Marcel Winatschek

Romain’s Desert

Romain Gavras shot the Bad Girls video in Morocco and the result looks like the surface of another planet—ochre dust, horizontal drifting, men riding the exteriors of moving cars as if physics were merely advisory. M.I.A. perches on the hood of a vehicle doing things vehicles shouldn’t do, and the whole sequence has this defiant, almost delirious energy. The song samples something traditional and warps it into something aggressive and insistently contemporary. That tension—old frequencies run through a distortion pedal—is basically M.I.A.’s entire project. Bad Girls is one of the times she made it look genuinely effortless.