M.I.A. And The Real ‘Bad Girls’
By Guest Contributor Thanu Yakupitiyage, cross-posted from Hyphen Magazine
Courtesy of TheGrio.com
By now pretty much everyone knows M.I.A. as the bad girl who flipped off the Super Bowl halftime camera. But her fans are more preoccupied with her new music video, “Bad Girls”, in which BMWs and Mercedes Benzes race in a desert we presume to be in the Middle East, tires burn in nameless oil states, Bedouin-styled men ride stallions à la Casablanca, brown rebel-types tote guns, and backup dancers appear in not-quite-accurate hipsterized niqab and hijab.
I’ve watched the video dozens of times. I love the scenes of Oakland-style “ghost ridin’ the whip,” and I keep rewinding to the highway stuntmen skidding while gripping the doors of the speeding car at 2’55”. Yet I’m still left wondering how to make sense of “Bad Girls.”
I’ve always been drawn to the art of M.I.A.–a Sri Lankan Tamil raised in England. When I first saw her “Galang” video back in 2005, I was awestruck: to have a visible Sri Lankan in Western popular culture seemed implausible. What struck me about M.I.A. early on is that she often positioned herself in relation to the Global South–in videos emphasizing dance (i.e., “Bird Flu,” filmed in South India near Sri Lankan Tamil refugee camps; “Bucky Done Gun” in Brazil; and “Boyz” in Jamaica) or highlighting immigrant enclaves in the West (think “Paper Planes” in Brooklyn). The new video is much less clear in intent.
On Facebook and Twitter, there’s hot debate over “Bad Girls.” Many absolutely love the video, proclaiming it to be M.I.A’s big comeback, while others remain unsure. Some see it as embodying resistance to the norm, while others don’t think it resists enough.
For my part, I’m taken in but left feeling uneasy. What’s missing is the present context of North Africa and the Middle East; it’s been a year since the revolution that toppled Tunisia’s Ben Ali, Egypt’s #Jan25 call that led to the ousting of Hosni Mubarak, the Libyan uprising against Muammar Qaddafi, and ongoing struggles for political justice in Syria and Yemen. Images, videos, and news reports of the region have shown inspiring scenes of resistance.
Courtesy of Al Jazeera
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