“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.
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.
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.)
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?
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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