Ah yes, Miley Cyrus. It was July, 2009, and I was walking down Butler Avenue in Tybee Island, GA, looking for some sort of bait. Or chum. Or whatever. My second fiancé and I had been arguing over the difference between SweetN’ Low and Splenda, as well as over my general chain of life-failure. So I run oft. I saw people catching these petite sharks off the pier, and I wanted one. So I got these shrimp at the IGA, and then ran into Billy Ray Cyrus on the street. I said I was from Kentucky, relatively. He said that I should follow my dreams. I’d already met Macgyver at this point, so I wasn’t very starstruck, but I’d followed him anyway.
Ended up at a bar called Sting Ray’s. The girls there were cold tripping when Billy Ray appeared. He kept saying “follow your dreams.” He eventually told me to follow my dreams again. I took some pictures, and forgot about the shark:
Billy Ray, fostering dreams, at Sting Ray’s:
(image)
I ran back to the hotel, and showed my lady the proof of Billy Ray, but then inadvertently added to my chain of failure for not realizing that Miley Cyrus was filming her insipid 2010 coming-of-age-teen-romantic-drama-film entitled “The Last Song” on the island all the while. I’d thought I knew some special secret about dream-followings and my new, close friend Billy Ray. Wack. Miley Cyrus was henceforth forever etched into my subconscious, as I’d just looked uninformed again and still couldn’t find any Splenda.
Well, Miley appears to again be having another kind of coming-of-age entertainment extravaganza; a sort of bucking Rumspringa, like those Amish reality show kids who go to NYC to get Nikes and teeth have. Um, here’s Miley’s “Wrecking Ball:”
Ahem.
Britney Spears is foxy. Her handlers were aware of this, and her “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman” brand was spot-on. Girl just got it. Or, had it. She’s somehow allowed to shave her head and chase people with umbrellas. Alas, poor Miley Cyrus does not have it, and won’t seem to get it. And the controversy surrounding her confounding, digitized letting of her hair down is not likely to remain a sustainable cash-cow in the long haul. And when I say confounding, try watching “We Can’t Stop” with the sound turned off:
It looks like not-smart people made the video, and that perhaps edgy brother Trace was brought on as a consultant. Eh, but it does document supposed Western problems set to pop music, with vocal inflections seemingly borrowed from the superior entertainer Rihanna. Miley sings a somewhat sad, yet inspirational song about the grind of being exhausted with pleasure from partying too hard, but also that one must never stop partying, and that God wants one to party, and that caffeinated content-writers like myself need to step off. Still, it’s somewhat of a magical stitch in pop culture, because Miley likely has no idea how a typical 20-year-old might act, as she’s lived a very atypical life since childhood, and that her “savage” looking party was carefully calculated by a team of experts. Experts of parties. I wonder who’d thought up the waggy-tongue thing and the flaming dustbowl-era prison inmate from Tulsa hairdo?
Though, looking back over the video for “Wrecking Ball” one might wonder if Cyrus’ Sinéad O’Connor-esque mugging in the beginning of the clip might serve as some poignant, lonely-girl-w/-$150-millie revelation of self-awareness. Like what happened to Skynet in the Terminator franchise. A beautiful sadness, representing all the suffering ever experienced by every sentient being ever to exist in every possible universe, encapsulated in a single, glistening tear. Withal, the singer is soon licking a sledgehammer, and making everyone wildly uncomfortable.
Either way, the singer’s latest clip has reached almost 10 million viewers in less than 24 hours.
Images courtesy of YouTube and M. Fossum.