To Remember: M.I.A. Born Free
Romain Gavras’ nine minute video for MIA’s latest single ‘Born Free’ is getting a lot of attention. The video is very graphic, contains sex and a lot of violence against redheaded people (and that is an official warning:):
M.I.A – “Born Free” from Paradoxal Inc on Vimeo.
The presenting people with red hair to be persecuted pertains to gingerism; hateful or exoticizing attitudes towards people with read hair:
Gingerism » Sociological Images
Gingerism appears to be ongoing, especially in Britain. Men and boys appear to be more frequent targets than women and girls, who at least are sometimes seen as uniquely beautiful. A recent series of verbal and physical attacks is nicely documented at Wikipedia. They include a stabbing, a family who has had to move twice after their children were bullied, a woman who won a sexual harassment suit after being targeted for her red hair, and a boy who committed suicide after being teased relentlessly.
Gingerism may be related to the long-standing antagonism between Britain and Ireland; discrimination against the Irish by the British crossed the Atlantic with early Americans. As late as the 1800s the Irish were demeaned, negatively stereotyped, and compared with apes in the United States.
This video can be seen as a prelude to Gavras’ directorial debut Redheads. Earlier MIA’s song Paper Planes featured in Slum-dog millionaire and the Pineapple Express. MIA puts herself in a tradition of ‘rebel music’ in an artistic and political sense of the term. That song being ‘satire’ according to MIA, this one, Born Free, seems to be harder to classify. The song Born Free consists of drum samples, a fading airhorn, and not to forget a large part of Suicide’s “Ghost Rider. There seems to be no structure, no development in the entire music of the song, it is just a mix of sounds apparently without any consistent message. M.I.A. uses the classic and often so obvious boasting style of rappers and Jamaican dance-hall to shout slogans that also do not seem very consistent. Nevertheless, in my opinion, it sounds good and it resonates very well with the video. And put together they stir debate:
Does M.I.A.’s genocide video go too far? – Music News: Artists. Songs. Videos – Salon.com
The question is — does it go too far? It’s easy to get shock value out of sexual explicitness, while blowing people up generally remains as commonplace as this week’s latest video game. The unrelenting brutality in “Born Free,” however, is no shoot-’em-up romp. M.I.A. has built a career on making music that’s as outspoken as it is danceable, and she comes by her politics honestly, as the daughter of a Tamil revolutionary whose early years were marked by civil war. But her nine-minute opus far exceeds the unnerving but mostly implied violence of notorious classics like Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” or Eminem’s “Stan.” In a spring that’s also brought us Lady Gaga’s chained-heat pastiche “Telephone” and Erykah Badu’s nudity and assassination-dappled “Window Seat,” it would appear the ladies are owning it on the envelope-pushing front.
“Born Free” is hard to watch, and not what anyone could call entertaining. The song, by the way, isn’t M.I.A.’s best. But it’s also undeniably powerful, a lurid parable on the systematic ethnic cleansing that goes on all over the world. There’s a moment in it that made me gasp as much as anything in “The Hurt Locker” and “Waltz With Bashir.” And to say that the climax evokes a haunting scene in Jean-Pierre Melville’s brilliant “Army of Shadows” is a testament to its gut-wrenching effectiveness. When was the last time a music video made you feel something? When was the last time it made you think?
Or is it, as Sunny at Pickled Politics seems to imply, too clean and just meant as a way to create a new platform for M.I.A.? Also in the next article at CNN this is stated:
M.I.A. music video elicits strong online response – CNN.com
“M.I.A. is a provocateur and someone who tries to rile people up in a variety of ways,” said Saul Austerlitz, author of “Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes.”
“I think one of the main routes that she takes to that end is the political, and this video has a lot of political resonances, things like Guantanamo, the Iraqi insurgency and the Taliban all sort of jumbled together and rebranded.”
M.I.A. is I think however more than a provocateur. She is also a political activist who sometimes uses Tamil Tigers symbols in her songs. This has led to accusations of her supporting terrorism:Pitchfork: M.I.A. Responds to Pro-Terrorism Accusations
His argument, in brief: because M.I.A. uses the image of the tiger, writes lyrics that address violence, and has a father known to be part of the Tamil Tigers organization (formally: the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE), she’s clearly promoting the aims of that organization through her art and music. As DeLon raps, “You know what the tiger represents: the death of the innocent.”
If all that isn’t pointed enough, check out DeLon’s hijacking of the chorus: “All she wanna do is [sound of four gunshots] straight to my head.” His conclusion is even more blunt: M.I.A. “want[s] war.”
Does she use terrorism as a marketing instrument and/or does she support the Tamil Tigers (who among other things invented contemporary suicide bombing)? And if so, does it matter given the predicaments of Tamils at Sri Lanka? In a statement she says the following:
Pitchfork: M.I.A. Responds to Sri Lanka Terrorist Accusations Once Again
But M.I.A.’s never publicly thrown her support behind the Tamil Tigers. Most of her statements lately have been about the thousands of civilians caught in the crossfire between the government and the Tigers. By most accounts, the army and the Tigers have both acted with reckless disregard for human life, but the government’s been blaming every atrocity on the Tigers and deflecting any responsibility whatsoever. As she said in a statement back in August, “I don’t support terrorism and never have. As a Sri Lankan that fled war and bombings, my music is the voice of the civilian refugee.”
And also:
Genocide, Violence and Oppression: Alive and Kicking, Says M.I.A.
Unsurprisingly she is extremely vocal about her political views. She has routinely denounced the war in Sri Lanka and its human rights abuses against Tamils, as well as the UN’s handling of the situation. She additionally spoke out against President Bush’s “War on Terror,” commenting, “You can’t separate the world into two parts like that, good and evil. Terrorism is a method, but America has successfully tied all these pockets of independence, struggles, revolutions, and extremists into one big notion of terrorism.”
The video also uses a slogan of the Irish Republican Army (IRA): Our day will come.
Whatever it may be (I leave that up to my readers) with Salon.com I see the video as an example of the hard reality of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Salon.com is right compare it with Eminem’s Stan or the beautiful Jeremy from Pearl Jam. In these songs the violence is more subtle and implicit but still very much there. Born Free, although in my opinion far from the best of M.I.A., is much more unnerving and hard to watch, also reminding us of films like a Clockwork Orange or Platoon. Born Free is raw in that it does not cover up reality but pushes it in our face. As such I think the video is appropriate for today and tomorrow when in the Netherlands we have Remembrance Day (to remember all the people died in World War II) and Freedom Day (to remember the day the Netherlands was liberated from Nazi occupation and to celebrate freedom).
Red hair and rembrance day also brings about a particular Dutch link: the girl with the red hair. This young woman, Jannetje Johanna Schaft AKA Hannie Schaft, was born in the city of Haarlem and got involved with the communist resistance during World War II. As one of the few women she was involved in what today no doubt would be called acts of terrorism: sabotage and assassination. After one such action she was reported to the German officials as ‘the girl with the red hair’. At the end of the war she was arrested (by a German and Dutch policeman) and after the Germans discovered her identity she was brought to the sand dunes at Overveen and executed (a somewhat similar background features in the Born Free video). After the war Hannie Schaft emerges as a symbol of Dutch resistance and more in particular of female resistance. However, because Hannie Schaft was a communist, after a few years (in the beginning of the Cold War) and because of the fear of the ‘red danger’ the annual commemoration of Hannie Schaft’s execution was forbidden. People wanting to bring flowers to her grave were stopped by police, soldiers and tanks with the instruction that it was allowed to shoot. Only one man managed to bring the flowers to her grave; he was arrested.
The Born Free video is an excellent political commentary as Kate Walton points out. and by using an (American?) village it brings the reality of persecution into our world. The round up in the beginning of the video makes clear that, even though one is searching for people with red hair, such politics invades everyone’s lives and makes us think about how we should react to it. The red heads stick out in an environment that otherwise seems dull and grey which makes them easy targets. Walton also states that it is not clear why red-headed people are singled out; or more in particular why red-headed young men are singled out: there are no red-headed women or old people in the film. Leaving out the reasons for their arrest is one of the clever things in the video. You probably know this saying when it comes to privacy invasion by security cameras and phone tapping and so on: No problem, I have nothing to hide. But it is not you who decides if you have anything to hide; it is the state institutions who decide if and what you have to hide and why you are singled out. There is also a double layer: we see as viewers of the video see red-headed people singled out. But we don’t know if that is the reason. We can only focus on what we see: a bus filled with people who have red hair. Making us believe that there is something wrong with this people and the only common denominator we see is red hair. So there is something wrong with red-headed people? That is partly how stereotypes and prejudice becomes engraved in our minds. Yet, of course, we find it ridiculouos to persecute people because they have red hair and that is part of the brilliance as Walton states. We now find persecuting Jews unimaginable too but it happened because political entrepeneurs used particular markers for political ends. Maybe one of the things that makes us uncomfortable is also the very fact that with her political commentary M.I.A lends a voice to people who have no access to the hegemonic power structures and are somehow perceived to be strange, outsiders, dangerous, threatening order and the normal state of affairs. And you know what? You can dance on it too!