Born Free (MIA song)
| Born Free | |
|---|---|
| MIA | |
| publication | April 23, 2010 |
| length | 4:13 |
| Genre (s) | Alternative rock , electro punk |
| Author (s) | Maya Arulpragasam, Martin Rev |
| album | Maya |
Born Free is the title of a song by the singer MIA . The song gained greater fame because of the controversial music video . The nine-minute video was directed by Frenchman Romain Gavras , the son of director Costa-Gavras .
song
Born Free was the first single from the third MIA album Maya . It was released on the Internet as a download on April 23, 2010, about a month and a half before the album. The song includes a sample of the song Ghost Rider by the band Suicide , which appeared on the band's self-titled debut album in 1977 .
The title "Born Free" is an allusion to Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ( "All people are born free and equal in dignity and rights." )
The single debuted at # 156 in the UK's unofficial Top 200, and at # 58 in Sweden; in most other countries it missed a chart entry.
Video
content
The action begins in the morning in a major US city. A unit of heavily armed police officers drives into a prefabricated building with a police bus and a black patrol car . Regardless of the civilian population, the officers break into the multi-party building and into two locked apartments. In an apartment they drag a pair of lovers - a corpulent older man and a woman of about the same age - who are having sex - out of bed; In a second apartment, the officers beat a man who is currently using drugs . They finally find what they are looking for in a third apartment: the officers drag a young person out from behind the curtain of a bathtub and push him down the stairs. Once at the bottom, he is pushed into the waiting police bus, where others, all male youths and children, are sitting. What they all have in common at first glance is the fact that each of the boys has red hair. The police bus starts moving. On the way, the parade is attacked with stones by a group of hooded boys, also red-haired; however, the officials ignore them. The police bus is driven into the desert in front of the city. Here the boys in the bus are pushed out of the vehicle with bumps. They are now told to run, but initially they do not. To demonstrate the seriousness of the order, a policeman pulls out a gun and shoots a 12-year-old boy in the head. The remaining boys begin to run and soon find that they are being chased through a minefield . While the mines explode below them, a jeep with armed policemen drives next to them, who mow down the boys with machine gun salvos. While a boy is being torn to pieces by a mine, the boy who was found in the bathtub that morning is beaten to death by police officers. At the end of the film, all the boys are dead.
background
“Too brutal” and “too naked” - with this reason, YouTube blocked the video, which was only designed for people aged 18 and over, from minors at the end of April 2010. The two extremely brutal shots (the head shot and the boy's explosion through the mine) have also been shortened. MIA itself justified the design and the content of the video in an interview with the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag : “The concept of terrorism has been perverted in recent years. I found a list of characteristics on the internet that define a terrorist. Depending on the interpretation, anyone can have the bad luck to be considered a terrorist. "
Reviews
“Now it doesn't happen very often that a video is as oppressive as the nine-minute orgy of violence that Romain Gavras staged around the new single" Born Free "[...]. [...] The provocation is certainly shamelessly calculating. YouTube had no choice but to block the video. [...] That is why the symbolic power of this act of censorship is similarly clumsy, but also as effective as the message of racism and the arbitrariness of the American state in the video. "
“The fact that the clip is so shocking is not primarily due to particularly brutal individual scenes - very little blood flows. What is more terrifying is the open racism, the arbitrariness of hatred, the immediacy of the violence and the realistic representation. It shows immediately what is everyday life in many parts of the world: That soldiers terrorize ethnic minorities, trample on their civil rights, harass them, kill them - including soldiers of the supposedly good. "
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://vimeo.com/11219730 Music video MIA Born Free - vimeo.com
- ↑ Now speaks the scandal clip "victim" ( Memento from May 7, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Anyone Can Be Unlucky to Be a Terrorist , die Welt, February 2, 2010, accessed December 7, 2012
- ↑ YouTube blocks MIA video - Provocation follows censorship , Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 21, 2010, accessed on December 7, 2012
- ^ Hatz auf Rothaarige , Basler Zeitung, April 27, 2010, accessed on December 7, 2012