Go back and watch the music video for Sia’s “Chandelier” if you haven’t seen him in a while. The Australian singer-songwriter’s hit about using the word ‘party’ as a verb to temporarily feel free (‘One two three / One two three / Drink’), followed by the next day’s comedown (‘Hier comes the shame, here comes the shame ”), is a complicated tune if you know its history. However, the clip is simple: 11-year-old Maddie Ziegler is dancing in an extra apartment. It is, but it is a lot of. She is wearing a blonde bob wig, similar to the two-tone, visage-blackout wig that Sia started using in performances. The kid kicks her legs, pulls her arms, throws herself around, opens her eyes, peeks out of curtains. Ziegler runs across the room and down a hallway, a little dervish in a leotard, bending endlessly to infinity with a slightly nerve-racking smile on her face. The concept has nothing to do with the content of the song, but somehow seems perfectly tuned to the feel. At the time of writing, the video has been viewed over two billion times on YouTube. Considering how instantly iconic it was, and how engaging and endlessly revisiting it still is, this seems a smaller number than you might expect.
‘Chandelier’, co-directed by Sia, was the first time she worked with Ziegler. The teenager quickly became something of a stand-in for the musician – the face of an artist who preferred to hide her own face. Ziegler danced on stage and at awards ceremonies with Sia, interpreted her music through movement and acted as an on-screen counterpart. They’ve made more music videos together, all of them memorable, almost all of them great. Eat as many of these as you can right now (although the “Elastic Heart” is a bit tough, considering who Ziegler’s co-star is).
However, if you only have time, go straight to “Thunderclouds”. It’s from Sia’s side project / supergroup LSD – the L is for Labrinth, the D for Diplo – and it has Ziegler in both Tank Girl cosplay and rocking with a big, bright blue bow, yet another stylistic touch borrowed from her pop song partner in crime. Sia herself shows up via a puppet substitute. Labrinth hangs in a cloud. Once again exuding a strong David-Spade-only-seedier vibe, Diplo drives a decked out van through a day-glo sky. There’s a thunderstorm at 11,000 meters, which doesn’t stop Ziegler from dancing on top of Diplo’s flying Mystery Machine. Nothing could keep Ziegler from dancing in a Sia video.
Now imagine that the singer and dancer have made a whole host of other candy-colored videos very similar to those of the “Thunderclouds”, with bits and pieces of their other collaborations in it. And they’ve all connected them through a story about a non-verbal, autistic young woman who sees the world as daydreaming in pastel dances, part Busby Berkeley, part Daft Punk’s ‘Around the World’ clip and part Yo Gabba Gabba. From time to time, Kate Hudson and Leslie Odom Jr. along to join in the fun.
Yes, that was our response too. Hopefully you have also lifted your jaw.
You have to admire every attempt by an artist to broaden his horizons, try something new, swing at the fences so devotedly and passionately. But Music, Sia’s feature debut is the kind of curiosity in which the gulf between intentions and the end result is Grand Canyon-esque. Controversial from the start for her decision to star a neurotypical actor, this mix of gritty, streetwise drama and outrageous, fantastic musical sequences has been a labor of love for the singer – an attempt to translate the sensitivity on display in her bruised-empowering lyrics, her mastery of intimate yet epic pop-bombast, and her video collaborations into something bigger. Instead, it is a serious error that is recognizable as an extension of a voice, yet hits all the wrong notes. It doesn’t give you an insight into what anyone was thinking, but it makes you wonder, “What the hell were they thinking?”
Music, we should note, is also the name of Ziegler’s character, filtering an overwhelming world through her headphones. Her grandmother (Mary Kay Place), along with a network of local residents, keeps an eye on music as she moves from the downtown apartment to the newsagent to the street vendor to the library. Meanwhile, her older sister Kazu (Hudson) – Zu for short – has been through some kind of drug addiction and is looking for a place to crash. Some new clients for her continued sideline selling pills would also be nice.
She’s still a mess, in other words immature, unrepentant, stuck in junkie survivalist mode to see everything as a potential bargain or score. Not the kind of person who can take care of a sibling with special needs, yet circumstances force her to step into the role of Music’s primary guardian. Luckily, she has help in the form of Ebo (Odom Jr.), an immigrant who was once a local boxing champion and now runs a gym for aspiring underage boxers. And she is aided in her own way by the vibrant inner life of music, which takes the form of those clear, shining musical numbers in which she lets Ebo, and ultimately Zu, into her private world.
Those numbers are, unsurprisingly, the moments when you see the person who wrote ‘Titanium’ and ‘Cheap Thrills’ – who sang, ‘I’m small and needy / wake me up and breathe’ into a gigantic black and white – white wig and saw an alternative identity – shine through. They’ve been scored by Sia and with Hudson and Odom sharing some of the vocal duties, they remind you why her music is such a pure rush, and how the lyrics of something like “Insecure” play against the groove revival. That number is set against a purple backdrop, with Hudson and Ziegler flapping their hands while grinning cartoonishly. Others, like a version of “Music” set in a patterned wonderland with Beto Calvillo’s reclusive potential dancer riding a bicycle, are little conceptual wonders. (Tracy Dishman’s production design is particularly striking here.) The climax “Together” Hoedown is an explosion in a rainbow factory. Out of context, these pieces may seem daring, inventive and exciting. In other words, anything that makes a great four-minute clip with visuals and sound is what makes a music video not an ad, but art.
But they are indeed chained to a story, a story that turns its heroine into some kind of neurodivergent equivalent of a magical Negro, and therein lies the tragedy. There are issues of representation at stake here, and understanding the bond between Sia and Ziegler can help you figure out why the former might have wanted the latter for the role. This was one more project together, one more way to further develop a fruitful creative relationship. It probably didn’t even occur to Sia to cast someone from that community. Whether the musician filmmaker cast an autistic artist to play music or not, that artist would still have to navigate the movie she and her co-writer, Dallas Clayton, came up with. Ziegler herself seems to view the condition as an extension of her dancing, so that her physical tics and facial expressions appear more like choreographed physical facial expressions than a hallmark of autism or a person. It is an abstract interpretation of autism, routine among many. Looking at the scenes where she interacts with her spinning co-stars in the non-fantasy world, you find yourself praying that soon, please, every moment will be reduced to a musical number.
(As for the rightly evoked scenes of music that is physically limited, in which Odom and Hudson [her] with their love ”while panicking, Sia apologized and promised to remove them on the day itself Music was nominated for several Golden Globes – one of the more questionable calls from this year’s nomination lineup, though still not among the top 1,000 blunders the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has committed in conjunction with the awards ceremony. However, the damage is done.)
Music is at best a delivery truck for a series of songs and a series of isolated OMG spectacles, giving you the briefest glimpse of a pop songwriting savant’s desire to make a statement about ‘finding your voice and your own start a family. At worst, it’s a perma-cringe-inducing mark against its creators, a simplistic Holy Fool fable about anabolic steroids and a sugar high from Skittles. There will be some wounds licking, you hope, and regrouping, and lessons learned for Sia. Hopefully it won’t get in the way of what was a great career, or the work of a really exciting creative duo. All we can do is nod, move on, understand the need to get better and click back on that. ” Chandelier “video. Ninety minutes of watching that video, and that music might get this Music erased from our memory.