Music And Message

If you're up for it, here's the video for M.I.A.'s track "Born Free".



Good luck trying to find this on YouTube, as Google had it buried, but not deleted.

The first time I watched this, I was immediately reminded of GaGa's video for "Telephone". Not because these two tracks are similar in style and delivery - this track sounds a bit more like Atari Teenage Riot than anything else that's out today - but because it appeared that M.I.A. and director Romain Gavras were trying to outdo GaGa and Jonas Akerlund. But after multiple viewings, I think I get the point, although it's forced and a bit overreaching at times.

Rather than wearing an evening gown fashioned out of hairless lemurs and parading around with a chorus line of post-op transsexuals, M.I.A. has opted to not appear in her video. Instead, the director takes you along for a ride with police officers rounding up red-heads. That's right, The Ginger Cleansing.

Although the subject, given the context of our times, is rather obvious, the overriding "message" - if there really is one - does tend to get blurred and obscured by the very realistic violence contained within the clip. For anyone that may not get it, and it's pretty easy to get, it's about immigration and how America handles it and could potentially handle it.

Bare with me, but just take into consideration recent events and how conservatives look at immigration. Could this be any more blatant of an example of how far-right conservative ideology views handling illegal immigrants in our country? Granted, it's over the top and one could argue that it rightfully should be. The only problem that I have with the video is that it tends to fall into too much of a "let's shock you just for the sake of shocking you" point of view on a few occasions.

The primary aspect of this clip that makes it powerful is that it has this documentary feel to it - though the prototypical MTV-esque shots tend to dovetail throughout the piece. It's this type of realism that is missing from many videos today. By and large, they are nothing more than overtly gimmicky piece of digital mish-mash that does nothing but liter the pop culture landscape.

And while some will claim that this is some sort of fever-dream of Eric Cartman's come to life, I think it provides some interesting insight into the mind of the fringe-conservative movement. Not in-so-much as they would actually perpetrate such actions ( at least one would hope ) but it's purely because their inflammatory rhetoric tends to conjure images like these.

In the end, the video for Born Free isn't spectacular in every fashion, and that's purely due to the fact that it does try too hard at times. I think that, given some better editing and slashing of a few select clips, this would be a more powerful video. Not only that, but removing it from the genre of popular music would most certainly lend more of an air of credibility to it's intended meaning. After all, nothing says pre-packaged clap-trap like modern, corporate, pop. Thankfully, M.I.A. has at least tried to move away from that.