Mia Khalifa (song)
"Mia Khalifa" (originally titled "Mia Khalifa (Diss)", also known as "Hit or Miss", and sometimes
stylized as MiA KHALiFA) is a song by American hip hop group iLoveFriday (stylized as iLOVEFRiDAY). The duo of Atlanta-based rappers Aqsa Malik (also known as Smoke Hijabi) and Xeno Carr self-released the song on February 12, 2018, which was later re-released by Records Co and Columbia Records on December 14, 2018. It was included on their second EP, Mood (2019). The song was produced by Carr. The song is a diss track targeting Mia Khalifa, a Lebanese-American Internet celebrity and former pornographic actress.
stylized as MiA KHALiFA) is a song by American hip hop group iLoveFriday (stylized as iLOVEFRiDAY). The duo of Atlanta-based rappers Aqsa Malik (also known as Smoke Hijabi) and Xeno Carr self-released the song on February 12, 2018, which was later re-released by Records Co and Columbia Records on December 14, 2018. It was included on their second EP, Mood (2019). The song was produced by Carr. The song is a diss track targeting Mia Khalifa, a Lebanese-American Internet celebrity and former pornographic actress.
The decision to write a song dissing Khalifa arose over a misunderstanding. A faked screenshot, intended as a joke, seemed to show Khalifa criticizing Malik for smoking while wearing a hijab in a music video. iLoveFriday and their fans took the apparent hypocrisy seriously. Khalifa has posted a comment on a TikTok post on June 28, 2020, from Khalifa's official account miakhalifa stating that "This... is my nightmares. God, this was global, I couldn't escape it." Critics have praised the song for its unconventional catchiness, but it has also been criticized as off-key and misogynistic.Months after its release, "Mia Khalifa" achieved unexpected viral success on social media, especially among TikTok users. The best-known portion is Malik's verse, which opens with a line that became an Internet meme: "Hit or miss, I guess they never miss, huh?"
Background and release
The music video for iLoveFriday's 2017 song "Hate Me" showed Malik, a Pakistani-American woman, smoking a blunt while wearing a hijab, a type of veil worn by some Muslim women and traditionally used to maintain Islamic standards of modesty.
The song and video were modest successes and gained traction within some online meme-centric communities. By January 2018, an Instagram account posted a screenshot of a fake tweet, attributed to Mia Khalifa, that criticized Malik and the "Hate Me" video. The fake tweet said:
"She's so disrespectful to all Muslim women and gives us a bad image .
Not only was the tweet fake, but Khalifa is actually not Muslim and never has been. She was raised in the Catholic Church in Lebanon but is non-practicing.
Although the screenshot was a joke, Malik said that she believed it was real when she first saw it and was shocked by the statement's apparent hypocrisy, given Khalifa's notoriety for appearing in a pornographic video performing sex acts while wearing a hijab. Malik said in an interview that smoking in a hijab is "not nearly as bad" as what Khalifa had done in a hijab. Many of iLoveFriday's fans also took the screenshot to be authentic and reacted with anger toward Khalifa. There has been some skepticism about whether the group members themselves realized the screenshot was a joke.
Regardless, iLoveFriday recorded "Mia Khalifa" in response to their fans' demand for a diss track. The song was self-released on February 12, 2018. The music video for "Mia Khalifa" was released on March 4, 2018. The video was reportedly viewed about 5 million times in the months before it became a viral meme. The song was later re-released by Records Co and Columbia Records on December 14, 2018. In early 2019, the original video was briefly removed due to a copyright infringement claim from Romanian artist Livia Fălcaru, as multiple pieces of her original art appear in the video without her permission. On September 27, 2019, "Mia Khalifa" was released as the first track on Mood, iLoveFriday's second EP.
Music and reception
The song was produced by Xeno Carr. Malik's verse has been described as the highlight of the song with its distinctive, catchy delivery. According to college newspaper Minnesota Daily, "the song itself rose to notoriety not because of its associations with Mia Khalifa, but rather due to a bizarrely catchy rap bridge." The opening lines have been the most frequently quoted and reused in memes:
"Hit or miss, I guess they never miss, huh? . You got a boyfriend, I bet he doesn't kiss ya . He gon find another girl and he won't miss ya .He gon skrrt and hit the dab like Wiz Khalifa."
The song itself is sometimes known as "Hit or Miss" because of the lines. At Pitchfork, Duncan Cooper said the verse captured Malik "at her absolute brattiest". Cooper emphasized her delivery of the phrase "kiss yaaaa!", noting the quality of an "almost Midwestern whine" in her voice despite her Atlanta origins, and wrote that "her melodies are straight and piercing, catchy to an obnoxious degree."
arcade game Street Fighter II, including the Capcom logo jingle and the "Fight!" announcer clip.
Bhad Bhabie—an American rapper and Internet celebrity, perhaps best known for saying "Catch me outside, how about that?" on Dr. Phil—criticized the song as inappropriate for children who were likely to be exposed to it through social media. When asked whether she thought the Internet has a negative effect on children's psychological maturity, Bhad Bhabie replied:
"Yes. It's not even their fault. Sometimes I'm around kids scrolling through TikTok or whatever and that iLoveFriday 'Mia Khalifa' song will pop up and I'll be like, 'Stop listening to that! No!' This girl listening is like seven, she doesn't understand what this song means."In an interview with Anthony Padilla, Khalifa stated that she was hurt by the song and that as a result, she became terrified of going on TikTok and being shamed.According to Reed Kavner at the site Tubefilter, "it's worth reiterating that [Khalifa] was an innocent bystander in all of this. She was the subject of a diss track after doing absolutely nothing. Today, she has 2.3 million Twitter followers and a YouTube channel with her boyfriend celebrity chef Robert Sandberg. None of this will affect her at all."
Viral success
"Mia Khalifa" and TikTok memes
TikTok is a social media video app owned by the Chinese tech company ByteDance. Formed from a merger with the app Musical.ly in 2018, TikTok allows users to post short videos and use audio clips from its database, generally to make lip sync videos. Some of the audio in the database is officially licensed by the copyright holders, but users can also upload an audio clip on their own, at which point the clip becomes available to other users. TikTok is particularly popular among Generation Z, defined as those born after the mid 90s and before the early 2010s.The app has been compared to the defunct Vine.
"Mia Khalifa" became ubiquitous on TikTok in late 2018 and early 2019.The song became so popular, and was so closely identified with the app itself, that it spawned a call and response meme called the "#hitormiss challenge" or "#TikTokTest". To participate in the challenge, TikTok users would wander into public areas like big-box stores or schools and holler the phrase "hit or miss", hoping to elicit a response from a stranger who might complete the line by calling out "I guess they never miss, huh?" The premise of the meme was that the phrase had become so well known among TikTok users that it could serve as a sort of secret handshake or dogwhistle to find other users in the real world.
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