” singer on its cover this week. Naturally we took this as our cue to whip of a post of M.I.A.’s standout quotes from the piece! See below.
THE 7 CLASSIEST QUOTES FROM M.I.A.’S ‘BILLBOARD’ COVER STORY:
* “I was happy being the retarded cousin of rap. Now I’m the retarded cousin of singing.”
* “I didn’t want my work to be like a bar graph of, ‘How many new producers can she afford?’ ”
* On her recent war of the words with New York Times Magazine writer Lynn Hirschberg: “I kind of knew what it was going to be. I said, ‘Fuck the New York Times‘ [via a series of tweets earlier this year]. Of course they weren’t going to be like, ‘Hi! How you doing? We love you!'”
* “It’s weird that I can make a joke and it becomes so controversial and people want to write about it. Some thing I say really flippantly gets this full-on rampage of stuff happening.”
* “When I was like, ‘I want Hype [Williams] to shoot the [“XXXO”] video,’ everybody was like, ‘No way—he’s a nightmare!'”
* “It was interesting to take someone like Hype and mash him up with my aesthetic, just because it’s so far removed. Sometimes when you do that you get some interesting shit…”
* On touring: “Last time, because I had visa issues, I didn’t prepare myself enough, because I was like, ‘Oh, I’m never going to get it anyway.’ And then suddenly it came around and I was like, ‘Shit!’ Making all my visuals and animating stuff without sleeping for days—I felt like I was at college trying to get my shit in and the deadline was tomorrow.”
Now, sure—it wasn’t quite the insightful interview that Adam Lambert’s one in Frontiers turned out to be. But then again, Billboard does note that the singer was traveling on a Eurostar train from Brussels to London when they spoke with her and that “her cell phone keeps dropping our call whenever her train enters a tunnel.”
One can only hope that M.I.A. views this write-up more favorably than the one the New York Times produced.
