Parkland shooting survivor/activist Emma González called out the music video for Madonna's "God Control" in a series of tweets. According to Madonna, the song/video is intended as a statement against gun violence.
The video initially warns viewers and then goes on to show people, Madonna included, being gunned down on a dance floor. CNN points out that the visuals are reminiscent of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting that left 49 dead and 53 others wounded. González clearly agrees with that:
When the video was initially released, Madonna told CNN that she felt like it was necessary to address the topic of gun violence for the kids of the world. The video also ends by listing a number of anti-gun violence groups.
You can watch the full thing here.
"As a mother, I feel even more attached to and protective of children. Do my children go to school safely? No, they cannot," Madonna said at the time. "Every child that I meet - as a mother you feel responsible for all of the children in the world. It's really scary to me that any public gathering, any place of worship, any school is a target."
She also defended the graphic nature of the video by arguing it was necessary to drive the point home. "[U]nderstand that this is what happens. Guns kill," she said. "A bullet rips through your body, knocks you to the floor and takes your life, and you bleed to death. I mean this is reality.
"People can watch it in action films, and they are OK with it, but when it is about the truth, the reality of what's happening in our country, why is it too graphic?"
In a separate song called "I Rise" on the seven-time Grammy winner's new album, Madame X, one of González's speeches is sampled.
In addition to González, TMZ talked to another survivor of a mass shooting, Patience Carter. Carter was at Pulse on June 12, 2016, the night of the massacre.
"As a survivor of gun violence, it was really hard to watch," Carter said to TMZ. "For someone like me, who actually saw these images, who actually lived these images, to see them again dramatized for views [and] dramatized for YouTube, I feel like it was really insensitive."
Carter took to Twitter to say that she was "truly disturbed," though she also wrote "I applaud the attempt":
Additionally Jay Kuo, the co-founder of One Pulse for America (which was one of the organizations mentioned at the end of the music video), also appeared to recognize what Madonna was going for, even if the art didn't land for everybody. After saying that the organization had made no direct request to the artist to be "mindful" of the graphic depictions (as they'd done a few times in the past), Kuo also said they weren't here to judge her creative decisions.
"That is the nature of artistic or political expression," Kuo said. "Critics are free as well to point out their problems with her video, but there is no doubt she shares the same goal as we and even her critics do: reducing gun violence and drawing attention to the crisis."
