Miley’s War: Love and Rebellion in the Millennial Trenches

By Devin O’Neill

The following will be a review of the new Miley Cyrus album Bangerz, and the promotional and branding strategies surrounding the album’s release.

First we’ll discuss the music, since that’s definitely the neglected part of the equation.

Miley’s come up with a new pop sound, and it works. I love it. I’m going to have to rethink my approach to a lot of what’s on the radio, to Top 40, because of what’s been done here. It makes a lot of current pop sound dated. Recent Top 40’s been influenced heavily by 120-BPM dance music. Big-tent electronica. Think Ke$ha, LMFAO, even the new Britney. Miley’s drawn a line and departed from all that.

She and her team have accomplished this by, basically, incorporating cutting-edge trends in hip-hop – trap, drill, what-have-you – into her sound, alongside country and pop. The textures are round and thick, not excessively massive or blown-out like a lot of the pop on the radio. It’s got a great bottom end and tons of clarity, and reminds me of soundscapes I’ve heard from Die Antwoord, Drake, even Dr. Dre.

She’s mixing and matching musical styles, but her personality ties it all together into a vital brand. She can pose herself as country, and pull off a hip-hop-hoedown with Nelly on “4x4”, the only modern club banger I’ve ever heard with a straight-up cowgirl-line-dance rhythm.

The whole album is like this. She uses her raunchy southern-girl attitude to smooth the edges between raw hip-hop and the other forms she’s playing with, while rocking her new look. The result is very pop, very confrontational, and very her. One massive debutante fuck-you. “Do My Thang” is an archetypal example of the sound, and probably my favorite track on the album.

Her lyrics are raw, confrontational, and naive, which, in the context of this sort of ratchet/cowgirl persona, works perfectly. Think 2 Chainz yelling “SHE GOT A BIG BOOTY SO I CALL HER BIG BOOTY”. Hard-skulled punk-hop. In fact the weakest moments, lyrically, are those where Miley tries to over-rationalize or move outside her pure attitude. Attitude is the fuel this album runs on. Attitude and romance.

Yeah, Miley’s 20, so a lot of these songs are about love, sex, even marriage. They’re wide-eyed and openhearted, and, combined with her determination to decide what her own moral boundaries are, make for a compelling window into the fire of youth. It’s almost like she has unlimited energy, and she sings with an enormous amount of confidence and conviction.

The album art is straight out of Tumblr. A collaged, retro explosion of ridiculousness, neon, palm trees, and lo-fi digital. Anyone who hasn’t spent time in some pretty weird corners of the Internet might be confused. Others will recognize the aesthetic immediately, especially if they’re into performers like Geneva Jacuzzi. It’s all archival scuzz.

This singularity of identity, though, isn’t restricted to the album. So now, we get to the rest of the equation. Now we get to the secret plan.

Soon, an MTV documentary is going to air called Miley: The Movement. This documentary was filmed before, during, and after her VMA incident, and during the recording process for the album, way back before the release of the first single.

Yes, you heard that correctly. All of this was orchestrated in advance. The VMA performance, the reaction, the SNL gig, the release of the album and the documentary, everything. The official album release is on Tuesday, 8 October 2013, and the entire mainstream media machine is perfectly primed.

Wait, it gets better.

Her co-executive producer on the album is a 24-year-old called Mike Will Made It, another millennial. Given his other production credits, he’s clearly largely responsible for helping her craft her new sound.

Mike is associated with G.O.O.D. Music, Kanye West’s record label.

Which makes sense, of course, if Miley’s being mentored by Kanye, or if he regards her as some sort of muse. Which this Rolling Stone article seems to indicate. She’s attempting, in a very young, green way, to follow in his footsteps as a contemporary innovator. And he seems to think she’s today’s most vital force in pop music.

Immediately after the VMA performance, it was announced that Miley would be collaborating with Kanye on a remix of his aggressive single, “Black Skinhead.”

Everything’s falling into place.

Now, let’s talk about why Miley’s doing all this.

This girl’s been controlled by Disney since she was 14 years old. She never got to be a teenager. There’s a delightful symmetry in the fact that she recorded one new song, “SMS”, with a guest-spot from another southern, female Disney escapee: Britney Spears.

Just before all this new business started happening, Miley fired her old management. She wants to rebel, she wants to break free, she wants to create a new identity.

All this is standard behavior for a 20-year-old, but very few do it in the public eye, with such ferocity, with such a singular voice, and without having a mental breakdown. Miley is totally lucid in interviews and on SNL. She’s well aware of what’s going on. Sex and drugs are not weird things for a 20-year-old female to indulge in, especially one dedicated to going hard and living her own life. She’s angling for a particular image and she’s hitting her mark; she isn’t missing. If it pisses you off, it’s because it’s supposed to.

There’s a comment on that video that reads “ILLUMINATI BRAINWASHED DEVIL WORSHIPPING SKANK”. Seriously.

This is what makes me love her so much. Because she is flatly refusing to allow previous generations to allow, really, anybody but herself to delineate what constitutes moral, appropriate, or artistically compelling behavior for her as a performer or a person. This is what the best, most interesting performers do. We have forgotten that punk rock and hip-hop used to piss people off and disgust them. We’ve come to appreciate dignified, safe entertainment that adheres to academic notions of “quality” and “skill” and “artfulness”. I can hear John Lydon puking somewhere.

It’s never been clear to me, exactly, what people are afraid of, when it comes to Miley and others like her. They seem to think that their children are going to be perverted and corrupted, that the entire culture is going to collapse, because of the way Miley is behaving. It’s not. They won’t be.

This reaction represents the entire digital-fear, social-media-is-fucking-us-kids-up, millennial-paranoia problem. And we are so sick of all of it. Fuck it and fuck you too. That’s what Miley’s saying. We are fine. We are doing what we want. Leave us the hell alone. Hers is the essential millennial battle-cry.

At core, this is an issue of demographics. There is a group of people that Miley’s behavior shocks. But me, and my closest contemporaries, do not belong to this group. This is not shocking to us. It’s beautiful. This is how we live, and this is the world we live in. We have all tried drugs and gone to fetish parties and skinny-dipped in public pools. Miley is not only attempting to be provocative; she is also trying to be honest. This likely horrifies people even more.

But we don’t care what you think, and neither does she – that’s the entire point. This is the synergy, the energy, of rebellion. This is how culture finds the impetus to evolve.

We’re still dealing with cultural conversations, for example, around the “appropriateness” of sexuality and sexual expression. “Raunchiness”, nudity, these things still get attention. But they get attention because sex is still shocking. Because we don’t have conversations about it. Because we still have a problem with it. We have not solved this neurosis. Miley is pushing for it to finally die, but she wants the conversation to die on her note, not theirs. This is the new acceptable, this is the new normal, deal with it.

The people obsessed with her ass are the ones paying attention to it. The rest of us, her fans, are interested in her attitude, the weirdness and ghetto-fabulousness of her videos, the thick thud and clear quality of her music. I promise you we do not YouTube or Google her only to stare at her boobies for hours at a time. We do. Not. Care.

People argue that the “uninformed masses” react to, and buy, sex. She’s just riding that, they say. But THEY ARE the “uninformed masses”. They see her as dangerous, and she feels the pressure from that conversation. They’re trying to destroy her, and that’s why she fights. She feels the need to tell everyone she “can’t stop” because everyone is trying to stop her. You watched them doing it; heard them all yelling at her to quiet the fuck down. It’s been all over the news and all over your Facebook feed.

Why do they care? Is she that unsettling?

People’s reaction to her “rebelliousness”, the expectations placed upon her, are just an extension of the oppressive forces that were the impetus for her to do this in the first place. It’s Disney all over again, people want her to be safe and wholesome. And she wants out. And she will continue wanting out.

The conversation about her being objectified, her reducing her image to sexuality, about her using that to draw people’s attention away from the art, that kind of talk doesn’t occur in a vacuum. If people assume there’s nothing else of value going on because she’s being sexual, if that’s all they pay attention to, that’s not Miley’s fault. That’s theirs. It’s clearly important to her to express herself sexually right now, but her sexuality doesn’t have to be reductive. It’s made that way by those reading it, and ignoring everything else.

This is schizophrenic feminism – it’s a conflict that we haven’t even nearly figured out, the same conflict prodded at by Marie Calloway and others like her in more academic corners of the culture. The feminist community cannot decide if being overtly sexual in public is a claiming or a relinquishing of agency. Well, Miley isn’t waiting on the results of our decision. She’s just decided to be herself.

Really, though, this isn’t about the sex. There are porn stars younger than Miley all over the Internet. It’s about the context she’s placed her sexuality in; the deep weirdness of the entire situation, of the aesthetics of her evolution. This in aggregate is far more interesting than her ass alone could ever be, and that deep weirdness is the real reason people are paying attention.

I love few things more than deep weirdness.

I am not interested in wrapping myself in a comforting cocoon of nostalgia, or in cutting myself off from the pushers of the next generation. I’m always going to be pushing, I’m always going to be at the edge, and I’m never going to give up. I try as hard as possible to tune in to new culture. When I’m reminded that there are always going to be 20-year-old-kids throwing existential and aesthetic tantrums, and shoving culture kicking and screaming into new modes of expression, it gives me so much hope. This is why I’m inspired by Miley Cyrus. She makes me feel alive.

I don’t crave polished, “dignified” music, or carefully-curated, smooth-pop sexiness. I’m not interested in recycling aesthetics over and over again. These are not things I see as worth fighting for, artistically. But Miley, as simple as her work is, gave me something new to fight for. It made me realize that pop music could still surprise me, and that’s more valuable to me than having my sensibilities soothed and my aesthetic rubrics reinforced. I can’t help but feel the life in what she’s doing; the fire. And whenever I see that fire my instinct is to protect it.

They seem to like you for the moment, Miley. They’re coming around. But it might not last. They might surround you and try to shut you up again. Blow them back. Keep twerking. For me, and for all of us.

Author Bio:

Devin O’Neill is a transmedia storyteller, branding practitioner, and performance artist. He enjoys things he shouldn’t, on purpose, and tries to get other people to enjoy them too. Make friends with him at https://facebook.com/devinoneill

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THE SINGER AND THE SPECTACLE: Applause for Lady Gaga

By Devin O’Neill

Lady Gaga clearly just wants attention.

How does this still manage to be a controversial statement? But it is, it is. It looks so benign, but it hides a number of terrifying realities inside its apparently innocent body, just like she does.

Human beings are social creatures and social capital matters. It gets us access to resources, to mates, to power. Lady Gaga has access to resources, to mates, to power.

She violates the formula in a crucial way, though: she openly admits she wants our attention. She begs for it. She wants applause.

“Oh, she just wants attention, he just wants attention” is, in our culture, an insult. The implication, probably, is that the attention is undeserved. But there’s always a paradox right in the middle of this: why would we give someone that didn’t deserve it all this attention? Why is it it so hard to ignore, to keep the provocateurs from winning? Why does Lady Gaga have 39,783,855 followers on Twitter?

What would we discover if we delved into the deep mechanics of this? Attention might be more complicated than our dismissive vacillations indicate. What if we started thinking about WHY attention gets allocated? This forces us to remove the blanket “she’s provocative” from Gaga’s body of work and look at the images, hear the sounds, see the cuts and the edits and the screams and the sweat, and to say, why do people love this? Why do people love her?

That’s where Gaga Criticism came from. It all started with this girl’s desire for attention. Shame on her?

In order to come to a conclusion about her, we’re forced to understand the role of attention in our own lives. The age of personal branding’s given us a sort of fevered, obsessive love/hate connection with how we’re perceived, and none of us really seem to be able to get off the train. This social network is on top of the effort we already put into getting noticed when we craft a job application, dress up to go out, or work to form relationships with friends and colleagues. Nobody likes to be left out. In the age of PRISM, everybody’s famous. The only question is: how famous?

If Gaga’s providing us with anything, it’s got to be entertainment, as she claims. She certainly doesn’t clothe us, feed us, or fuck us, not literally or directly, anyway. She may inspire us, though. She may do that.

In the “Applause” video she walks us through all the varieties of her desperation for attention. She struts on a catwalk. She emulates classical works of art, and contemporary ones too. She grows a tail. And, like most of us have done over and over, she dances alone in her room in her underwear, nothing but a mattress, the floor, and the glory of her own existence.

Does our existence have glory? Do we deserve applause when we’re dancing alone in our underwear? Do we want applause and glory? Don’t lie now. Don’t lie. Be honest with me.

The entire time she’s clawing her way towards us, speaking directly at us, winking at us coquettishly, seducing at us, raging at us, pleading with us. I can’t think of another Gaga video where she spends so much time walking straight towards the camera. She carries a massive bouquet of flowers on her back like a cross, because she knows she’s a slave to our approval, to her own needs, far more effectively than we’re a slave to her vision. But she admits this. She admits it with authority.

She knows she needs us, desperately, and here she admits that. We don’t like to talk about how much we need other people at all. It makes us really uncomfortable. I need you. Please don’t go. Please hold me, Please encourage me. I’m nothing without you. Gaga’s yelling all that at the top of her lungs.

At the heart of the vortex that surrounds her howls one question over and over again – WHY WHY WHY WHY – the same question I ask when I wake up in the morning. And we watch, and we watch, and we watch, and we realize that even as we’re trying to understand the dramatic, stimulating, arresting visual and aural worlds she creates, we’re answering the question. We’re giving her what she needs.

When she was performing at the Born This Way Ball in Los Angeles, in the middle of “Bloody Mary” she slammed down to her sweaty knees on the stage, stretched out her arms and tilted her head to the roof, and screamed “SAY MY NAME! I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT THE FAME!” As we chanted GAGA-GAGA-GAGA along with the monk-like chorus of the song, her body twitched, eyes closed, hands grasping, as she absorbed our power. She knows where her bread is buttered.

“Give me the thing that I love / Put your hands up and make them touch” – a bizarrely literal, physical understanding of applause that makes clear the insane nature of a really old human ritual. Why do we do this? Why do we bang our hands together in hordes in order to create this tidal-wave of noise? When did we start? When will it stop? When will she stop?

We’re a giant approval machine, and we're all giving it to each other. The reasons why are often ambiguous. Gratitude, altruism, pity, solidarity, humor, or the support of a beautiful vision of how the world could be, a vision that we love, a vision we haven't seen before. A new vision.

During one particularly surreal segment of the video Gaga appears as a black swan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

Because no matter how loudly people groan about the fact that she’s dropping another album, or the fact that she’s found yet another way to collage aesthetics from the past and future, or the fact that her new work just isn't like her old work which isn’t like her older work, or the fact that she’s arguing with Perez Hilton on Twitter, or the fact that she’s only lassoed pop culture and bent it to her own selfish purposes, nobody, and I mean nobody, predicted Lady Gaga in advance.

Author Bio:

Devin O’Neill is a transmedia storyteller, branding practitioner, and performance artist. He enjoys things he shouldn’t, on purpose, and tries to get other people to enjoy them too. Make friends with him at https://facebook.com/devinoneill

Click here to follow Gaga Stigmata on Twitter.

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The Burqa’s Aura: Gaga and the End of Western Art

By Devin O’Neill

So Lady Gaga decided to wear a burqa, and sing about it, and now the Internet’s eating her alive.

http://jezebel.com/lady-gaga-has-a-burqa-problem-1055471506

This deserves some attention, truly. This conversation is about the future of artistic dialog. It’s much bigger than it looks on the surface.

First, I’m tired of hearing “oh, this is just sad grasping for attention, she’s just trying to cause controversy, this isn’t culturally relevant.” No, no. Stop and think. CLEARLY it is. CLEARLY she’s actually touching a sensitive cultural button. Otherwise people wouldn’t be so pissed off about it. If what she was doing was just a sad, irrelevant grab for attention, nobody would care about what she’s saying. But they do. In terms of starting an important cultural conversation, she already wins. Let’s clear that up to begin with. The argument has blossomed.

The subject under discussion is the shape that the dialog should now take. And the position of the above article makes a relatively familiar set of assumptions:

1. The assumption that she’s just wearing/singing about it to be controversial, and that she doesn’t understand the implications of what she’s doing.

2. The assumption of the default position that appropriation and collage always result in oppression and that her normalization of the burqa as a fashion statement will have a negative, not positive, effect on the communities that deal with the burqa as a social reality.

3. The assumption that the original implications of the burqa are not sexual.

A few too many assumptions for me.

The charged nature of the debate doesn’t just come from the position of Islam. It comes from Western ambivalence about Islam. On the one hand, we characterize Islam as the religious impetus for an entire body of regressive oppression in the Middle East. On the other, we feel deep guilt about that assumption and about our own cultural hegemony with relation to our pluralistic, progressive understandings of culture, and we want to grant Islam due respect and a “seat at the table.”

In this way, the burqa as a hot-button issue is very much a conversation generated by Western academia. The conversation is an expression of our ambivalence. We’re so interested in it because we’re so conflicted about it. That ambivalence is the minotaur in our labyrinth, the demon we’re repressing. As Voltaire put it, “to learn who (or what) rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”

In other words, how does the burqa enter our artistic, discursive, creative culture? Can it be remixed and experienced and questioned, as in the rest of the contemporary artistic field of experience, or are we to leave it untouched? Are we to have any relationship with it at all?

What, precisely, is Gaga saying about the burqa? Maybe that’s a good place to start.

One of the objections of her critics is that she’s sexualizing the burqa. This is absurd. The burqa is already deeply, thoroughly sexualized. It’s a garment designed to cover a woman’s body. Why would it be important to cover a woman’s body, if we’re not worried about adverse weather or witness protection?

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burqa

So what Gaga is actually doing is performing, in an exaggerated way, the function of the burqa. It’s not that she’s wearing it; it’s that she’s making a show of taking it off. That’s the sexualized element of her performance. First, she explicitly fronts a position that seems consistent with the position of Islam:

I’m not a wandering slave I am a woman of choice

My veil is protection for the gorgeousness of my face

And then:

Do you wanna see me naked, lover?

Do you wanna peak underneath the cover?

In other words, the controversial act here, apart from her cultural appropriation, is the revelation of her female body, the moment where she hints titillatingly at the removal of the burqa.

When presented with that starkness, the attack on her suddenly seems to require further inquiry from a feminist position. Why is it so important that she keep context with the burqa by keeping her body hidden? What, exactly, is the burqa for?

This isn’t about devaluation of the burqa – both cultural positions need to be considered and allowed validity. I want to make that clear. I’m not saying, “we Westerners are right; the burqa is repressive.” I’m also not saying, “Islam is right; the burqa is a good and positive cultural force.”

I’m simply asking: what is it for? I want a Muslim representative to tell me.

Is there a bar to clear for cultural understanding? How much do we have to learn? Is no real dialog possible, ever? If we determine the purpose of the burqa, can we then discuss the efficacy of that purpose? How separatist is it possible to be, on a planet where we’re culturally interconnected to the extent that we are?

Assuming the automatic invalidity of Gaga’s statement, assuming that it should be stricken from culture as a mistake, puts a stranglehold on academic discussion of the burqa as a creative, fashionable, cultural, or religious phenomenon. We’re not even sure we should be talking about it. Maybe certain things cannot be at the center of Western conceptions of academic and artistic dialog. Maybe we must be silent. Maybe we should cloak our opinions and ideas, and bow our heads.

Well, Gaga decided to talk about it. I’m glad she did.

Author Bio:

Devin O’Neill is a transmedia storyteller, branding practitioner, and performance artist. He enjoys things he shouldn’t, on purpose, and tries to get other people to enjoy them too. Make friends with him at https://facebook.com/devinoneill

Click here to follow Gaga Stigmata on Twitter.

Click here to “like” Gaga Stigmata on Facebook.

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Born This Way Ball - An Inventory

Gaga Stigmata recently wrote a guest piece on the Born This Way Ball for Gagaism.org. Here's a preview of the piece, with a link to the full post below. We are grateful to Scott Finley for inviting us to contribute to Gagaism.org's larger project on the BTW Ball.

“Americano” and Meat Dress

Women as meat: the oldest metaphor. As Carol J. Adams wrote in The Pornography of Meat, it is usually invisible, this practice of “viewing another as consumable – as something,” of presenting the Other packaged and ready for a lustfaced gaze-and-devour. (Or it is visible but ridiculous, laugh track-able: Jessie Spano reminding Slater yet again that she’s not a piece of meat.)

But here Gaga makes it visible, literally, disgustingly (because if she’s making visible a disgusting system, a disgusting [set of] practice[s], shouldn’t she provoke disgust?): Gaga was strung up with the other stripped-and-shined pink meats. But she broke free. She broke free even though she was almost dead. She found other self-freed meatgirls and grabbed guns – giant phallic guns: signifiers of American subjecthood and tools to blow apart the system that slayed and displayed them. These meatgirls didn’t wait to clean themselves. They didn’t put on ugly pantsuits from Express and get stuck on the middle rung of the corporate ladder. They’re about to smash patriarchy still in their meatsuits – still as the meatcreature-monsters the patriarchy has created. They manifest a more literal and pop-spectacular translation of Schneemann’s “Meat Joy.” Joyful-angry Othered meatgirls ready for consumption but redirecting the violence outward toward their perpetrators – viva la revolución!

– Samantha Cohen

“Bloody Mary”

Lady Gaga tells NME Magazine that “Bloody Mary” is “a song about Mary being divine and human at the same time.” When she performs “Bloody Mary” at the BTW Ball, it becomes a song about being fully human and fully A.I. A haunting, moaning, part-human-part-machine screeching sound fills the stage, reminiscent of the music that accompanies Kubrick’s monolith – that black pillar/3-D-screen that challenges viewers and ushers forth evolution’s newest stage. When Gaga glides upon the stage and the first chords of “Bloody Mary” sound out, there are really two stages present: the one she glides upon, and the new evolutionary one she embodies. Her white Perry Meek dress and helmet channel Kubrick’s spaceship, positioning her as human-become-spaceship (and spaceship is the body of Kubrick’s computer come into consciousness). As she floats forward, defying gravity, her dress also defies gravity, refusing to trail behind her and instead surging before her – as though both flesh and fashion disregard all known laws of nature, problematizing what forward movement looks like. Gaga is the second coming of Mary as 100% human and 100% HAL 9000. Surrounded by the audience’s little screens – those miniature monoliths – that both capture and create her, the next stage of humanity, Homo A.I.

– Meghan Vicks

The Castle

The castle in/before which the Born This Way Ball takes place is certainly a surprising choice .....

Click here to read the full piece on Gagaism.org, which includes entries by Samantha Cohen, Peter Kline, Devin O'Neill, Eddie McCaffray, Alexander Cavaluzzo, Laurence Ross, and Meghan Vicks.

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