M.I.A gets booed on stage at Kid Cudi concert for yelling 'disgusting' statement on immigration
Topics: Music, Politics, Immigration, Republicans
Thomas Bamford
Featured Image Credit: Marc Grimwade/WireImage
Topics: Music, Politics, Immigration, Republicans
Once hailed as the future of music, M.I.A has someone become the artist most committed to torching her own legacy, and her latest stunt at a Kid Cudi show in Dallas might be her most spectacular act of self-sabotage yet.
The British Sri Lankan rapper. born Mathangi Arulpragasam, was performing as a support act on Kid Cudi's Rebel Ragers Tour when she decided to use her set for a political monologue that went down as well as you'd expect in a packed amphitheatre full of people who paid to hear Pursuit of Happiness, not a TED Talk.
M.I.A told the crowd she couldn't perform her 2010 track 'Illegal', a song literally about the dehumanisation of migrants and refugees, because "there's probably one in the crowd."
She then doubled down, telling the audience she "never thought I'd be cancelled for being a Republican voter."
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You can check out the video on Reddit here.
One Tik-Tok users posted that she was "The worst warm up act of all time."
The crowd's response was immediate: boos by the bucketful.
The irony was almost too thick to cut through. 'Illegal', was written from the perspective of a refugee fleeing violence and persecution, a subject M.I.A knows intimately, having grown up in London as the child of Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka, living through genuine poverty and racism.
Using that song as a punchline just seems grim.
There was a time when M.I.A was genuinely one of the most exciting artists on the planet. Her debut album Arular was a landmark record, a collision of dancehall, punk, baile funk and Tamil music that made the rest of pop sound timid by comparison.
'Paper Planes' scored her a Grammy nomination and Slumdog Millionaire got her an Oscar nod.
Was was billed by many to be the next Madonna, except more interesting and way less corporate, not being afraid of broaching difficult topics in her music.
Instead, the last decade has been a slow drift from visionary to someone who seeks controversy at every turn.
Controversial X posts about the Coronavirus vaccine, her pro-republican stance alienating her core fanbase and setting up a fashion line that protects against 5G. And now this.
For an artist who built her entire career on solidarity with the marginalised, her political fire has begun to point in increasingly strange directions.
Cracking wise about undocumented immigrants just seems a case of punching down.