Weingarten: That was a little hideous to me. It made a great point, but it could have done it eight other ways as well. It’s a good story, it was told well, it was visual, but it only went for the shock effect. I’m also the child of Holocaust survivors, so I’m going, “This isn’t entertainment. I know you’re trying to make a point, but you’re kind of making a bad point by putting a soundtrack to your violence.” There are people that actually watch this and go “cool!”
Waksman: I thought the M.I.A. one was amazing! It’s pretty intense. It definitely takes you by surprise, and clearly it’s meant to. The climactic moment where the kid’s body gets blown to bits….i didn’t feel like it was gratuitous. I felt it was pretty potent as a political message.
There’s something purposeful to making both the oppressor and the oppressed being more alike than not alike… It draws attention to the power relations that work in any situation like that. … I think we’re in a world situation now where that is an unfortunate fact of our political reality. We have a lot of border wars going on in different parts of the world, territories and nations and ethnic minorities are having to wage a lot of conflict over their turf, and of course, the people with the bigger guns get to have a little more say in where the boundary gets drawn than the folks who are in a less powerful position. And that to me is what the video is speaking to, in a general sense.
The M.I.A. video is really quite different from all of the others, most notably because, you don’t see her. All of the other videos are about the star artist. You see Erykah Badu through the whole video, and it’s a pretty provocative video. And it’s really interesting the message it puts forward, and at the same time, it’s all Erykah Badu. She’s getting naked through the video and there’s a lot of narcissm involved in showing yourself, but clearly it leads to something a bit more than that. And the Lady Gaga and Christina videos, these are very much about the women that are singing the songs. M.I.A.’s was so not about that.
