M.I.A. mentioned the gunshot sound effects were added because its something she’s familiar with.

“If you’re an immigrant you left somewhere and most of the time you fled a war. Gun sounds are a part of our culture as an everyday thing. If you’ve been exposed to gunfights and violence and bombs and war then I can use those sounds backing my thoughts, ya know? Look, I’ve been shot at so I’m quite comfortable with gunshot sounds. If you have a problem with it, go and talk to the people who were shooting at me.”

In 2018, NPR ranked this as the greatest song by a female or nonbinary artist in the 21st century, saying:

This runaway hit was hardly Maya Arulpragasam’s first song about the dual consciousness and dissonance of being a refugee seeking to make sense in a hostile foreign culture, but it proved the most salient. Its immortal chorus, a gloriously acerbic flip on Wreckx-N-Effect’s ‘Rumpshaker,’ posited that nothing’s more thuggish than Western capitalist expansion, and her languorous vocal operated as both narrator and indicter, as she sang, heavy-lidded and purposely pitchy, about her own survivalist swagger. Written around the time she said the U.S. was giving her visa issues in 2006 but stamped with a years-long shelf life, ironically ‘Paper Planes’ proffered her biggest platform yet: a spot on the 2009 Grammys where she performed with JAY-Z and T.I., nine months pregnant, proving that the immigrant hustle never ceases. It brought her music to the very mass American audience she was critiquing, a central tension within M.I.A.’s oeuvre that has kept her music so vital. She understood that colonization was the antagonist, capitalism was the vessel, and that she could subvert them both to get her point across. ‘Paper Planes’ made M.I.A. famous, but more significantly, it solidified her as a biting analyst willing to use her pop stardom to expose the flaws in the very system of pop stardom itself — an uncomfortable outsider and iconoclast whose incongruities are as fascinating as her brilliant music.