Sia, from pop singer to film director | Wigs …

Pop artists who hid their faces behind a mask abound: SBTRKT sporting tribal masks or the French duo Daft Punk covering their heads with luminous helmets. From John Talabot with his face covered in aluminum foil to the recently deceased rapper MF Doom, who wore a metal mask and a pseudonym in homage to the Fantastic Four supervillain, Dr. Doom. But Be chose a more drag form to protect his private life: the wig. First it was the two-color Cruella de Vil hair, then the curly hair, or the white one puffed up like cotton candy; as if she changed her hair according to her mood. At one point the wig became her real hair, the artifice is the real thing.

MY WIG IS FLYING

The drag queen Alaska Thunderfuck 5000, winner of the second season of RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars, in his album Anus: “This is my hair/I don’t wear wigs”, repetía en This is my hair waving her platinum blonde wig. At some shows Sia wears giant bows or huge hats, other times she covers her eyes with retro fabrics or a lace veil.

Born in Adelaide, Australia, in December 1975, Sia (Sia Kate Isobelle Furler) began covering her face in 2014, after rising to fame for putting her vibrant voice on David Guetta’s song. Titanium, and after the first single on the album became hit 1000 Forms of Fear, Chandelier. A theme that would become a gay anthem in 2015 when on Josh Thomas’s Australian series, Please Like Me, Arnold’s character rehearses telling his father he’s fucking singing that song.

The daughter of musical parents, her career began in the mid-90s as the leader of the acid jazz band Crips., But the popularity that came later scared her due to an emotional instability that caused her to fight against various addictions. Sia did not want to worry about her image when she walked to the supermarket in flip-flops and a torn T-shirt or went into the sea in a bikini, thinking that a tabloid magazine would take a photo of her sentencing her body. So that there is no doubt, Sia wrote her own anti-fame manifesto that began like this “If someone who is not famous knew what it means, they would never want to be famous.” The singer refused to offer her privacy and found in wigs a refuge where she could feel safe.

A year earlier, in 2013, the media lovingly linked Sia to actor Robert Pattinson, the pale vampire from Twilight. The pop singer denied it on Twitter adding a revelation: “I’m queer. I don’t really identify as a lesbian because I have predominantly dated men. But I’ve certainly dated women. “ The singer was a partner of the member of the American band Le Tigre, JD Samson, and a few years later she married documentary maker Erik Anders Lan, from whom she separated a few years ago. From that tweet Sia lovingly connected with the LGBTIQ community in different ways. Beyond the words and the presences, Sia was already relating from her image mounted on the stage: fag pulse to inspire the crazy women. Not Lady Gaga, not Madonna; Sia has her own queer glamor and doesn’t need to be compared to another queen of pop.

The Australian singer collaborated with all kinds of artists: she did backing vocals for Jamiroquai, she composed songs for Christina Aguilera, Beyonce, J.Lo, Rihanna, Adele, Shakira and even Britney Spears. It does not matter for whom, his style is identified even if it is not signed, as does his look covered with a wig. In 2001 she released her first solo album but it was through the tiny body of dancer Maddie Ziegler that Sia visited the most important TV shows. The 11-year-old dances dramatically in cream-colored fishnet in the music video for Chandelier, sporting Sia’s blonde wig. From that moment on, Maddie became the singer’s alter ego in each video clip, even with Sia present. In 2015 both performed in Saturday Night Live: Maddie showing her face, Sia singing from behind. Backstage at that show he ran into Donald Trump, who, with the cameras off, asked Sia to take a picture with him. The singer refused, explaining that having many queer Mexican fans, she did not want them to think she supported the ideas of the future president. Trump didn’t take it badly. And Sia ended up in her dressing room, with a fit of nervous diarrhea. In 2017 Sia wrote a love letter to the LGBTIQ community. In these lines he narrates what he felt with a video of a 13-year-old gay boy who expressed how oppressed he was in the world through Sia’s song, Breath me. It was because of that video, in large part, that Sia decided to dedicate herself with her voice (up and down the stage) to the queer community in a more meaningful way. “I am so thankful for my queer community and I would have withered a long time ago without them,” the letter states.

HOMEMADE

The video of Chandelier It is such a personal project that Sia herself filmed it. It would be the beginning of his audiovisual work that is crowned in 2021, with the premiere of his first feature film: Music. Starring, of course, by his alter ego Maddie Ziegler. Like Judy Garland in the movies, we watched Maddie grow up between video clips. In Music, a film that maintains Sia’s pop spirit, plays a teenage girl with autism who, after being left without her father, must be cared for by a musical sister (played by Kate Hudson) who cannot take care of herself. Again, there is a connection to Josh Thomas – the last series he created and starred in, Everything´s Gonna Be Okay, raises a similar premise. A brother who does not know what to do with his life becomes the guardian of his sister with autism. In both works, the songs and the dance are key to dealing with the sadness and fear that drags you into an ocean of pus. But above all, the complicity between siblings who discover that love lives in the singularities of others. In the last 2 years Sia was captured several times by photographers who displayed her face in magazines and internet portals. Now the whole world knows what his face is like. However, she did not stop wearing giant wigs and bows. Why? Because wigs speak much more about who we are than a face-washed photo. Desire is identity.

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