The VMAs, if you’re really not aware, is MTV’s yearly celebration of pop music in all its glorious banality. It’s a ceremony of universally fake smiles, constructed personalities, broad, simple, thoughtless entertainment and a who’s-who of dead-eyed products disguised as human beings. I paid an unusual amount of attention to the show this year, and while flicking through the coverage online thanks to a curious and overwhelming boredom, I found myself in an uncomfortable world of American superficiality that, now I don’t watch TV anymore, I’d almost forgot existed. It reminded me that, as much as I’ve tried my hardest to be an apologist for pop music as a necessary evil in the capitalist culture that Western history’s sailed into, the sheer banality and obnoxiously shallow direction that pop music has taken is undeniable. And it just seems to be getting worse.
The
main walking, talking sack of money that everyone’s talking about is Miley
Cyrus. Miley Cyrus is part of a long trend in the dark and mysterious pop
culture machine to get ‘em while they’re young, like a Colombian drug cartel –
creating a pop superstar from a disgustingly young age to bring in the younger
audiences and then unsubtly sexualising them later on in order to cater for
everyone else; because the ‘sex sells’ mantra has never been more obsessively taken
to heart than in the music industry. If you talk about Justin Bieber with the
anti-Bieber crowd, most of them tend to say that all they’re waiting for is the
inevitable ‘fall’ that comes to any child star when the onset of puberty,
megalomania, intense media scrutiny and a thousand other weights of intense
pressure crush them to breaking point. People love that narrative. Miley Cyrus
hasn’t lost it just yet, and there’s always an outside chance that she might
never properly ‘lose it’ in a Michael Jackson or a Britney Spears kind of way, but
nevertheless her journey from simple child to an 'adult' adult is looking gently misguided to say the least.
If
you’re a female pop star, the general expectation is that you have to be hypersexualised.
After all, to put it cynically, you need something to get people talking about
you, and it’s not gonna be the talent. Beyoncé is the most obvious exception
here – she’s mastered using her talent alongside her sexuality without coming
across as crude and exploitative. Katy Perry would be the opposite of this, embodied
as she is by some seriously terrible music and a complete lack of intelligence
and integrity, while constantly pandering to the childish sexual mores of her
audience as the basis of her whole career (Remember that Perry shot to fame
with the song ‘I Kissed a Girl’). This is the route Cyrus has chosen – or rather
the one that the clandestine marketing panel behind her persona has chosen. It
was most apparent in the ‘We Can’t Stop’ video, which appeared to me like a post-gangsta-rap
Less Than Zero, and revealed the brand new finally-legal-now sexy Miley Cyrus
in the same way you’d reveal a new iPhone generation. Cyrus smacking other
girls’ bums and writhing around in the doggy position is a vision of the other
great mantra of any big entertainment industry in the last decade or so – ‘subtlety
doesn’t sell’.
Chucking
some unsubtle sex appeal onto Cyrus’ act when she reached adulthood wasn’t
particularly shocking or at all surprising in itself, but this year at the VMAs
that unimaginative marketing strategy hit a new level of OTT in Miley Cyrus’
performance and her new general demeanour. For one thing, she couldn’t keep her
tongue in her mouth, slapping it out at the side every now and then like an
escaped slug in order to remind the thousands of onlookers that she’s ‘feisty’
and ‘raunchy’ and ‘up for it’ in the most horrendously creepy way possible,
also stopping to wipe her fanny on a giant teddy bear and unskilfully twerk every
now and then (because the mainstream media has discovered twerking in the same
way a mum discovers the word ‘cool’). She sings ‘We Can’t Stop’, of course,
which sounds like all the obnoxiousness of a single generation concentrated
into a boring pop hit, but then just when I think I’ve seen enough embarrassment
for one night, Robin bloody Thicke waddles out of the darkness, and the two
creepiest examples of everything wrong with the sexual attitudes of Western
culture collide in a head-cradlingly cringe display of retrograde stupidity.
To
take a minute just to talk about Robin Thicke, ‘Blurred Lines’ is a song I can’t
fucking stand and will never forgive the world for accepting as part of the fabric
of human culture in this day and age. The song itself isn’t bad and is actually
pretty interestingly made and decently produced and sticks in your head like a
skewer, but the lyrics, its message, its approach and of course its video,
only appear to represent something a lot ‘darker’ than the simple ‘joke’ that
Thicke (who himself is an imbecile, by the way) tried to pass it off as. The
word that me and most other critics of the song like to use in relation to it
is creepy. It’s so creepy. It reeks
with the stench of the male gaze. It drips with the excited sweat of the
rapist. ‘I know you want it’, ‘you’re a good girl’, ‘do it like it hurt’, eugh,
it’s enough to make you shudder. Guys singing about wanting to have sex with
girls and girls wanting to have sex with them isn’t cause in itself for the
feminist alarm bells to start ringing, but the attitude in what’s possibly the
biggest song of the year sounding like the mutterings of a masturbating sex
offender has aggravated me more than anything else pop music has shit into my
stream in the past eight months.
So
seeing Miley Cyrus, who performs with the style of an ignored stripper, lech
herself shamelessly onto Thicke, who looked like a dad with a guilty boner, inflamed
a conservative part of my brain that I beforehand never knew existed. Alice
Glass said once in an NME interview that the mainstream media ‘sells sex to
children’, and she’s right. Girls are being taught to be used and guys are
being taught to be users. Sex towers above all other values. Miley Cyrus is
trying so hard to be ‘raunchy’ because that’s what the established pop music
culture requires of her. The status quo at the moment is for men to be almost
obsessively perverted and sex-crazed and for women to be shamelessly
objectified, norms which instead of appearing to be moving past, we as a
culture all seem to be encouraging and pushing to undignified levels. Criticism
of this kind of shit isn’t prudish, or against free forms of sexual expression,
because there’s nothing sexually liberating about any of this crap. It’s all
restrictive and mindless and cheap and basic and catering to an audience of
backwards-minded sex-obsessed simpletons which I hope doesn’t exist in as
massive a chunk of the population as watching the VMAs would lead you to
believe. Also, I tend to think that trying to manipulate your base urges to get you to buy into a product is an insult to you as a human being.
There
is hope in the fact that Cyrus’ performance absolutely bombed; as far as I can
tell from the online reaction and the awesome viral Smith family reaction screenshot, everyone found it fucking hilariously awful.
But, although using crude sexuality in order to cynically grab attention is
nothing new in any form of pop culture, Cyrus’ failed attempt last night seemed
indicative of something really fucked-up in the modern mindset of North America
and its cultural compatriots here in the UK. The almighty power of the pop
music industry is infusing younger generations with a depressingly immature and
shallow sexual attitude, and upholding and absolving these attitudes where they’re
already present. And of all the things that depressed me about watching a small
fragment of the VMAs – the shit music, the vacuous coverage, the self-centred
brown nosing, the repressed congeniality of the employees of the mainstream – I
think it was being reminded of mainstream culture’s pernicious championing of perverse
sexuality and gender attitudes that depressed me the most. The VMAs is a parade
for the Nazis of culture.
