"Maya provokes, over and over, and if some of the provocations don’t entirely work, that hardly invalidates the ones that do. Her new single, “Bad Girls,” isn’t up to much, but director Roman Gavrais makes it an uncanny combination of club swagger and rebel time-wasting in this video, a bit like a Syrian version of “Two-Lane Blacktop.” On the other side of the scale, Gavras and M.I.A. teamed up for the “Born Free” video, which was banned by YouTube (your go-to source for family-friendly material). Unless you’re living somewhere very unusual, the sight of white people being rounded up and shot is genuinely unsettling and not trivial, not when the U.S. is expanding its ability to detain people indefinitely and innocent people have been detained and tortured at Guantánamo Bay. Remind me why we’re talking about a middle finger again? I’m just sorry Maya apologized."
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Sasha Frere-Jones, “M.I.A. shouldn’t have apologized” (via semipoplife)
I just got back from two weeks in Italy and was half-asleep by the halftime show (which is at like 1 AM in London), and I was basically so excited M.I.A. was on the Superbowl (because remembering M.I.A. is actually famous, not just famous among people who read Pitchfork always gives me hope for the world) I barely noticed that she swore and gave America the finger, and it did not really occur to me that people would make a big deal of this?
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