When I find myself in times of trouble/Miley Cyrus comes to me/speaking words of wisdom:/”la-da-dee-da-dee, we like to party.”
On the serious, it seems as if only two things dominate the news cycle: Syria and Cyrus — OK, and maybe the iPhone 5c. We digress.
After the flurry of Internet activity surrounding Cyrus’ beaten-to-death-by-the-moral-police VMAs performance, the New Yorker published an insightful reaction piece. Writer Sasha Weiss commented on the influence of Internet culture and social media, and reminded everyone that as long as there are innocent young pop ingénues, there will be drastic image transformations — see Madonna’s burning crosses and cone bras and Britney’s red bodysuit circa “Oops! I Did it Again.”
“Most of us are dimly aware of ships massing in the eastern Mediterranean to bomb Syria, and watching Cyrus gyrate on a page of news stories reminds us of how dim that awareness is, how easily we can be drawn away from seriousness into frivolity, and back again,” Weiss wrote in the article titled “Reacting to Miley.”
The back-and-forth of the frivolous and the serious continues this week with the release of Cyrus’ new music video for her song “Wrecking Ball,” which happened to coincide with President Obama’s speech about the Russian diplomatic plan his administration is preparing.
Both have received criticism in their respective fields: Political commenters said Obama’s cause is lost, and he’s failed to be consistent and clear in his statements about his intent to strike Syria with a calculated missile attack. The nation’s trust cache in Obama keeps diminishing, and his vague speech — no American boots on Syrian ground, no “pinprick strikes” — did little to put Americans at ease.
Another equally loud collective voice of criticism has been directed toward Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” video. Just as her VMAs performance was “debated, criticized and dissected to the point of obscurity,” as Weiss wrote, her music video was met with the same sort of pearl-clutching hysteria when people watched her swing nude atop a literal wrecking ball.
Another Internet explosion ensued — complete with parody Vines and condescending faux concerned Fox News coverage. People reacted as if they’d never seen a naked human in a popular video before, even with Justin Timberlake and his cheap imitation, Robin Thicke, and their respective music videos featuring nude bodies.
Although it was fun at first, Mileygate is quickly becoming tiresome. We get that pop culture is the candy shop and international upheaval is the Brussels sprout, but what’s happening abroad deserves attention as well.
During a speech on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton said, “In a democracy, citizens cannot sit on the sidelines, that we have to ‘get into the arena,’ as Teddy Roosevelt called it, and participate.”
We have a feeling that Hils, unfortunately, wasn’t referring to rebellious 20-year-old pop stars.
A version of this story ran on page 6 on 9/12/2013 under the headline "We Can’t Stop: Why do we turn to pop culture in turmoil?"
