Activist and performer flips bird, utters obscenity in Super Bowl halftime show

posted at 11:02 am on February 6, 2012 by Howard Portnoy

On the NBF (“Nail Biting Finishes”) scale, Super Bowl XLVI LXVI was right up there. As the clock ticked to zero, a Hail Mary pass thrown by Tom Brady was batted around briefly in the end zone and nearly came down in the arms of New England tight end Rob Gronkowski.

But the real excitement, I am told, came approximately an hour earlier, during the halftime show. Since I (literally) tune out halftime shows, I wasn’t aware until this morning that an event occurred that some say rivaled Janet Jackson’s widely publicized “wardrobe malfunction” during Super Bowl XXXVIII.

This time, the buzz is over an obscene gesture and utterance by a female “performer” who goes by the stage name M.I.A. (I am proud to say that until this morning I never heard of her either). The Associated Press reports:

In front of some 110 million viewers on NBC and uncounted others online, she flipped the bird and appeared to sing, ‘I don’t give a [expletive]’ at one point, though it was hard to hear her clearly.

Several other sources have reported that the expletive was difficult to make out, though the context makes the message pretty unambiguous. A video of the relevant part of the performance is here, so judge for yourself.

NBC, the network that aired the big game, has apologized for the gesture, which it described as “completely inappropriate” and “very disappointing,” adding:

M.I.A. did not do anything similar during rehearsals and the league had no reason to believe she would pull something like that during the actual show.

But apart from the horse being out of the barn, so to speak, who does NBC think it’s kidding? Were they really unaware that M.I.A.—whose real name is Mathangi Arulpragasam—harbors rather strong political opinions? Had they not heard that she is virulently pro-Palestinian and has been accused by the Sri Lankan government (she is of Sri Lankan descent) of being a “terrorist sympathizer” and “LTTE [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam] supporter”? But why try to pigeonhole her activism when she explains it so eloquently in her own words?

I’m not coming at it as a politician, it’s my own personal experience. And I just think that that’s just what people want to put out there, you know, ‘You don’t have the right to talk about this.’ And they use me as a puppet to explain that to you, that only people who, you know, have a PhD in this s**t are allowed to talk about this. Or that only politicians are allowed to talk about politics, and that’s why we’re f**ked, because the cycle is constantly kept within that f**king framework. There aren’t more people standing up and telling their personal experience … if a normal civilian comes up and says ‘Hey, this happened in my village and I’m not happy about it’, we’re not allowed to talk about it. You have to follow this bureaucratic bulls**t to get any sort of action, and it’s all part of this cycle. Like back in the day, we had ideals of revolution and fighting back, and most of the time that s**t starts with individual people having personal relationships, these experiences. And now it’s so disconnected and the media can paint a picture for you … they make so much bureaucracy and politics, and I think taking away the personal aspects, the human aspects of these political issues is really wrong. Whether it’s the floods, or starving people in Africa, or whatever. It’s all funnelled through this channel, you really are not getting it from the horse’s mouth, you know?

I dunno—I  think the horse has spoken loudly and clearly. Shame on NBC for pretending they weren’t listening.

Of course, it’s entirely possible her “statement” was non-political. As a performer, she has after all been compared—favorably—to Igor Stravinsky.

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