If you've been connected to the internet recently you have no doubt heard about M.I.A. for one of, or probably all of, three big reasons; Firstly, on the 2nd of February she unveiled her new video, directed by renowned (and equally controversial) French director Romain Gavras, via the new Vice youtube channel, Noisey. It depicts a remote Gulf desert location of stunt driving women in leopard print burkas and gun toting breakdancing Arab males in Kaffiyeh head dress, while burning oil wells fume in the background and cars drift on two wheels, screeching rubber across tarmac. Since is release the video has been garnering around a million hits a day and the mirror upload on her Vevo channel is doing similarly well, and like her last outing with Gavras, the uber violent, allegorical Born Free, people can't stop reacting to the video in many different ways. Some people find the video comical, others find it offensive, it has been accused of exoticism, using Arabs for cultural decoration. However, given M.I.A.'s own background this is unlikely. Very few people in the west had previously been aware of the phenomenon of Arab stunt driving, after all, they are all terrorists right? That's all you see of the arab world in the news, endless war or massive street uprisings, always backed by bloodshed, gunshots and military violence. M.I.A. has shown a different side to Arab culture, and stunt driving is a real past time enjoyed by many males in Gulf countries, known as Tagwalah or Tafheet, with the two wheel stunt specifically called Shaal. Search on youtube and you will find dozens of amateur videos of said stunts, proof that M.I.A.'s video is no fictional creation, as many commenters have accused. It can also be seen as a very clear statement about US ally Saudi Arabia's discriminatory driving laws that forbid women from sitting behind the wheel. Plus it remains that if this video had been set in America for example, no one would be saying, or thinking, very much about it at all, yet the very fact that her choosing to set it in the Arab world and cast it with middle eastern people has got the public and media so worked up, says so much more about our perceptions and cultural prejudice than it ever could about her.
And that brings us nicely onto the second point. The other reason you've probably heard about M.I.A. is because of her 'stunt' at the Super Bowl on saturday night. While onstage with Madonna to perform her role alongside Nicki Minaj on their collaborative track Gimme All Your Luvin', M.I.A raised her middle finger in place of saying "shit" as the song lyrics suggest. This has sent the internet and media alight with 'controversy' despite the fact that the offending gesture was filmed in a wide shot and barely noticeable (even in HD) due to it lasting a fraction of a second. And it is indeed true that if the media hadn't created such a shit storm about it, most of the 110 million people watching probably didn't even notice it. Yet controversy it has caused, with those bizarre parental family values TV lobbyist groups you always hear about up in arms in particular. It seems odd that these people have no problem with the fact that at the very moment M.I.A.'s middle finger was held aloft, a veritable army of faceless, hyper sexualised women were thrusting their barely concealed vaginas into the air like a sea of automated sex, yet the millisecond's image of a woman's finger has them all wetting themselves with outrage. It's a sad state of affairs if this sort of thing is considered offensive in the world of television, which is usually saturated with images of sex, violence, consumerism and obscenity. Children are constantly exposed to warping images in everything from the news to adverts yet the parent groups choose this to rally against. There are rumours she may have to pay a fine, which echoes the past super bowl controversy in which Justin Timberlake ripped open Janet Jackson's top, briefly exposing her breast. Jackson was slapped with nearly half a million dollars worth of fines despite it not actually being her fault, yet these were eventually dropped. Hopefully M.I.A. won't be fined for the same reason, there is a delay from the recording to the live broadcast and the millisecond of finger should have been cut. Apparently Madonna is furious about the gesture and is rumoured to have said she will never work with M.I.A. again, which if true, makes Madonna look very petty. She should stand by M.I.A., after all, it was Madonna's idea to get her up on stage to say the line "I don't give a shit" in front of millions of apparently very sensitive viewers. Remember when it was Madonna who used to cause controversy? Now, in the words of Jimmy Kimmel recently, "she's outsourcing it to foreigners".
Over ten years ago you would be hard pressed to find a single photo of Eminem (for example) in which he didn't have both of his middle fingers up, and he was a hugely succesful pop artist with children, much more so than M.I.A., who is more popular with teenagers, students and 20/30somethings. Yet while Eminem caused his fair share of controversy too, he is white and male and M.I.A. is female and from some weird country most of these people probably haven't even heard of. Just looking at the video and comment responses on youtube and news sites shows a genuinely shocking array of racist and sexist slurs. Which again, says a lot more about our society than it does about her. And this is what M.I.A. has always been really good at. Her unconventional approach to pop music and video, using political or ethnic images and radical groundbreaking ghetto sounds, has always succeeded in letting people's reactions do all the hard work. The fact her father was a Tamil rebel fighter when the Western backed Sinhalese government were wiping out Tamil people, resulting in her being banned from entering America, says more about America than it does about her. Just like the way the reaction to her finger waving says more about our superficial media and public blindness than it does about, er, middle fingers...
Tens of millions of Americans are struggling beneath the poverty line in what is supposed to be the most propserous nation in the land, where student protesters are being shot at, pepper sprayed and scattered with tear gas, while the government is readying itself to waste yet more millions on another war, and people care more about the Super Bowl, whining on about abortion rights or banning gay marriage? Well that definitely deserves a middle finger.
The third reason you may have heard about her is that she is rumoured to be breaking up with her fiancée, and this is a story the press have pounced on in the wake of her Super Bowl controversy in a desperate attempt to stir up hatred, which again, paints a pretty dire picture of our culture, in which we would rather discuss an artist's private life or make her a pariah because of a split second hand gesture, than discuss the social issues highlighted by her art.
