SIA

In spite of making music for nearly 30 years and being recognized in Australia, Sia Furler’s desire was to work solely behind the scenes as a songwriter. Her breakthrough happened after the unexpected success of David Guetta’s “Titanium” in 2011 which she wrote and unknowingly got featured on: “I had worked so hard to be this cool, credible artist,” she says. “And then finally, I’ve retired to just work behind the scenes, and then I’m on, like, a cheesy pop house song.” (Aron, 2018). After that, she was required to release an album because of a publishing deal, which she eventually agreed to under the condition of having full artistic control and receiving no promotion as she had no desire to be famous (Aron, 2018).

The first single from the album, “Chandelier”, came out in 2014 and its video marked the first time Sia had worked with Maddie Ziegler – the dancer who has appeared in most of her videos and performances ever since. Ziegler danced in an abandoned building, portraying a character of a broken doll in a blond bob wig (Fig. 17) (Aron, 2018). After “Chandelier” became one of the most watched videos in history, Sia’s album 1000 Forms of Fear debuted at number one on the official Billboard 200 chart (Wikipedia, 2023).

The dancer, combined with Sia’s decision to wear a wig to protect her privacy (Fig. 16), have become key parts of Sia’s brand ever since (Freydkin, 2017). It almost seemed like the fame Sia feared was distributed among herself as the voice and Maddie Ziegler as the face (Fig. 18). The famous duo ended up collaborating on two albums which included global hits such as “Elastic Heart” or “Cheap Thrills”, multiple music videos and live performances, and a tour (Malkin, 2017).

After two successful albums, Furler formed a group titled “LSD” with artists Diplo and Labrinth in 2018 and released an album with several singles out of which some of them reached moderate success (Wikipedia, 2023). In 2021, her musical movie Music received strong backlash for starring Maddie Ziegler as an autistic character and her poor representation of people with autism, which overshadowed the music itself. The movie received several award nominations despite heavily failing in the market. The focus was fully on the backlash despite the singer’s explanations of not wanting to do a project without the young dancer (Gilang, 2022).

Sia has not been able to reach the level of success comparable to her previous albums since. Her decision to wear a wig and create a character to represent her visual image was special, but it became a continuous aspect of her brand that got visually too consistent as the years went by, resulting in the significant decrease of video views and streams, but also of public recognition of new releases due to the backlash. As of now, Sia’s image, brand as well as her next artistic steps remain unclear.