With all of the media hoopla
following Miley Cyrus lately, she seems inescapable. For a week after her controversial
VMA performance, CNN’s home page ran multiple headlines about her. One can’t
sign onto facebook without seeing people both praise and complain about her.
That was the context in which I first heard her music, after reading an article
discussing the double standard that women are judged more harshly than men in
pop music. I, too, had noticed she seemed to be getting all the blame, and
although at that point, two days after her performance, I didn’t even know she
had performed with Robin Thicke, I imagined that there was a deeper story there
that wasn’t being told. Cyrus herself astutely pointed this out afterward,
noting that “It was a lot of ‘Miley twerks on Robin Thicke,’ but never ‘Robin
Thicke grinds up on Miley,’ …. So obviously there’s a double-standard” (“Miley Cyrus:
Confessions”).
Lots of people focused their VMA commentary on Cyrus’s dancing and costume
without giving much consideration to the song itself.
In “We Can’t Stop,” the first single off of
Cyrus’s forth-coming album Bangerz,
most people hear a party anthem, a grown-up version of Cyrus’s teeny-bopper hit
“Party In the U.S.A.,” but I hear it as a call for help, a gasping sigh of
desperation. I hear the fear that she can’t stop, that she is unable to stop.
The song suggests drug addiction.
One lyric is “dancing with molly,” a street name for the drug extasy (sic).
Referring to the drug as “molly,” a girl’s name, personifies it, makes it so
she has a relationship, a friendship even with the drug. Later she sings about
being in line for the bathroom as she’s “tryin’ to get a line in the bathroom.”
This could refer to a line of cocaine. The video shows her pretending to cut
off her fingers with a kitchen knife, only to have her bleed out pepto-bismol,
which might make one think of vomiting due to a drug overdose. The video also
shows her in pools and bathtubs (“We Can’t Stop”). Seeing her writhe around the bathtub or jump
into a swimming pool, the dim, faraway look in her eyes masked by sunglasses, I
find it impossible not to think of Whitney Houston, who
drowned in just inches of bath water earlier this year. Her obituary showed
cocaine in her system.
In interviews, though, Cyrus often
seems to have her head on her shoulders. She seems to be in control of her
image and how people see her. She recognizes that “it’s an important time not
to Google [herself]”
(“Miley Cyrus: Confessions”). She wants to study photography in college, but
worries that she would not be allowed to have the life of a normal college
student (“Miley Cyrus on Weed”). Her biggest role model is Dolly Parton (“Miley
Cyrus on Weed”). She is aware of her theatrics – when she cried in “Wrecking
Ball” she notes that it wasn’t because the song was so emotional, though she
wants listeners to tear up, but that she produced the tears by thinking of her
dog who had just died (“Miley Cyrus: Confessions”). These things all make her
seem stable and self-aware.
Perhaps most surprising are the
incisive comments she gives on America’s love-hate relationship with offensive
media, comments that make sense and keep her performance within the bounds of
what she finds appropriate. Cyrus notes that:
America is just so weird
in what they think is right and wrong. Like I was
watching
Breaking Bad the other day, and they
were cooking meth. I could
literally
cook meth because of that show. It’s a how to. And then they bleeped out 'fuck.'
And I’m like, really? They killed a guy, and disintegrated his body in acid,
but you’re not allowed to say 'fuck'? It’s like when they bleeped ‘molly’
at the VMAs. Look what I’m doing up here right now, and you’re going to bleep
out ‘molly’? Whatever. (“Miley Cyrus: Confessions”)
The
adolescent shrug-off of “whatever” seems a bit immature, but Cyrus is right
about the hypocrisy. If the censors have problems with foul language, why don’t
they have a problem with extreme violence? Why can they show drug use on TV,
but can’t even mention it during a song? She really seems to hit the nail on
the head when she questions why the censors didn’t cut off her performance if
they were really interested in protecting the audience. In Cyrus’s eyes, it is
the network’s censors’ job to make sure that what the airwaves transmit is
appropriate for its audience, and she sees them as failing. Elsewhere in
“Confessions of Pop’s Wildest Child,” Cyrus discusses how she actually toned
down her original idea for the performance to avoid censors, knowing what they
considered over the line. This suggests that she was fully aware of the risqué
nature of her performance, but also knew that it could go a little over the
line and stay on the air if the network thought people would tune in to see
her.
This isn’t Cyrus’s first experience
with hypocritical censors. She has courted controversy with media portrayal of
her sexuality since she was fifteen In April 2008, her email was hacked and
pictures of her in her underwear, which she had emailed to then-boyfriend Nick
Jonas, appeared on several internet sites. It would be appropriate for someone
to sit down and talk with her about how creating such digital images can come
back to haunt you and about being confident in yourself rather than just your
looks (and probably for someone to sit down and have a chat with Nick Jonas
too), but I felt bad for how the media raked her through the mud. Because she
is a public figure, she became a target for people to dig through her personal
life and make it public. The media criticized her for even taking the pictures,
but no one was attempting to get them removed from the internet sites they
showed up on. When the boy who hacked her account was arrested, he was not
charged for taking the images and posting them, but only for stealing credit
card information. In that case, the media’s double agenda of seeming morally
chaste while pedaling sexualized images of women contributed not to any calls
for heightened protection of the web, but to many people criticizing Cyrus for
doing what many other girls have done and not faced the same public shaming
for. (Zetter)
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| Zombie Apocalypse or auditioning for Les Mis? |
Two years later, when Cyrus released
her Can’t Be Tamed album, her
participation in the media’s attempt to sexualize her became even more obvious.
The album cover looked more like a fashion ad than an album cover. The clothes,
pose and even the font looked more like an Abercrombie and Fitch ad than like
something promoting music. This was Cyrus’s more adult attempt to break away
from her tween audience. While the songs may attempt to be more grown-up, the
overall sound was still aimed at teenagers, the group who had grown up
listening to her. She was still aware of whom her audience was, but she didn’t
think about what effect she had on them.
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| Look at me. I'm so cool that maybe I can get promoted from Biker Monthly to the American Eagle catalog! |
Now, older, Cyrus does seem more
self-aware. She knows when she steps over lines, but she naively assumes that,
just because she is now trying to make music aimed at a more adult audience,
the media is going to treat her like a grown-up primarily interested in
reaching an adult audience. Maybe now she is aware that many in the media were
not prepared for her transformation. More importantly, while 20-year-olds know
she has changed, their parents were less likely to follow her career, and more
likely to plop their younger kids in front of the VMAs expecting wholesome,
Hannah-Montana style family entertainment. Miley still seems rather oblivious
to the fact that the audience that is going to seek her out may well be younger
than the audience she is aiming her work at. “I forget that it’s, like, people
in Kansas watching the show. That people sit their kid in front of the TV and
are like, ‘Oh, an awards show! Let’s watch’,” she told Rolling Stone (“Miley Cyrus on Weed”). While she seems mature
enough to recognize her music may be problematic, and may send dangerous
messages, she doesn’t make any attempt to control those messages, and that is
the real problem. She can snort cocaine if she wants to, but she doesn’t need
to be making it sound like a fun idea for everyone else.
Ultimately,
the question that has to be answered is, would I want to sit down to dinner
with Miley Cyrus, and the answer is not at this point. She’s said a few smart
things, but she’s still not mature enough.
Given a few years, maybe she’ll continue to grow up and become interesting as
she finds ways to comment on the media’s hypocrisy without taking advantage of
it simply for free publicity.
Works Cited
Eells,
Josh. “Miley Cyrus: Confessions of Pop’s Wildest Child.” Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone. 24
Sept. 2013. Web. 29 Sept. 2013.
---.
“Miley Cyrus on Why She Loves Weed, Went Wild at the VMAs, and Much More.”
Rolling
Stone. Rolling Stone. 27 Sept. 2013. Web. 29 Sept. 2013.
Singh,
Anita. “Hanna Montana star Miley Cyrus: Vanity Fair photo scandal made fans
relate to
me.” The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group. 27 June 2008. Web. 2 Oct.
2013.
“We
Can’t Stop.” Dir. Diane Martel. YouTube.
Sony Music Entertainment. 19 June 2013. Web. 1
Oct. 2013.
Williams,
Mike, et al. “We Can’t Stop.” Bangerz.
Perf. Miley Cyrus. RCA, 2013. MP3.
Zetter,
Kim. “Purported Miley Cyrus Hacker Pleads Guilty to Spamming From Hacked
Celebrity
Accounts.” Wired. Conde Nast. 1 Aug. 2011. Web. 1 Oct. 2013.
