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Miley Cyrus’s Quest for Realness

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<div class="descender" data-wc="83" word_count="83">
“Yeah, I smoke pot / 
Yeah, I love peace” is how Miley Cyrus opens her new record, “Miley 
Cyrus and the Dead Petz.” Her burly, overfed voice is soon placed in 
chorus with itself: “Do it! Do it!” she encourages. As far as 
declarations of autonomy go, this is lamentably low-stakes. Cyrus’s 
defensiveness is unfounded, nearly aspirational, a tirade against some 
internally conjured enemy who hates weed, hates peace. It’s a rebellion 
against a status quo so unrecognizable as not to register.</div>
<div data-wc="93" word_count="93">
Elsewhere,
 Cyrus has been a catalyst—her Happy Hippie Foundation has brought 
crucial notice to the struggles of homeless L.G.B.T.Q. kids. But, as the
 host of the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday night—a pageant it is 
impossible not to feel too old to be watching; somehow, we are each born
 too old ever to be caught watching it—Cyrus presented herself more like
 a teen left alone for the first time than as an agent of insurrection. 
Her gleefulness felt genuine—endearing, even—but her politicking, limp.</div>
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<div data-wc="72" word_count="72">
The
 real destabilizing act on Sunday was—has always been—the spontaneous 
exhibition of vulnerability: Justin Bieber squinting back tears after 
completing an aerial dance routine (the child, he is fleet of foot!), 
his face crumpled and small, like a mole creeping timidly into a circle 
of daylight. Or Kanye West in a square, cardboard-colored T-shirt, 
hollering away his past indiscretions: “I just wanted people to like me 
more!” (Feel you, bro.)</div>
<div data-wc="132" word_count="132">
The 
reigning neurosis of 2015—Is this real? This, what I’m seeing, is 
real?—made the Video Music Awards feel like an overcostumed poker match 
organized by a cabal of very rich, very careless people. Who was 
bluffing the hardest to relieve us of our cash? Pop music has always 
been a charade of one sort or another, and separating practiced 
performance from the spontaneous expression of feeling is a fool’s 
errand in this arena. But somehow the question of veracity has never 
felt more urgent. Every time self-professed regular gal Taylor Swift 
strode toward the podium—preternaturally poised, bloodless, her golden 
midriff pulled taut, like plastic wrap stretched across a bowl—thousands
 of heads tilted, wondering: Is the joke on me? This, is this a joke? Is
 it on me?</div>
<div data-wc="70" word_count="70">
Over the past several 
years, Miley Cyrus has struggled to establish credibility as a harbinger
 of seditiousness, as a pop singer unlike other pop singers, as a flash 
of truth in a sky speckled with dummy stars. The ambition here is Cosmic
 Underdog: a blissed-out, spirited, live-and-let-live scamp pogoing 
through Los Angeles, insisting upon justice, insisting upon total 
candor, insisting upon—in the parlance of the day—endless, unmediated 
“realness.”</div>
<div data-wc="104" word_count="104">
Cyrus earned her fame 
playing the shiny-haired title character on “Hannah Montana,” a 
laugh-tracked sitcom that ran on the Disney Channel from 2006 to 2011. 
After “Hannah Montana” ended, Cyrus began the familiar process of 
distancing herself from the show’s wholesome protagonist. Over time, her
 rebellion became grander and more obtuse—provocative ensembles led to 
visible tattoos, which led to the triumphant public consumption of 
alcohol, which segued into suggestive choreography, which morphed into 
the onstage simulation of various sex acts—but the goalposts were 
moving, too. Post-Lady Gaga, sartorial experimentation no longer even 
rated. A parade of increasingly outrageous outfits warranted yawns. 
Drugs, eh.</div>
<div data-wc="72" word_count="72">
After
 a handful of missteps, some of which felt naïve, if not odious—her 
appropriation of African-American tropes has enraged those who feel that
 she’s not entitled to mine that material; at the V.M.A.s, she used the 
word “mammy,” startlingly, in a dopey skit with Snoop Dogg—Cyrus 
stumbled upon an oddball sensei: Wayne Coyne, the singer and songwriter 
behind the Oklahoma-based psychedelic-pop band the Flaming Lips.</div>
<div data-wc="204" word_count="204">
That
 Coyne would be the figure to catapult Cyrus into a new orbit of 
“realness” is, for anyone who came of age in the early nineties, 
curious. Theirs is an improbable pairing. In 1993, the Lips had a 
modern-rock hit with “She Don’t Use Jelly,” a warbled, impish pop song 
from the group’s sixth album. It is at least partially about a woman who
 butters her toast with gobs of Vaseline, and it was at least partially 
hoisted onto the charts via a memorable cameo on “Beavis and Butt-head.”
 (“Uh oh. I think this is college music,” Butt-head worried.) Mostly it 
is joyfully nonsensical, the kind of thing that a child might make up if
 you fed her too many graham crackers and took all of her toys away. In 
1997, the band released “Zaireeka,” a four-CD album in which all four 
discs were intended for simultaneous broadcast on separate CD players. 
The band became critical sweethearts in 1999 with “The Soft Bulletin,” 
which was repeatedly compared to “Pet Sounds,” and again in 2002 with 
“Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots,” a record about heartache and 
mortality. None of these bona fides seemed to indicate an imminent 
partnership with a colossally famous sitcom star turned pop singer.</div>
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<div data-wc="73" word_count="73">
And
 yet. The origins of their friendship are uninteresting: a tweet, a 
string of jubilant emoji, Instagram. To be honest, it seems like they 
simply liked each other—that they enjoyed a strange, instinctive 
rapport. Eventually, Coyne changed Miley. That’s presumptuous to say, 
and perhaps disempowering, but there is a clear demarcation: Cyrus 
before Coyne, Cyrus later. It’s O.K. Sometimes people transform us, 
thwart the trajectory. We are different after.</div>
<div data-wc="121" word_count="121">
Cyrus
 has since embraced the Lips’s iconography, adopting bubbles, streaks of
 neon. She regularly affixes a cornucopia of absurdist accessories to 
her body. She has wiggled into a hot-dog suit and joined the Lips 
onstage for a show. At the 2014 Billboard Music Awards, she and Coyne 
performed a lush, blustery iteration of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”
 Coyne was wearing a deliberately placed puff of tinsel. Its generously 
styled tendrils swung down—far—between his legs. Cyrus wore a glittering
 cloak that made her resemble a tropical bird. On Twitter, Cyrus’s fans 
accused Coyne of being “on so much meth” and “a stupid old man.” (He is 
fifty-four; she is twenty-two.) It didn’t matter. They were partners.</div>
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<div data-wc="49" word_count="49">
At
 the V.M.A.s, that partnership was again put on display. Cyrus performed
 “Dooo It!” backed by a troupe of drag queens; halfway through her 
performance, Coyne crept up behind her and launched a rocket of confetti
 from a bong-shaped device that he lodged in her crotch.</div>
<a class="tny-slot" data-smart-underline-link-always="" data-smart-underline-link-background-position="68" data-smart-underline-link-color="rgb(0, 0, 0)" data-total-words="554" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="/3"></a>  <a class="tny-page" data-smart-underline-link-always="" data-smart-underline-link-background-position="68" data-smart-underline-link-color="rgb(0, 0, 0)" data-total-words="830" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="/2"></a>  <a class="tny-slot" data-smart-underline-link-always="" data-smart-underline-link-background-position="68" data-smart-underline-link-color="rgb(0, 0, 0)" data-total-words="1024" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="/4"></a> <br />
<div data-wc="91" word_count="91">
Shortly
 thereafter, “Miley Cyrus and the Dead Petz” was placed on SoundCloud, 
where it could be streamed, in its entirety, for free. Coyne co-wrote 
“Dooo It!” and produced much of the record, and it is evident that it 
was important to Cyrus that he be there for the first announcement of 
its existence. That gesture of friendship—a union that’s as earnest and 
symbiotic at it is flummoxing—trumped Cyrus’s sexual peacocking and 
endless pot references. It was, in many ways, the most authentically 
subversive moment of the evening.</div>

Miley Cyrus’s Quest for Realness

“Yeah, I smoke pot / Yeah, I love peace” is how Miley Cyrus opens her new record, “Miley Cyrus and the Dead Petz.” Her burly, overfed voice is soon placed in chorus with itself: “Do it! Do it!” she encourages. As far as declarations of autonomy go, this is lamentably low-stakes. Cyrus’s defens…

01Sep2015

What Joe Biden’s previous presidential campaigns can tell us about how he’ll make his big decision this year

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<i>Vice President Joe Biden, left, talks with </i><i><i>Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Del.,</i> his longtime confidant and aide, in the U.S. Capitol in 2010. (Photo: Tom Williams/Roll Call via Getty Images)</i></div>
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Vice President Joe Biden is expected to reveal in the coming weeks whether he’ll make a third bid for the presidency, closing out the last big, open question about the makeup of the 2016 presidential field and ending what has become the speculative political parlor game of the summer.</div>
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As people try to understand what Biden might be thinking, it’s worth taking a look at how he approached his previous bids for presidency in 1988 (when he pulled out of the race amid a plagiarism controversy before voting began) and 2008 (when he dropped out after coming in fifth in the Iowa caucuses).</div>
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One of the most instructive texts on this front is an <a href="http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/history/e_one_section_no_teasers/OralHistoryList.htm" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; color: #ff6633; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">oral history conducted by the U.S. Senate’s historian in 2011</a> with Biden’s longtime confidant and top aide, former U.S. Sen. Ted Kaufman. Kaufman spent decades as Biden’s chief of staff, then briefly filled his boss’s Delaware Senate seat in 2009 when Biden left for the White House.</div>
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Kaufman’s extensive and multipart talk with Don Ritchie, now historian emeritus of the Senate, covered several key topics about Biden’s political life, including an <a href="http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/Kaufman_3.pdf" rel="nofollow" style="background-color: transparent; color: #ff6633; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">entire interview titled “Biden for President.”</a></div>
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While some things have obviously changed since Biden’s earlier races for the White House — age, experience, the emergence and evolution of the Internet — other important things have remained constant: Biden’s tight inner circle, his family-first nature and his pragmatic approach to politics. With that in mind, Yahoo News culled the lengthy on-the-record interview with Kaufman, who declined to comment beyond his previous accounts, to find nuggets that might reveal a little bit about how the vice president has previously weighed presidential decisions and is approaching the last big political choice of his elected career.</div>
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<span style="font-weight: 700;">For Biden, family set the terms for how and when to enter the presidential race:</span></div>
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“Basically after the ’84 election we started preparing for a presidential election. Essentially what was done was there was a decision made. The first decision always was personal and family with Joe Biden, and by the way I think it’s underrated in terms of all politicians, there’s a number of misperceptions out there with the public, just like I’m sure it is in trying to understand baseball players or understand academics, but when you’re inside you realize that what drives most politicians’ decision is personal. How does it affect my family? If my family’s not going to be onboard for this campaign, I’m not running. … It’s a practical and a personal problem. You will probably fail, if you run without having your family squared away — we can go back through history and look at people who had done that, or tried to do that. So the first decision was: was the family ready to do this.”</div>
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<span style="font-weight: 700;">Biden thought years of advance planning made for a better White House bid:</span></div>
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“I think we knew better than most people what was required. We knew that for this incredibly complex enterprise, getting started early was essential. You could run at the end, like Gore ran at the end in ’88 and did very well, so you don’t have to but it really was better to do it over the long pull. So we started in ’84 in terms of national scheduling.”</div>
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What Joe Biden’s previous presidential campaigns can tell us about how he’ll make his big decision this year

Vice President Joe Biden, left, talks with Sen. Ted Kaufman, D-Del., his longtime confidant and aide, in the U.S. Capitol in 2010. (Photo: Tom Williams/Roll Call via Getty Images) Vice President Joe Biden is expected to reveal in the coming weeks whether he’ll make a third bid for the presidency, c…