The Decline and Fall of Brand Miley
In her few years on the planet as a makeup-wearing human, Miley Cyrus has cultivated an incredible amount of goodwill. She has managed to stand astride pop, country, rock, and even a certain corner of R&B without falling prey to the perils of tween superstardom. Having successfully avoided any of the false and tasteless sexual notes hit so mechanically by young pop stars today, Miley is now about to discover, along with the rest of us, how much more difficult plain old fashioned teen superstardom has come to be.
Cruel irony! It was supposed to get easier to manage one's public sexual persona as one hit one's pubescent stride. But the Annie Leibovitz scandal -- featuring 15-year-old Miley in a mildly voluptuous portrait (not out of place, stylistically, in the world's great collections of Renaissance art) -- looks like a stroke of grace up against the simultaneously overwrought and undercooked Grown-Up Miley on display in the video for new single "Can't Be Tamed."
Grown-Up Miley is 17, now, and sings words like these:
For those who don’t know me, I can get a bit crazy
Have to get my way, 24 hours a day
‘Cause I’m hot like that
Every guy everywhere just gives me mad attention
Like I’m under inspection, I always get the 10s
‘Cause I’m built like that
I go through guys like money flyin’ out their hands
They try to change me but they realize they can’t
And every tomorrow is a day I never planned
If you’re gonna be my man, understand
I can’t be tamed, I can’t be saved
I can’t be blamed, I can’t, can’t
All while the now standard-issue phalanx of Zoolanders, 'backup dancers' only in the most figurative use of the term, gesticulates dramatically at her lips and other relatively more curvy parts.
It is absolutely perfunctory, unreal, and worthless art, bearing no emotional or logical connection to anything that made Miley Cyrus a household brand worth four hundred zillion bars of hand-polished platinum and, while she was at it, an international cutie pie.
I'm all for artists growing up and getting adventurous. The Miley of "Can't Be Tamed," alas, has all the adventure and surprise of Sex and the City 2. Phony, vapid and soulless at one fourth the age of Carrie Bradshaw? Miley can hardly blame herself for it. It's our entertainment class -- writers, directors, producers, the people we trust to conceptualize our art -- that's repeating a doomed formula. Maybe it's more important that we cure our political class of its own rotten roteness. But pop art, unlike politics, is supposed to make us smile, and seeing this place we go to take leave of the burdens of everyday life grow decadent and stale sure feels like the bigger bummer.
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Comments :
May '10
Re: The Decline and Fall of Brand Miley
My 14 y/o daughter read me those lyrics the other day. We concurred that we like much better the world into which that Taylor Swift's music invites a person. Like you, we're at a loss as to the reasons behind the wholesale turn of direction and change of personality in Miley. I guess it's money and marketing...banking on that same ol' formula you mentioned. She used to be a neat kid, with a bright personality, and with an air of rebellious virtue against that formula. So I thought. How sad.
Re: The Decline and Fall of Brand Miley
It has all the markings of something that is "over." However, I would not bet on it.
May '10
Re: The Decline and Fall of Brand Miley
Don't you think that it's almost becoming a kind of "rite of passage" for these child actors to transition to adult careers by ramping up their sexual persona? It is as if they don't think they'd be taken seriously if they don't become Madonna wannabes.
May '10
Re: The Decline and Fall of Brand Miley
Golly, it is a stinker! Also, one can't help noticing that her voice has that heavily sampled quality that comes from liberal use of the Auto-Tune. Was her intonation always a problem, or is it a recent development, co-incident with the removal of taste?
Re: The Decline and Fall of Brand Miley
It doesn't hold a candle to the Shangri-La's "Sophisticated Boom Boom."