M.I.A. Evokes Gulf Cool In "Bad Girls" Video

Featured alongside Nicki Minaj on Madonna's "Give Me All Your Luvin'," which you may watched the trio Sunday at the Super Bowl halftime show, M.I.A., aka Maya Arulpragasam, has also premiered the new music video via Noisey for her next single "Bad Girls," a remix of the "Vicki Leekx" track, and will be the first single from the Sri Lankan-British artist's upcoming fourth studio album, expected to be released this summer.
The midtempo worldbeat rap ballad, "Bad Girls" incorporates Middle Eastern and Western musical influences and instrumentation. M.I.A. stepped up to the role of hustleress in the song. The 36-year-old rapper brings fast cars and "bad girls" to the Moroccan dessert for the accompanying new video, which features Arabic street racers, ghost riders, desert bonfires, and women in blinged-out burkas touting semi-automatics. The flashy video lives up to song's provocative lyrics, which include the classic, "Live fast, die young, bad girls do it well."
Shot in Ouarzazate, Morocco, home to one of the world's largest film studios over four days and behind by director Romain Gavras. Set to M.I.A.'s Punjabi-laced chill-banger, "Bad Girls" is a lady gangsta fantasy but one that plays off very real ingredients from life in the Middle East. There's crumbled architecture, sustained over years of attack; smouldering oil tankards; young men in kaffiyeh, standing around dangerously bored; mysterious women covered from head to toe, with only their kohl-lined eyes flashing out.
"It was dope to have so many people from so many different backgrounds speaking so many different languages come together to create something that we believed in," says M.I.A. about the video. The video is meant to evoke a Persian Gulf landscape – dusty, baked, semi-apocalpytic and in the hands of M.I.A. and Gavras, utterly hard-core. It's an interesting take on culture, blending lyrics about having sex in cars with Americanized imagery of Moroccan culture, but it's definitely not for the easily offended. The action-packed video is without a doubt a visual stampede of insane stunts and strange dance moves.