Born Free: Political Brutality

The message against oppression in the music video/short film for M.I.A.'s new song has the nuance of a sledgehammer.

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

A two-vehicle convoy speeds through deserted streets in the early morning light: in front, an armoured truck, carrying paramilitary forces (police? army?), the American flag on their sleeves; behind comes a bus, carrying unknown passengers. The truck stops outside a run-down tenement building, paramilitaries pour out of the rear doors. On the soundtrack, electronically reproduced siren-like waves and edgy pulses give way to an ominous, constantly repeated riff, sampled from “Ghost Rider” by the influential 1970s electo-punk duo Suicide, while a woman with an English accent raps in almost conversational lines that appear to have very little to do with the action on the screen.

In a scene that might come from a video game, we follow the men as they rampage through the building (the assault is as much aural as visual), brutalizing residents as they go, until they capture a young man with short red hair and a wispy beard. He is dragged, resisting, to the bus and forced on board, at which point we discover that all of the other passengers who aren’t police/army/whatever are also red-haired boys and young men.

The convoy leaves the city, driving into the desert until it pulls in to some kind of encampment. The young men are herded off the bus, all the time subject to constant verbal abuse, as well as physical brutality, from their captors. They are lined up and instructed to start running. When no one moves, a guard aims his pistol and shoots a young boy with red curls in the head. The others start running, one veering off to the right, pursued by two guards. As they run, explosions begin – presumably landmines – and, one by one, they are killed. As the video nears its end, the young man who had run off course stumbles and is caught by the chasing guards who proceed to beat him to death with their nightsticks. Meanwhile, the last of the runners is blown to pieces before our eyes; bits of arms, legs, torso arc in slow motion out of the flames and smoke before falling to the ground.

This is the short film Born Free, which has sent the mediascape all a-twitter in the last few days. It is advertised as the music video for a new song by the hip-hop/dancehall/world music artist M.I.A. The song “Born Free,” one of the tracks from her new album to be released in June, was ostensibly leaked on April 23. A few days later, the video was posted on M.I.A.’s website and on YouTube. As a result of viewer complaints, the latter initially pulled it, citing “gratuitous violence,” prompting M.I.A. to go ballistic against her record company, only to retract her accusations when she realized that YouTube, and not Universal Music Group, had been responsible for withdrawing the video. Not that it mattered, because the unexpurgated version was available on the artist’s own website and a number of other sites as well. YouTube subsequently restored the full version, but only for adult viewers (or, at least, those viewers who declare themselves to be adults when they sign up).

Some background may be required here. “M.I.A.,” short for “missing in action,” is the musical persona of Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam, born in 1975 in Hounslow, a suburb of west London, England, of Sri Lankan Tamil parents. Her father, Arular, was a supporter of the Tamil separatists in the civil war that divided the former British colony of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, for some 33 years until the majority Singhalese military captured the last remaining Tamil strongholds in May 2009. She has been an outspoken advocate of the Tamil cause.

After two well-received albums, Arular (2005) and Kala (2007), named respectively for her father and her mother, M.I.A. took a break from touring and recording to start a family. She now lives in Brooklyn with her fiancé, Benjamin Bronfman, and their fourteen-month-old son. His surname may be familiar to Canadian readers – Benjamin is the son of Edgar Bronfman, Jr., a member of the famous Bronfman family of Montreal, founders of the Seagram liquor empire. Edgar, Jr., M.I.A’s father-in-common-law, once headed Vivendi-Universal, the mega-corporation which owns her record label; now he’s head of Warner Music Group, another of the so-called “Big 4” corporations that control much of the (legal) sale of popular music around the world.

Maya/M.I.A. has expressed her support, in music and action, for ethnic and religious minorities seeking autonomy from more powerful neighbours and, more generally, for the peoples of the developing world in their struggles against cultural, economic, and military imperialism. Not that any of this is apparent in the song “Born Free,” which – at first listening – is “about” dead-end jobs, unsatisfactory relationships, living for today because tomorrow doesn’t offer anything better (“I don’t wanna live for tomorrow/I push my life today/I throw this in your face when I see you/I got something to say … /I was born free …”).

The nine-minute-long Born Free is not so much a music video as it is a short film which uses the song as part, but only part, of its soundtrack. Directed by Romain Gavras, son of the left-wing Greek filmmaker Constantinos Costa-Gavras (director of Z, State of Siege, and Missing, among others), Born Free is a direct assault on racial profiling, on ethnic cleansing, on Homeland Security and the War on Terror, on the new anti-immigrant law in Arizona, on any conflict in which an ethnic or religious minority faces oppression. Scenes from the film directly invoke Northern Ireland and Palestine, although one assumes that the Tamils were not far from the minds of M.I.A. or Gavras.

In selecting redheads as his persecuted and/or resistant minority, Gavras suggests that discriminatory laws, racism, or state oppression can target any group in society. Of course, Randy Newman made the same point much more succinctly, more humorously, and likely with more lasting effect, in his 1977 song, “Short People”. Unfortunately, some listeners didn’t grasp the intended irony in Newman’s song (for example, there was an unsuccessful bill introduced in the Maryland legislature to ban the song from radio play).

There is little chance that the message behind Gavras’s short film will be misunderstood – some viewers might not “get it,” but at least they won’t get it wrong, simply because it hits them over the head like a sledgehammer. The graphic language and physical brutality are wearing, which may be the point, but I found the unrelenting intensity tedious after a while. There is no nuance, no subtlety in this piece. I doubt that many will view it more than once, but it has probably served its purpose: it has given enormous advance publicity to M.I.A.’s forthcoming album and to Gavras who, not entirely coincidentally, has been working on a feature film provisionally called (can you guess?) Redheads.