but if I go to bed baby can I take you?
Maya Arulpragasam is an inspiration to me because she managed to find a balance between two worlds that are usually very hard to combine, and when you dare to try, you open yourself to a myriad of reproach and accusations of using the misery of the world for your own financial benefit,… and she did get them.
MIA rose to the status of pop star and she decided to use her now-louder voice to talk about issues that usually aren’t brought up in pop-music, this way bringing it up to the attention of people that aren’t used to be confronted to these problems.
In her movie-clip Bad Girls, MIA gives power back to women that have been deprived of it for so long, showing them doing incredible stunts in the desert wearing hijabs.
While keeping it sexy, badass and action-based, checking boxes that she knows will take her song to the mainstream and reach out to the most people, she brings up the issues that these women are confronted to in their patriarchal society while shattering the western cliché we have of these women (locked up in Harems waiting for their man and bickering with his others wives) by having them chanting together about car sex in khaki bedazzled hijabs
BAD GIRLS
In her movie clip Borders, she stages herself in the middle of actors pretending to be refugees. Using pleasing pattern, striking images, aesthetic colours,… She stands in the foreground of those images showing misery and asks questions : "What’s up with that? Your privilege what’s up with that?" She asks you what lives do you value and why?
Critics of course arose. The first one was told to be damaging, selfish, dangerous, promoting globalisation, not considerate of what really is happening…
In the second one she was accused of aesthetizing poverty and people’s misery for commercial gain and how ironic it was to work with Apple on a video criticising our system.
BORDERS
But she decided that this piece would do more good than harm and put it out there. This is also very encouraging for young artists who, like me, are terrorised of criticism and feel like they can’t put anything out there until they have made sure that it can’t be taken a certain way, or offend anyone and usually end up not putting anything out there at all, or putting something that is so heavily edited that it doesn’t end up saying anything that they wanted to talk about in the first place.
It is very scary to talk about anything social or political today as, with the omnipresence of social media, your opinion/piece is going to be broadcasted wider than ever and reactions are going to come from all angles. But it would just be too sad if people just stopped doing it. MIA’s art encourages us to do as she does while she unashamedly mixes tragic social issues with pop music and commercial aesthetic. Yes, she is making money by doing so, but she also reaches out to a 100 times more people that she would if she did it in a more low-key, and humble way.
In an interview to the Standard she talks about this issue, taking for example one of the biggest fast-fashion industry,H&M, with who she worked on a campaign for sustainability and clothes recycling “People will say that they’re greenwashing, and so on — but the fact that people can even make those comments and H&M will see those comments is a positive thing.”18 I guess that the way to do this is to weigh the good your piece will do, the damage it could do and if it seems like the ultimate result will still be for a better, than to do it. Sometimes you have to trust your judgement and people need to look at artists’ pieces with more perspective.
She also states in an article by the Times 19 that during the refugee crisis in 2015, she had the exact images in her head for a video that would be striking and get popular attention and she didn’t have the money to shoot it, so when Apple said they wanted to produce it, she didn’t think twice and went ahead with it as it was time-sensitive. Of course this was frowned-upon, but it also is incredibly refreshing from its honesty and hunger to get people to react to a current and urgent matter.
I definitely don’t approve of everything Maya does, or the way she justifies what she does, but the facts are here, she brings issues to people that would never have heard of them is they weren’t featured in a pop song and makes me, and loads of other young artists feel like we can bring our political beliefs into our work without being horrible people.
Famous artists talking about poverty and misery in their work has always been very controversial but photographer Sebastiao Salgado, who took some of the world’s most striking photographs of famine in Sahel, and violence in Rwanda says : “They don’t have a clue when they say I’m photographing misery. Misery is isolation, individualism, selfishness. And this isn’t what I have seen in Sahel. (…) Don’t think there just was suffering, there were heroic acts, dignity and solidarity”20
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18. Godwin, R. (2016) Single mother, refugee, campaigner and controversialist: meet M.I.A. London: Evening Standard.
19. Feeney, N. (2015) Why M.I.A. Made a Video About the Migrant Crisis and Put It on Apple Music. London: Time
20. Cojean, A. (2016) Sebastiao Salgado : « La solidarité, je l’ai apprise ici, en France » Paris: Le Monde
