{"id":6414,"date":"2013-09-03T15:52:42","date_gmt":"2013-09-03T22:52:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=6414"},"modified":"2013-09-03T15:52:42","modified_gmt":"2013-09-03T22:52:42","slug":"miley-cyrus-and-ugly-sex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/miley-cyrus-and-ugly-sex\/","title":{"rendered":"Miley Cyrus and Ugly Sex"},"content":{"rendered":"

Was the MTV performance meant to be repellent rather than enticing?<\/h3>\n

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

An older generation used to call the boredom of bad habits \u201creaching rock bottom\u201d; the present variant perhaps is \u201cjumping the shark\u201d \u2014 that moment when the tiresome gimmicks no longer work, and the show is over.<\/p>\n

In a moral sense, Miley Cyrus reached that tipping point for America, slapping us into admitting that most of our popular icons are crass, talentless bores, and that our own tastes, which created them, lead nowhere but to oblivion.<\/p>\n

After all, what does an affluent and leisured culture do when it has nothing much to rebel against?<\/p>\n

That was poor Ms. Cyrus\u2019s recent dilemma at the MTV awards ceremony. There are no real rules about popular dance anymore: no set steps, no moves borrowed from ballet, not even a few adaptations from scripted square dancing. It is all free-form wiggling and gyrating \u2014 twerking \u2014 as if to shout out, \u201cWho are you to say that fake screwing in a vinyl bikini is not dance?\u201d<\/p>\n

The same is true of music and lyrics. You can talk to a drumbeat and call it music. You can hit the same chord ad infinitum and call it music. You can scream almost anything and call it music. Doggerel becomes lyrics. Half notes, full rests, rhyme, meter \u2014 all that is irrelevant, to the degree it is even still remembered. That is why we often see our performers just stop singing for a few moments in a daze; the dead beat goes on without their constant mindless input.<\/p>\n

In the first part of the 20th century modernist contrarians \u00a0established a counter-music, an antithesis to classical genres. Populist dancers announced, \u201cWho needs ballroom formality?\u201d But again, how do you oppose that opposition, without a reactionary, full-circle return to formalism?<\/p>\n

The advisers of Miley Cyrus should have a problem in that the 20-year-old ignoramus is not a Paris showgirl in the\u00a0Folies Tr\u00e9vise\u00a0<\/em>of the 1870s, not an Impressionist artist in 1890, not a Ziegfeld Girl circa 1910, not a poet of the Great War, not a Depression-era novelist, and most surely not a blues singer in 1940 \u2014 all defiant in arguing that in turbulent times genres, rules, protocols in the arts, literature, and popular expression were confining, hypocritical, and fossilized (as if it is more difficult and challenging to write a poem without iambic pentameter, rhyme, or poetic diction).<\/p>\n

Miley Cyrus, to the extent she was intent on anything other than making more money and headlines, seemed to be trying to rebel against the rebellion, most likely Madonna and her own knockoff insurgent, Lady Gaga. But given that both of them have appeared on stage nine-tenths nude, routinely simulated sex in front of millions, and adopted symbols and sets designed to gross out Middle America, how do you go beyond their uncouthness? Higher platform shoes? More videos of public nudity? Two foam fingers?<\/p>\n

For going \u201cbeyond\u201d \u2014 not singing more mellifluously, dancing more adroitly, or energizing the crowd more enthusiastically \u2014 is now the point. In Petronius Arbiter\u2019s first-century novel,\u00a0The Satyricon<\/em>, the fatter and more repugnant is Trimalchio, and the more loudly he passes wind, burps, mangles mythology, and invokes scatology, the more he thinks that he appeals to his bored dinner guests. In terms of repugnance, Miley Cyrus was the anorexic and mobile version of Jabba the Hutt.<\/p>\n

She has neither the training nor the discipline to go formal retro. She surely was not going to appear in her vinyl bikini, put on ballet shoes, and do a bit from\u00a0Swan Lake<\/em>\u00a0(now\u00a0that<\/em>\u00a0would be shocking). Nor was she going to offer \u201cO mio babbino caro\u201d from Puccini\u2019s opera\u00a0Gianni Schicchi<\/em>, waving her huge foam finger in Mitch Miller sing-along fashion. That too these days would be shocking.<\/p>\n

So what is a poor multimillionaire celebrity to do in the age of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, when slumming has become pass\u00e9 and the audience has become post-decadent? Just say, \u201cAnd you idiots are paying for this\u201d?<\/p>\n

There are no large cultural stimuli to force Cyrus the Younger to question society\u2019s classical norms. No struggle to win the vote for women and then blacks. No Verdun, with a million dead in the muck. No Great Depression, with rampant starvation.<\/p>\n

Instead we live in a psychodramatic age of virtual oppression and feigned want, in which \u201cLetter from Birmingham Jail\u201d is updated with Oprah\u2019s melodramatic account of being denied a closer look at a $38,000 Swiss handbag. Our version of D-Day is the question whether or not to lob a few cruise missiles at Bashar Assad to make Obama\u2019s redlines red. Soup kitchens and five-cent apples have transmogrified into electronic EBT cards and Obamaphones. Where is the elemental inspiration, the existential need to tap popular anguish and turn it into revolutionary artistic expression?<\/p>\n

If multimillionaire rapper Jay-Z performs at the White House, where is to be found the font of resistance? In short \u2014 resistance to what?<\/p>\n

In shock-jock Miley\u2019s defense, she did win our attention and get top ratings. How so?<\/p>\n

Ostensibly, she brilliantly pawned her former Disney image as sweet, wholesome Hannah Montana for a grotesque postmodern Grendel\u2019s mother \u2014 yet still replete with a whiff of teenage tennies and stuffed teddy bears. Madonna tried that disconnect with her anti-Christian shtick, which supposedly bounced off her Italian Catholic roots. But by the time the public had seen her genitalia, they had no idea of and did not care about what she had once been.<\/p>\n

But Miley? Imagine Shirley Temple doing a pre\u2013Deep Throat<\/em>\u00a0or Hayley Mills stripped down to vinyl underwear.<\/p>\n

Miley rightly sensed that rivals Madonna\u00a0and Lady Gaga had no constructed innocence to deconstruct. And neither of the two had a celebrity dad to bounce off as a pouty teenager gone wild. Ms. Ciccone and Ms. Germanotta needed silly made-up shock names; Billy Ray had taken care of that for Miley. (And thank God for Billy Ray, or we might have gotten Miley a.k.a. something like Mommy Superior or\u00a0Sister Nothing.)<\/p>\n

She also accomplished in live performance a grotesqueness that once required animation and, later, computer simulation \u2014 constructing a spooky female villain behaving as repugnantly as she appeared. Out jumped onto the MTV stage a rare female orc, or a weird androgynous concoction from Frank Miller\u2019s\u00a0Sin City<\/em>. For us old guys, Miley Cyrus almost seemed like one of the 1960s Dynamation villain serpents conjured up by Ray Harryhausen in his Sinbad or Jason movies. She even had the Harryhausen slithering tongue, wooden movements, and hissing down pat. In other words, she tried her best to appear ugly and unappealing.<\/p>\n

Of course, we have seen far more intriguing transformations (from truly talented performers) to keep up with the changing times \u2014 the suited and tied heartthrob Beatles suddenly going psychedelic, altering their appearance and turning into stoned critics of the Western establishment, as \u201cShe loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah\u201d morphed into \u201cBack in the U.S.S.R.\u201d and \u201cSgt. Pepper\u2019s Lonely Hearts Club Band.\u201d\u00a0Again, Miley had an edge over them all, having once been an anti\u2013Britney Spears wholesome teenybopper, while Madonna and Lady Gaga had never trafficked in anything other than sexual boredom.<\/p>\n

But less remarked upon was her inspired art of inversion. In all candor, Ms. Cyrus is hardly a natural beauty or talent. There is absolutely nothing about her 20-year-old figure that is sensual, and she has what we used to call in polite terms a \u201cdifferent\u201d face. Hence the previous wise move of adding lots of hair and loose-fitting clothes.<\/p>\n

In truth, the old cute look was a big seller, not just because a few million American parents still wished their teenaged daughters to have upright-appearing role models, but also because it hid rather than accentuated Miley\u2019s otherwise plain sort of looks.<\/p>\n

But at the MTV awards, her vinyl bikini reminded us that she has essentially no curves. Shoulders, hips, and waistline meet the same plumb line. Apparently not being fat and middle aged is somehow supposed to be sexy. Again, the exposure of her Twiggy-like anti-sex persona was precisely her intent \u2014 to repel rather than entice.<\/p>\n

The reptilian tongue was supposed to suggest past and current mastery of some oral sexual act, but it only added to the repugnance. Her goatish permed horns reminded us why she wisely used to drape her hair over as much of her physiognomy as possible. And yet all that deliberate unattractiveness was as if to throw down the gauntlet: \u201cYour old concocted Miley was actually no beauty \u2014 now see me full bore and deal with the old con.\u201d<\/p>\n

Take away the embarrassing bear sets, the foam finger, her pats on a nearby big rear end, and her randy thruster in the prison stripes, and the show\u2019s effect was of some desperate frontier tomboy, coming of age in her under-bloomers and rutting around the hayloft in search of the hired hand \u2014 all set to some sort of mooing and grunting background barnyard noise.<\/p>\n

Ugly sex is all that is left after revolutionary cool.<\/p>\n

NRO\u00a0contributor Victor Davis\u00a0Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is\u00a0<\/em>The Savior Generals<\/a><\/span>, published this spring by Bloomsbury Books.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Was the MTV performance meant to be repellent rather than enticing? by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online An older generation used to call the boredom of bad habits \u201creaching rock bottom\u201d; the present variant perhaps is \u201cjumping the shark\u201d \u2014 that moment when the tiresome gimmicks no longer work, and the show is over.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[86],"tags":[1025,94,1024],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1Fs","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6787,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-culture-in-ruins\/","url_meta":{"origin":6414,"position":0},"title":"A Culture in Ruins","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 25, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0PJ Media\u00a0 Lady Gaga\u00a0reportedly spent $25 million\u00a0on pop art to jazz up her new and apparently underwhelming album. 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