Read Online The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic by Jessica Hopper - Free Book Online
Authors: Jessica Hopper
Tags: Music Criticism
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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.
LOUDER THAN LOVE:
MY TEEN GRUNGE POSERDOM
EMP Conference paper, Spring 2005
There was a time, not too terribly long ago, when I was not cool. In 1990, I was 14, almost 15, and just entered the ninth grade at the largest high school in Minneapolis and was orbiting somewhere between loner dork and amorphous weirdo. My wardrobe consisted of a lot of black clothes, a lot of orange clothes, my mother’s business apparel from the ‘80s; I wore cowboy boots and long, unbelted tunics that made me look like I was in a cult. I spent a lot of time alone, sewing hats and reading news magazines to keep up on international politics. The music I knew about was from the radio. I had a few tapes I liked: the B-52’s Cosmic Thing , Deee-Lite, the first Tracy Chapman album. I mostly listened to the tapes on the weekend, when I was delivering my newspaper route, though sometimes I would lay in bed at night and listen to the Tracy Chapman tape over and over and cry a
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.
LOUDER THAN LOVE:
MY TEEN GRUNGE POSERDOM
EMP Conference paper, Spring 2005
There was a time, not too terribly long ago, when I was not cool. In 1990, I was 14, almost 15, and just entered the ninth grade at the largest high school in Minneapolis and was orbiting somewhere between loner dork and amorphous weirdo. My wardrobe consisted of a lot of black clothes, a lot of orange clothes, my mother’s business apparel from the ‘80s; I wore cowboy boots and long, unbelted tunics that made me look like I was in a cult. I spent a lot of time alone, sewing hats and reading news magazines to keep up on international politics. The music I knew about was from the radio. I had a few tapes I liked: the B-52’s Cosmic Thing , Deee-Lite, the first Tracy Chapman album. I mostly listened to the tapes on the weekend, when I was delivering my newspaper route, though sometimes I would lay in bed at night and listen to the Tracy Chapman tape over and over and cry a
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