MIA has justified flipping the bird live on air at 2012's Super Bowl as a spiritual gesture of the Hindu goddess Matangi.
The artist, who is currently in a legal battle with the NFL over her performance during Madonna's Give Me All Your Luvin' last year, initially claimed the split-second middle-finger incident was a "display of female empowerment through being punk rock" in the face of "corporation dick-shaking". However, the star has now told NPR in the US that it was, in fact, a ritualistic gesture, ignoring the fact that it was aptly timed with the lyric: "I don't give a shit."
"In America, you have gang signs, and people throw up initials and stuff like that. Well, 5,000 years ago, there was thing called a mudra, which is your sitting position when you do yoga or you're meditating or praying or whatever," she said. "And you have different ones based on what you're meditating over. There's not a lot of them that are named after gods and goddesses, but the middle finger is specifically named Matangi – the Matangi mudra."
The NFL, the American football governing body, is currently suing MIA, whose birth name is Mathangi Arulpragasam, for £900,000. Pushed on the subject by NPR, MIA said that giving the middle finger could have been misconstrued by NFL: "It's cultural! In my country, it's godly. OK?"
"Of course the NFL is not believing that, because the NFL does not believe in any other culture outside of the NFL. But it's true; you can Wikipedia it. You can just say 'Matangi' and 'mudra', and you'll see it's the middle finger."
Matangi is also the name of MIA's new album, which is out now. The singer and rapper recently opened a show with a live video transmission from Julian Assange.
