Born Free

M.I.A does it again. Long known for incorporating sociological and political themes and well-written, introspection-heavy lyrics into her otherwise buoyantly surging, driving, and melodic pop music, the first single and video pulled from the UK genre-smasher takes all that to new levels. The video below is, without a doubt, not safe for work unless you're into that field. Otherwise, the song itself is spotlessly clean. 

Obviously the video provokes more questions than it answers, as all good art should. Without going into a whole bunch of biographical information on M.I.A (whose real name is Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam and whose family's native country is the politically-fractured Sri Lanka, in which she spent some of her youth), the song and the video alone place its crosshairs on what seems to be an all-too-human tendency to erect barricades between fellow homo sapiens, to not only purposefully but cruelly delineate lines of normalcy and otherness between ourselves as an entire race of people. To say "we are right" and "that is wrong." The use of redheads as the symbol for this otherness is wry as well as terrifying. Of course all sorts of examples come to mind when watching the video: the Shoa, American slavery, genocides in South America, in early North America, Columbus' entire life, the Tamil struggle in M.I.A's own native Sri Lanka, present day Darfur. Even the Japanese-American internment here in the US. Few countries have been immune to this. The list of genocides and similarly-based oppression is, sadly, as long as time itself. Even Ireland, amongst Catholics and Protestants, the need to demarcate between acceptable and unacceptable--whatever that may end up being--seems integral. And yes, you can be sure that there are direct parallels to the recent immigration law passed in Arizona in which failure to carry identification is now a crime and those "suspected" of being in the country illegally are fair game to be arrested, detained. I'm not sure what kind of criteria is going to be used to constitute the basis of this round-up policy but it sure as shit doesn't sound empirical. How does an official decide someone "looks" like an illegal immigrant? 

So the question I've heard is what are we, then, to make of M.I.A.'s deliberately graphic video? What answers does the video provide? None. It's exposing. This is the prime difference between politics and art. Politics attempts to profess sagacity on topics whether it has this or not, a hardheaded surety which can often lead to violent acts such as this; art, on the other hand, asks questions, investigates, takes a camera with which it peers into the dark and murky unknown and attempts not to solve the confusion but show it, let those haunting questions and the accompanying images linger--because if they are done right they do all the work. There's a certain absurdity here, horrifying no less, but an absurdity that dominates, which makes the actions of these soldiers all the more terrifying. And still, it's an absurdity that doesn't seem so far. A ridiculousness that we seemed predisposed to laugh at in theory but somehow know we are every bit capable of such monstrosity unless we get on our feet and keep it from happening.