Though she has a history of butting heads with big companies (namely Google), M.I.A.’s latest effort was birthed from a collaboration with Swedish high-street fashion giant H&M. The British-Sri Lankan rapper wrote a new song for the clothing company, “Rewear It”, the video for which has debuted via Vogue.
The track and partnership comes as H&M is trying to draw attention to climate change for H&M’s World Recycle Week initiative, which aims to collect and recycle 1,000 tons of old clothing from its customers in exchange for store credit. As such, the “Rewear It” clip features M.I.A. standing atop piles of clothes whiles dancers of various ethnic origins show off their movies in cities around the world. The track continues with the ardent political messages from previous releases “Borders”, “MIA OLA”, and “Foreign Friend” albeit with more clothing references.
In a Q&A posted alongside the premiere, M.I.A. listed Iceland, Senegal, and America among the many countries used as filming locations, leading her to note that the song is “pretty global”. Elsewhere in the discussion, she talked about what it meant for her to do such a “mainstream” collaboration and mused on social consciousness as it relates to Kanye West’s Twitter account. Read the whole thing here.
It’s not known whether this song will appear on M.I.A.’s long-in-the-works Matahdatah project (and considering its origin, it probably won’t), but if it’s any indication of where her music is at right now, it’s certainly promising. Watch the music video below.
