Hip-hop’s agent provocateur M.I.A has announced she will no longer be playing the inaugural Afropunk festival in London in September.
The announcement follows a wave of backlash and even threats to boycott the festival for comments the 40-year-old singer made earlier this year about the Black Lives Matter movement.
In an interview with ES Magazine back in April, M.I.A commented on Beyonce’s Superbowl halftime show (without even having seen it!), suggesting that Black Lives Matter and the issue of violence against blacks had gained too much visibility,at the expense of other marginalized groups.
“It’s interesting that in America the problem you’re allowed to talk about is Black Lives Matter. It’s not a new thing to me — it’s what Lauryn Hill was saying in the 1990s, or Public Enemy in the 1980s,” M.I.A. said in the interview. “Is Beyoncé or Kendrick Lamar going to say Muslim Lives Matter? Or Syrian Lives Matter? Or this kid in Pakistan matters? That’s a more interesting question. You can’t ask it on a song that’s on Apple, you cannot ask it on an American TV programme, you cannot create that tag on Twitter, Michelle Obama is not going to hump you back.”
Everyone knows no one messes with the Bey Hive. But M.I.A apparently didn’t get the memo.
Right after the interview was published, her comments were singled out for being — you guessed it — racist and anti-black. The Anglo-Sri Lankan rapper, known for her political activism (she’s a vocal refugee advocate, and the daughter of a Tamil separatist) tried to clarify her position on Twitter, to no avail.
Many attendees of Afropunk — a music festival generally held in Brooklyn, which describes itself at “a platform for the other Black experience, the one we don’t see in our media” — took to social media to vocalize their frustration, threatening to boycott the festival if M.I.A was not dropped from bill.
It seems like MIA has heard their call.
The festival organizers have not yet addressed the headline change.