Crazy like a fox.
But that ain't all.
More on that shortly.
First, check out this article from USA Today music writer and Facebook friend Brian Mansfield.
The problem with Miley Cyrus isn't that she has broken bad. It's that she's so confusing. One day, she's sexualizing herself without actually being sexy, putting her hair up in double buns like a baby devil's stubby horns and sticking her tongue out like a cartoon-character Calvin making faces at his stuffed tiger. The next, it seems, she's singing Wrecking Ball, a devastating piece of heartbreak pop that ranks among the year's very finest singles.
If she's trying to show how grown up she is by how lewdly she can act, she's not doing a very good job of it. At the same time, conventional wisdom suggests that rubbing foam fingers in places foam fingers ought not go doesn't help her credibility as a singer of serious fare like Wrecking Ball.
Perhaps, as proposed by Elton John — who, like Cyrus, played this weekend's iHeartRadio Music Festival in Las Vegas — she's a "meltdown waiting to happen." Frankly, it's hard to tell.
What's great about Miley Cyrus, though, is that she's so funny. She has a weird and finely tuned sense of humor, which she displayed Saturday during two performances at the festival, particularly her afternoon set at the Music Festival Village.
Dressed in a white hot-pants suit with laces that went flying every time she swiveled her hips toward the audience, Cyrus performed We Can't Stop and Party in the U.S.A. while surrounded by dancers wearing inflatable mushrooms and rainbows, as well as twerking little people. The colorfully absurd stage looked like a cross between a Super Mario Bros. video game and a demented early-'70s children's television show.
With all Cyrus' activity the past few weeks — her performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, appearing naked in her Wrecking Ball video, breaking up with Liam Hensworth — she's shown an uncanny ability to astonish. But Cyrus could hardly have come up with anything more flat-out flabbergasting Saturday than one of her song choices — Look What They've Done to My Song, Ma.
Written by Melanie Safka of Brand New Key fame, Look What They've Done to My Song, Ma was a modest hit in 1970 for the New Seekers (and, later, a Quaker Oats jingle). Though it was a fairly common song in the '70s, covered by Ray Charles, country singer Billie Joe Spears and others, it was never a particularly big hit. It's certainly not the sort of song anyone would expect a 20-year-old like Cyrus to know.
It's lyrics, though, are particularly relevant to someone who finds herself besieged by the media at exactly the time she's presenting the music she hopes will define her as a young adult artist:
Look what they've done to my brain, MaCyrus' performance was a bizarre, funny pop-culture moment, for sure, but it also showed the singer revealing herself to critics of an older generation by using one of their own songs, a markedly mature move for a young woman who seldom receives the benefit of that doubt.
Look what they've done to my brain
Yeah, they picked it like a chicken bone, and they think I'm half insane, Ma
Look what they've done to my brain
And then there was Wrecking Ball. Cyrus performed the song in front of a concert audience for the first time Saturday afternoon, and then again that night. The afternoon performance moved her to tears. When she finished singing, she had mascara running down her face.
The weird thing about Wrecking Ball is that all the nuttiness of Cyrus' public persona doesn't diminish the song. If anything, the controversy, the bizarre faces, the fear for her mental stability, whatever you want to call it, actually enhances the emotional impact of her performance — the same way country singers often use a cornball novelty to set up a real heartbreaker.
It's entirely possible that Cyrus' recent bizarre antics are all a set-up. Yes, it's a way to create attention, but not solely for attention's sake. Cyrus may have a longer game in mind.
Think of Cyrus as a cute, young, female Andy Kaufman type, and the confusing pieces of her recent behavior start to make sense. Despite all his other issues, the late comedian understood how to generate heat by turning people against him, a principle he learned from watching professional wrestlers.
And, really, how surprised would anyone be to see Cyrus show up some week on WWE's Monday Night Raw? All her post-VMAs talk about being "messed up" or "an adult acting like a kid" has the feel of a cerebral wrestling villain cutting promos. She's turning "heel."
Why in the world would she do that? Any wrestler can tell you that the more people hate you as a heel, the more they love you when you become a "face," or a good guy, again. Come to think of it, Madonna could probably tell you a thing or two about that, as well. If Cyrus is stringing her haters along Kaufman-style, it's a brilliant, well-played joke.
Don't want to give Cyrus credit for being that smart? Fine. Maybe she hasn't consciously set her course. Just remember, though: All her life she's had the example and advice of a father who was a one-hit-wonder country singer and also was smarter than a lot of people thought he was. He may not approve of every creative choice she makes, but he's there to give her guidance and support whenever she wants it.
Besides, anybody who has the good sense to cut Wrecking Ball and the ability to deliver it like Cyrus does can't be that stupid
As always, Brian provides thoughtful and insightful observation.
And, in this case, in my humble o, toes right up to, but never steps over, the X that marks the spot where one becomes an apologist for Miley's somewhat dull bladed hacking attempt to be considered cutting edge.
I can't help, though, but be drawn back, each time I read more, and/or another interpretation, of all things Cyrus, to the list of those who have come, even, in their own way, twerked, their way into, if not our hearts then certainly the history of those whose "outrageous" behavior marked, at the time, the end of civilization as we knew it and, eventually, became announcements of the "new era" packaged in the very envelopes said pioneers were pushing.
Little Richard.
Elvis.
The Stones.
(Chronologically, and seemingly, that entry should have been The Beatles, but their suspected decadent "mop topped yeah, yeah, yeah-ing" was pretty much blown out of number one on the Sodom and Gomorrah charts, just a few short months later by the back alley, soon to be Satanic, gyrations of Mick and company.)
Madonna.
Gaga.
And now.....
Nope, sorry.
Can't bring myself to do it.
Even though Miley, pretty transparently and obviously, wants to be the next name on that list.
The word "obviously" used in the spirit of, for example, "when he wielded the sledge hammer and smashed the living shit out of that living room, he was obviously upset that his wife insisted that he stop watching so much football."
And while all of this, every wrecking ball shattered shard of minutiae having to do with any and all things Miley, is, at the core, nothing more than a matter of personal opinion and/or taste, I'm also synaptically incapable of resisting the temptation to pick at least one nit as regards Brian's P.O.V.
Andy Kaufman?
Shu-yeah.
Right.
Andrew Dice Clay, maybe.
But, you say potato, I say are you fucking kidding me aside, here's a thing.
Little Destiny Hope Cyrus is a genuinely talented kid.
Check out You Tube and look for something called The Backyard Sessions.
The girl got some homespun game.
And with a little more luck, a little genuine hard work and a whole lot of rebooting could very possibly become an important contributor to the pop history books.
Meanwhile, though, she seems to be caught up in this Star Trekish space/time causality loop that keeps her scurrying ever faster around and around the hamster wheel of more and bigger tattoos, boob shots, ass flashes, tongue wavings and "hey, look at how outrageous I'm being as I desperately work to make you think that I'm outrageous" pawing in the quest of pushing the aforementioned envelope.
While professional observers, like Brian, and myself, for that matter, spend time taking it apart, looking at it and then offering up well intended pocket change in the amount of two cents about what it all means.
Seven and eight year olds who watch Hannah Montana re-runs and like the groove of "Wrecking Ball" think Miley is the bomb.
And the vast majority of those over the age of eight spend whatever time they spend bothering to consider the kid, at all, do so with an affectionate rolling of the eyes.
There really is some quality stuff lurking in the middle of all that falderal.
But genuine outrageousness is a lot like genuine comedy.
The comic actor knows that it's light years funnier when you act like you don't know its funny.
Miley, dumb, smart or crazy like a fox, still doesn't seem to grasp, and apparently has no one around willing to tell truth to power, that she's turned her presentation into little more than a freak show.
And if perception is reality, then presentation results in perception.
And presentation is paramount.
Think KFC.
The only difference between respected, popular acceptance and freak show is the manner in which the chickens get slaughtered.
Crazy like a fox?
Maybe.
But the fox isn't known for its subtlety when it comes to dispatching the chickens.
