Sia’s ‘The Greatest’ — and the problems it raises
This is how the music video for Sia’s newest single, “The Greatest,” begins:
A hashtag, in angular scrawl, appears on a black screen: #weareyourchildren. A faint humming noise breaks the silence. Young bodies line the floor of a jail cell. Young bodies lie limp in a hallway. Young bodies lean against each other in a huddle, still and grey and many signs shy of alive.
Maddie Ziegler is alive. She quivers the way only someone unambiguously alive can — her lungs expand, her arms shake. It’s a specific, involuntary slightness — the kind caused by a deep stirring of one’s insides. That is how you know she is alive.
Maddie Ziegler dons a black wig. With dirtied fingers, she drags rainbow down her cheeks.
In some moments, it is war paint.
In others, tears.
The drum machine hits. The young bodies awaken. The song begins. The young bodies begin to dance but still look many signs shy of alive.
~~~
On Saturday, June 11, 2016, Orlando nightclub Pulse hosted its weekly Latin Night, a space where the bar’s largely LGBTQ+, Latinx crowd could, after a week’s worth of hard work and microaggressions, let loose.
Pulse shooting survivor Chriss West recalled the first part the evening in an interview with CBS Orlando affiliate WKMG-TV.
“The excitement, the adrenaline, the drinking, the good times, the laughter, the joy in people’s faces,” West said. “It was just so much fun there. I mean, the experience of Pulse was just one you couldn’t compare to any club in Orlando. It was a second home to all of us.”
~~~
The first verse, in short: a rainbow-faced Maddie Ziegler coaxes the grey-faced young bodies out of the jail cell. They run amok through a dilapidated building.
Sia’s motivational refrains play in the background — catchy platitudes about perseverance that simultaneously mean something to everyone and nothing in particular.
Maddie Ziegler does a cartwheel and, as if by the magic of her movement and Sia’s quirky-pop pep talk, the dancers get in formation. The chorus hits.
I’m free to be the greatest, I’m alive
I’m free to be the greatest here tonight, the greatest
The choreography is sharp, staccato, aggressively stylized. These kids move like zombies, faces deadpan as they toss their limbs in full abandon and perfect synchronicity all at once.
Against Sia’s impassioned belting, their dancing begs the question:
Are they really free?
Are they really alive?
~~~
Weighing Sia’s music video — confirmed by multiple dancers in it to be a tribute to the victims of the Pulse shooting — against the firsthand accounts of those who were there, I can’t shake the issue of portrayal.
Where in the choreography are what Chriss West described as “the good times, the laughter, the joy in people’s faces”? Why paint the Sia-universe analog of Pulse as a decrepit space from the get-go, rather than the “second home to all of us” West and other survivors say it was?
I’m not here to call Sia and choreographer Ryan Heffington’s artistry or intent into question. But this video isn’t just a work of art. It functions as an implicit memorial, an advocacy piece, a translation of true and terrible events into song and dance. On top of that, it’s a pop cultural product — it exists to sell Sia’s music as much as it does to commemorate.
And for that, I’m here to hold Sia and Heffington accountable for the weight of the imagery they’ve put forth. I’m here to ask questions.
Is Sia using her platform to re-sensitize the public to a deep and real pain that, for too many, dulls with the quickness and oversaturation of violence in a 24/7 news cycle? Or is she being exploitative by profiting off a tragedy she didn’t experience firsthand?
Where do the proceeds from the song and video’s streaming go?
Did the friends and family of the Pulse shooting victims, or the clubgoers that survived, have any stake in the storytelling?
Why no mention of victims’ names or links to Pulse-related advocacy groups in the video description? Is the sentiment more powerful in the abstract, left vague like Sia’s lyrics?
Who’s really benefiting from this?
Amidst the weighty symbolism of LGBTQ+ rainbows, prisons connoting persecution, and 49 dancers representing 49 victims, why no allusions to Latin dance — the very thing these 49 clubgoers lost their lives celebrating?
The Pulse shooting was the deadliest attack on the LGBTQ+ community in U.S. history, and a majority of its 49 victims were queer people of color. Would acknowledging this have gotten the way of Sia’s universalist messaging?
Is solidarity an easier cross to bear when the rainbow stands for colorblindness, too?
As creatives, do Sia and Heffington owe anything to their subject matter — the deceased, the mourning, the healing — or are they only beholden to their art?
Art that listens as loudly as it speaks: Is this too much to ask?
Is it a fair thing to ask for?
~~~
As the song fades, the music video’s 49 dancers, Ziegler included, jump around in an undead, still shy-of-alive kind of ecstasy. They keep jumping, even after the music makes way for silence.
Then, without warning, they collapse. Light shines through bullet holes in a back wall. Despite the arresting stillness of 49 young bodies on the dance floor, three disco lights continue to spin.
~~~
At 2:02 a.m. on June 12, 2016, as Pulse’s Latin Night made way for early morning, Omar Mateen bypassed the club’s security. Armed with both a pistol and semiautomatic rifle, he began shooting patrons and taking them hostage — 110 rounds of gunfire total, resulting in 49 clubgoers dead and 53 injured by 5:53 a.m.
The Orlando Sentinel published their stories, and Orlando Weekly has an ongoing profile series that delves into each life, one by one. Both offer journalism that treats Pulse’s victims not as statistics or symbols but as people.
In Orlando Weekly’s words: “The list of 49 names released after the massacre on June 12 only tells people a fraction of who the Pulse victims were. Aside from being an accountant, a bouncer, college students, theme park workers, dancers, perfume salesman, fast-food workers and mothers, they were people who had dreams, fears, hopes and aspirations.”
~~~
This is how the video ends:
A faint humming noise, not unlike the one at the beginning of the video, crescendos. Maddie Ziegler opens her eyes, rainbows intact.
Cut to the same hallway.
Cut to the same jail cell.
Then back to Ziegler, against a red wall, new. She sobs.
~~~
At the time of writing, this music video has over 343 million views on YouTube.
Survivors’ accounts of the night from CBS, MSNBC, ABC, and CNN, among other news organizations, typically sit just shy of 150,000 views each, with a few exceptions. That is, each of these eyewitness accounts reach just .04 percent of the audience Sia’s “The Greatest” does.
This is probably the case for a number of reasons, some easier to reckon with than others.
The easy: YouTube’s not the primary host for most news organizations — many of these segments originally aired on TV. Sia, like any musical artist, is a brand, a public figure with a loyal and dedicated following she’s spent years building. Videos of Pulse survivors sharing their stories on Ellen reach an audience of millions on this same logic (and, at least in that case, a famous person with a platform uses it to elevate the voices of those who might not have that privilege).
The hard: We, as consumers of news and pop culture, don’t feel like digesting painful truths. We whip out our laptops after a long shift at work to binge-watch Netflix standup comedy specials. We scroll through Buzzfeed lists on our smartphones before going to sleep. We look to media for an escape from whatever afflicts us — schoolwork, car repairs, unpaid bills — and don’t want to make getting through the day any more complicated than it already is.
We’d rather be entertained. We’d rather look at a pretty version of an ugly thing, passively tweet #weareyourchildren, and carry on with our lives, satisfied in the belief that we’ve done some small amount of good.
Put another way:
We, like Ziegler, are alive.
And because of that, most of us can look at this video with some distance. We can comment on the choreography, the cinematography, and the music in themselves — how, beyond what it all means, the piece really is beautifully made. We can even talk about how moving the work was — how it incites in us a sympathy that may leave us teary-eyed or thinking about a lost loved one.
But here’s the thing: What I — or you, or anyone else — thinks about this video doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter. This isn’t about us. These people’s tragedy is not for our entertainment.
What does matter is what we do after the video ends, after the tears dry, after the rainbow makeup washes off. What matters is what we make of our sorrow.
And if I may preach only one thing, it’s this: Give your feelings legs. Turn them into verbs. Act upon what you saw in that video like you mean what it made you feel.
Be an ally to the LGBTQI+ community. March behind them. Listen to them. Donate to the onePULSE Foundation, which provides survivors and victims’ loved ones financial assistance. Ask your artists tough questions. Get a dialogue going. Create the kind of art that gives the marginalized a chance to speak.
Because we, dear reader, are no signs shy of alive — and it is our chief responsibility to do as much good with that as we can.
