MILEY CYRUS THREAD OF DOOM

[J.T.]

Oh I agree but at least Japanophiles want to visit their fantasyland.  I think I'd shit if Miley's romaticized obsession with what she believes is the inner city African-American lifestyle caused her to come and visit Petersburg.

 

I love my hometown dearly but it ain't a Mecca I want to return to.

[jaedmc]

That reminds me of nerds in highschool that watched a lot of Anime. They'd look at my slanty eyes and think me some mythical beast.

[J.T.]

But it was an awe built from warped admiration!  They were idiots that probably thought you could throw fireballs and that you glowed and your hair turned blonde when you got angry!

 

When I get mad at work, people find hard cover for fear that I will open fire.. 'cause we all carry guns or something.

 

You are a good bro, Jae.  Don't let anyone tell you othewise.

[offspring515]

I don't really find Lady Gaga that attractive.  Who would you rather see naked and without any makeup?

 

 

 

Gaga looked amazing in that thong.  Miley looked like those shorts were cutting off her circulation.  Advantage Gaga for me.

 

(Preemptive sorry to everyone if this sets off the "OMG HE MENTIONED A HUMAN FEMALE BEING ATTRACTIVE...CREEEEEEPY!" police.)

[LooseCannon]

That reminds me of nerds in highschool that watched a lot of Anime. They'd look at my slanty eyes and think me some mythical beast.

 

It'd be really annoying if those anime nerds were a complete sausage-fest and there wasn't a nerd girl among them (at least, not one who wasn't morbidly obese) who wanted you to ravish her with your tentacle.

[jaedmc]

But it was an awe built from warped admiration! They were idiots that probably thought you could throw fireballs and that you glowed and your hair turned blonde when you got angry!When I get mad at work, people find hard cover for fear that I will open fire.. 'cause we all carry guns or something.

HA. Growing up it was brutal because everyone thought I could knew karate and would challenge me to kick their ass. Got called a chink a lot, which is extra annoying for obvious reasons. My older brother, who's a littler darker than me, would get it worse, coz idiots would act like he was Mexican and call him Jose instead of his real name. It's that special kind of double racism that only Southern Americans can really pull off. When I was working on becoming an actor, I was talking to this old pro(a grizzled vet if you will) what my prospects were like since I'm not white but I'm not full on asian either. He said, "I don't know what you are, but you're ethnic looking and they'll totally want more of guys like you." Flash forward 7 years, and I'm getting in contact with an agent because she told the photographer who did my headshots she need more ethnic looking guys. Nostradamus. And I think it's because I'm in the business in which the first things you have to do is come to terms with your appearance and how people respond to it, that I'm super aware of these perceptions.But, yeah, I'll totally take warped admiration over what you've got JT. Though, it's not always positive. History classes that cover World War 2, for example can get a little awkward.EDIT: Also, while picking my son up from grade school today, a parent drove up blasting that Miley Cyrus song. So she wins.

[Fat Spanish Waiter]

This is a fucking weird thread.

[Matt D]

So a new song of hers and Bieber's called "Twerk" leaked today. 

 

It puts a new spin on this note:

 

[odessasteps]

Im too lazy to check, but anyone here post the Proncipal Skinner GIF yet?

#simpsonsdiditfirst

[blitzkrieg]

Oh hey this thread is still going on. Am I the only person that really sees Miley as more subverting hipster/party culture than black culture? Really it seems much more a stab at the kind of stuff you'd get from Mad Decent artists than anything you'd get from black/rap/urban culture. If you look at the "We Can't Stop" video it seems like someone found an "indie hip-hop/rap" video blueprint and used it to plan the video.

[Reggie20x6]

The same woman who directed 'Blurred Lines' also directed Miley's video.

 

http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/post/_/id/80424/qa-veteran-music-video-director-diane-martel-on-her-controversial-videos-for-robin-thicke-and-miley-cyrus

 

 

Where did the concept for Miley Cyrus’s “We Can't Stop” video come from?

Miley and I wanted to make a trippy, fucked-up video that was like a giant selfie.

 

What was the tone on the set like for that one?

Miley Cyrus is an astonishing young lady — effervescent, creative, excited, and so loving. She’s my favorite artist now. She was engaged with the entire cast. I’ve never seen a pop artist this normal. She is sophisticated and hilarious. She is one of the people, she is not a freaky celebrity. She engages and is 100 percent sincere. I can’t say enough about how truly fly this kid is.

 

Did Miley or her camp tell you from the very beginning that they wanted to do something more sexualized or risqué than what she's previously done?

She and I loved the idea of her being over the top. Her “modeling” is crazy, like what the fuck is she doing in this video? Her teddy bear dancing, she’s kissing her doll, she’s riding a horrible bike with her butt out. I don’t see another female pop star getting into a girl fight in her video. This video is fucked up and fun. It’s like a long Vine.

[supremebve]

Oh hey this thread is still going on. Am I the only person that really sees Miley as more subverting hipster/party culture than black culture? Really it seems much more a stab at the kind of stuff you'd get from Mad Decent artists than anything you'd get from black/rap/urban culture. If you look at the "We Can't Stop" video it seems like someone found an "indie hip-hop/rap" video blueprint and used it to plan the video.

I think the black/rap/urban thing comes from the constant talk about her twerking, which has been going on for years, but one little white girl does it and it is now trendy.  It is kind of like rock music, I've often argued with people that The Isley Brothers are the best rock band of all time.  People always look at me and say, "That's not a rock band."  It's because as a society we can't even fathom a black band is a rock band despite the fact that rock music was invented by black people.  The racism that people feel about her twerking has almost nothing to do with her twerking, it is the fact that her twerking, poorly by the way, is now a topic of conversation.  When Luke's dancers were twerking all over the place, not only would MTV never dream of showing it, nobody thought it was worth talking about.  Miley Cyrus is to twerking as Christopher Columbus is to America.  She didn't discover that shit, there were people doing that shit for years. 

[supremebve]

See what happens when white people steal our shit, you fuck it up for all of us. lol.

 

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/hampton-university-allegedly-lectured-students-181800152.html

[piranesi]

 

The same woman who directed 'Blurred Lines' also directed Miley's video.

 

http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/post/_/id/80424/qa-veteran-music-video-director-diane-martel-on-her-controversial-videos-for-robin-thicke-and-miley-cyrus

 

 

Where did the concept for Miley Cyrus’s “We Can't Stop” video come from?

Miley and I wanted to make a trippy, fucked-up video that was like a giant selfie.

 

What was the tone on the set like for that one?

Miley Cyrus is an astonishing young lady — effervescent, creative, excited, and so loving. She’s my favorite artist now. She was engaged with the entire cast. I’ve never seen a pop artist this normal. She is sophisticated and hilarious. She is one of the people, she is not a freaky celebrity. She engages and is 100 percent sincere. I can’t say enough about how truly fly this kid is.

 

Did Miley or her camp tell you from the very beginning that they wanted to do something more sexualized or risqué than what she's previously done?

She and I loved the idea of her being over the top. Her “modeling” is crazy, like what the fuck is she doing in this video? Her teddy bear dancing, she’s kissing her doll, she’s riding a horrible bike with her butt out. I don’t see another female pop star getting into a girl fight in her video. This video is fucked up and fun. It’s like a long Vine.

 

 

SELFIE SNAPCHAT VINEGRAM...let's rap kids!  I'm the cool old lady who understands you

 

PLEASELETMEKEEPWORKING@@!!!!!!!!

 

@Logan'sRun

 

 

Somehow, this lady's desperate identity posturing is sadder to me than Miley's.  Enragingly, this will not be the last old person to describe a "film" or "video" as "like a long vine" thinking that this will somehow keep the stunted children who run the world from murdering her for sport.

[blitzkrieg]

 

Oh hey this thread is still going on. Am I the only person that really sees Miley as more subverting hipster/party culture than black culture? Really it seems much more a stab at the kind of stuff you'd get from Mad Decent artists than anything you'd get from black/rap/urban culture. If you look at the "We Can't Stop" video it seems like someone found an "indie hip-hop/rap" video blueprint and used it to plan the video.

I think the black/rap/urban thing comes from the constant talk about her twerking, which has been going on for years, but one little white girl does it and it is now trendy.  It is kind of like rock music, I've often argued with people that The Isley Brothers are the best rock band of all time.  People always look at me and say, "That's not a rock band."  It's because as a society we can't even fathom a black band is a rock band despite the fact that rock music was invented by black people.  The racism that people feel about her twerking has almost nothing to do with her twerking, it is the fact that her twerking, poorly by the way, is now a topic of conversation.  When Luke's dancers were twerking all over the place, not only would MTV never dream of showing it, nobody thought it was worth talking about.  Miley Cyrus is to twerking as Christopher Columbus is to America.  She didn't discover that shit, there were people doing that shit for years. 

 

 

Well it does seem to be the normal cycle of things. You have a piece of black culture that is then adopted by a subset of white culture which is eventually makes it when into mainstream American culture which results in a backlash by both black and white cultures. 

 

That said if Miley had simply done it well or simply left it to backup dancers we'd have a lot shorter thread. Hell if they had simply had Iggy Azalea do the "white girl twerking with black backup dancers twerking" we would have had a totally different conversation. The mainstream media could have simply continued to be outraged over the "Molly" reference instead of moving on to "twerking."

 

In the end "We Can't Stop" isn't a bad song nor is it a bad video. The video is highly derivative but fun, much like Thicke's "Blurred Lines" and "Give It 2 U", and because it's Miley Cyrus gets more airplay than videos in the style it borrows from, which is usually how the mainstream works.

[jaedmc]

Hey, what was your creative process when making this video?

"Huhuhhuhuhuuhuhuhuhuhuhuh"

[piranesi]

Hey, what was your creative process when making this video?

"Huhuhhuhuhuuhuhuhuhuhuhuh"

 

Now is not the time for your Laurie Anderson impression, sir.

[jaedmc]

IF NOT NOW WHEN? WHEN?!

[piranesi]

IF NOT NOW WHEN? WHEN?!

 

Off the top of my head, I'll guess 1982?

[jaedmc]

...

 

[T.Rex-n-effeckx]

Issues of "minstrelsy" and "appropriation" are always complex.One of the interesting asides in Jerma Jackson's "Singing in my soul" was that there was a pre-Mistrelsy period where the decision to not "blacken up" when playing a black character was seen as a conscious choice to deny black character his unique humanity.Miley Cyrus's "Party in the USA" is her essentially doing karaoke singing over the backing track to Nelly's "Ride with Me", to lyrics based on the video for Nelly's "Ride with Me".Is it better or worse when she works with Nelly then when she rips him off and doesn't acknowledge the black inspiration?I think the best two pieces on Miley Cyrus VMA performance came from New Orleans musicians.While I disagree with parts of both, both say one of the things that is ignored in most articles: Miley's backup dancers were also awful.

It reminded me of the "hard out her for a Pimp" academy award performance infront of the NBC Academy award broadway dancers or when you see ballet dancers do the Mexican Hat dance in the Nutcracker Suite.Miley wasn't acting crazy, she and her back up dancers were in a choreographed performance with no understanding of a vernacular dance form with 20 years of history behind it.http://rustylazer.tumblr.com/post/59496030028/twerkin-vs-bouncin-i-think-and-this-is-the

http://www.fuse.tv/2013/08/big-freedia-miley-cyrus-twerk?campaign=scl%7Cotr%7Ccst 

 

[Swift]

I'm going to go ahead and stomp on some eggshells, because I've been biting my tongue on saying this all week... but why is it not ok for a white person to borrow elements from "black culture"? To paraphrase a comment I read on another site during the week, "you wouldn't dream of telling a young black girl that she can't pursue ballet or classical music or any other thing that's perceived as "white culture". Guarantee if Rihanna showed up next year in a tutu doing ballet moves, the popularity of that artform would spike, and yet I can't imagine white people making a fuss about it. Again, this seems to be a thing that's only really relevant in the US. Us vs. them. And yet, there are a million things that unite both blacks and whites and everyone else. What culture does playing video games belong too? Or playing sports? Or car enthusiasm? Or reading comic books, and so on. The idea that any one thing belongs to a group based on skin colour boggles my mind.

 

And I have both "black culture" and "white culture" in quotation marks, because I don't really believe that there is such thing as a culture based on skin colour. I, as a white Irishman have no connection to the baseball cap wearing, souped up Civic driving douchebag across the road from me. I don't walk down the road and feel I have a special affinity with other white people. They're just random people. Nor do I suspect that a gangbanger in Compton has much in common with a lawyer in New York.

[Niners Fan in CT]

Because she's borrowing them and then implying that it is dangerous/outlandish/edgy, etc.

[blitzkrieg]

I'm going to go ahead and stomp on some eggshells, because I've been biting my tongue on saying this all week... but why is it not ok for a white person to borrow elements from "black culture"? To paraphrase a comment I read on another site during the week, "you wouldn't dream of telling a young black girl that she can't pursue ballet or classical music or any other thing that's perceived as "white culture". Guarantee if Rihanna showed up next year in a tutu doing ballet moves, the popularity of that artform would spike, and yet I can't imagine white people making a fuss about it. Again, this seems to be a thing that's only really relevant in the US. Us vs. them. And yet, there are a million things that unite both blacks and whites and everyone else. What culture does playing video games belong too? Or playing sports? Or car enthusiasm? Or reading comic books, and so on. The idea that any one thing belongs to a group based on skin colour boggles my mind.

 

And I have both "black culture" and "white culture" in quotation marks, because I don't really believe that there is such thing as a culture based on skin colour. I, as a white Irishman have no connection to the baseball cap wearing, souped up Civic driving douchebag across the road from me. I don't walk down the road and feel I have a special affinity with other white people. They're just random people. Nor do I suspect that a gangbanger in Compton has much in common with a lawyer in New York.

 

I'd imagine Tiger Woods, the Williams sisters, minority hockey players, and black football players playing quarterback in the NFL might have issue with the idea of sports being universal. That said as many of us have said, it's not so much what Miley did, it's what Miley did poorly. If Rihanna came out next year in a tutu and did ballet poorly I'm certain that she would get a backlash from it. But I think it's important to say that the majority of the Miley backlash isn't racially charged and more of a "save the children" reaction. Before the VMAs the media was reacting to Miley exactly the same way, simply about her mentioning "Molly" in the song instead. All the VMAs did was change the subject of the uproar which considering her newest song release was an obviously calculated move.

 

And yes, race and culture are really overrated ideas in 2013 which we probably would all get along better if we spent less time clinging to them.

[jaedmc]

Because she's borrowing them and then implying that it is dangerous/outlandish/edgy, etc.

See I don't really fault her totally for this. Because many of her peers sitting in the audience, who are black, did the exact same thing to sell records.