WE CAN’T STOP: OUR YEAR WITH MILEY

Village Voice Pazz & Jop Critics Poll, January 2014

 

Is there a scribe among us—save for Wire writers and those whose bylines eagerly accompanied reviews of that Larry Coryell reissue—who didn’t pull down at least $40 for Miley musings in 2013? Perhaps a shocked-and-awed news item, a post-VMAs reaction, a pondering of that preponderance of tongue? If not, I hate to break it to you, but you got ripped off. It was her year, whether we liked it or—well, yeah.

We wrote about Miley perhaps not so much because she fascinated but riled us with her every move. And to be sure, it was the moves—of her masturbatory fingers, nude body, her twerking, her waggling tongue, the way she used other women’s bodies and her own in videos and performances. Her actual album, Bangerz, was a tertiary concern at best.

It was a long year for pop aggrievement; exempting Bruno Mars’ five-week run at the top of the year, the No. 1 spot on Billboard in 2013 was occupied by white artists. While those Baauer, Macklemore, Robin Thicke, and Lorde hits got their share of controversy and think-piece lather, nothing disquieted us as thoroughly as Miley. She did a mere three weeks with “Wrecking Ball,” but spent the last half of the year as a lightning rod for our censure and outrage; we cut off her head and she just kept writhing, unchastened.

Writing about Miley is simple because she’s impossible to define and easy to vilify—whatever we want to billboard onto her sticks because all at once she is enrapturing, repulsive, hysterical, ignorant, white, young, female, ultra-rich, sexy, scary, skeezy, unafraid, feminist, an artist, not feminist, privileged, talented, sad, visceral, fake, real, too real, and friends with Terry Richardson. What can’t we say about her? Apparently nothing. Bad girls are infinite. Miley possesses us in a way that fully clothed Lorde never will.

Yet the sins of Miley were real. She made egregious missteps amid her attempts to telegraph her artistic primacy, appropriating black cultural idioms and playing on historically racist stereotypes. She claimed she doesn’t see or consider race, and of course she doesn’t have to consider race—she’s a very rich and successful white woman living in America. To ask her to see the scope of her privilege—to understand what it means to mean-mug and then push in her gleaming grill, to really get how a swipe of her tongue across Amazon Ashley’s ass could play to anyone but herself—is an act of futility. Miley’s defensive assertion that we were all prudes with a problem illustrated how wide the chasm between her actions and her awareness was. It made her naiveté seem willful, emblematic—it made her continual triumph downright enraging.

Then there’s the matter of the paucity of imagination in how Miley served herself to us in 2013, permanently lensed in the pornographic gaze. Every glance was a demand to imagine what it is to fuck her or to imagine ourselves as her, being consumed. By the time the video for “Adore You” was released in December, Miley’s pussy-as-Thor’s-hammer pretext and uncomplicated invitations began to feel ruthless in their continual deploy. Their cheap power was fatiguing.

If there was any discernible deep thought behind the image, Bangerz could have been a masterful Top 40 long con, a work of weapons-grade performance art on par with, say, Valie Export’s Actionist peepshow Action Pants: Genital Panic. Miley engaged our baseness and biases, only to make us confront how much we want to see, how much we’ve been culturally sensitized to be turned on by a rich, white bitch daring us to want her, watching us as we watch her. By year’s end, she’d utterly failed to shock anyone who was still paying attention. Which, if we’re being honest, was all of us.

In the same week “Adore You” dropped, Miley offered up a hopeful revision of herself to The New York Times. If taken at face value, it would seem we’ve misunderstood her all along: She’s a Mandela-mourning, big-tent feminist living in hope for America’s post-racial future. She doesn’t want to be a bad example to the youth, but she’s got a rebel nature. She claims she respected her Disney-branding enough to curtail it till she was legal. The part of that complex equation that actually jibes with the Miley we recognize is that yoke of Disney. Her grown-up image requires a constant reminder of her Disnified past to show us just how wayward we should understand Miley to be. They made millions branding Miley as a clean-fun-loving, purity-ring-clasping everygirl; Disney had her formally apologize for taking bikini selfies after the then-teenage singer’s phone was hacked and pics disseminated. It is only natural that even the most tepid, predictable adulteration of Miley’s emblematically pure image would be sensational, that it would have the power to horrify us.

Miley’s Bangerz-era story is a transformation fantasy built on proximity to what she was, how we knew her, how fast she went from supersweet to superfreak, suggesting that, yes, she was an authentic bad girl all along under that darling disguise. Her drifting orientation from the Mouse mothership is meant to tell us as much about who she is now as when she cried real tears and writhed nude on a wrecking ball for Richardson’s camera. This is her ceremony to show us, whether we want her or not, she belongs to us now.