On the VMAs, Miley Cyrus and Selling Sex to Children

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.

Kanye West - Yeezus

Kanye thrives on contentiousness – if he wasn’t as renowned for his arrogance and pigheadedness as he was for his music, he sure as hell wouldn’t be the behemothic superstar we all know and love to hate. On his last album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, he took account of his now-legendary dickishness by making his dickishness the album’s central theme. This artistic direction led to Kanye attempting to balance his persona’s unashamed hedonism with a sort of penitent sensitivity towards how this could be perceived as not entirely commendable of him and how he was actually a good-natured and troubled individual underneath all the sickeningly garish displays of wealth. Dark Twisted Fantasy was actually another critical success for Yeezy, though I debated constantly as to whether it was the bona fide magnum opus that Kanye intended as well as a piece of pure devilish entertainment value. Three years on, here comes Yeezus, where the post-Taylor-Swift-incident navel-gazing continues.

However, before we get into the ins-and-outs of Kanye’s infamous delusions of grandeur, let’s talk about the parts of the album which don’t involve Kanye speaking his mind, because let’s face it, it’s the production on Yeezus that’s got everyone talking. The vibe here is similar to his aforementioned previous effort – a big luxurious-sounding mishmash of synths, pianos, horns, as well as the twisting of Kanye’s own voice through juttering self-samples and autotune. But as everyone’s pointed out, the tracks are noisier, harsher, abrasive and just a little unhinged in places where the production on his previous album was softer and had a more dignified feeling of composure, and the album sounds all the fresher because of it. The beats really do sound like the work of a madman – or at least producers on the commission of a madman, considering the V.I.P. list of auxiliary talent that Kanye brought in to assist in giving the ten tremendously demented tracks the stylishly mangled treatment they deserve.

And the variety of expert opinions really shows in the quality of the tracks on this album, with each dark, steely composition pulling you further and further into the madness. And there’s method within the madness. There’s a lot of exciting shit that jumps out at you within the overall production, like the aggravating electronica that manifests itself in numerous zips, squeals and growls. Or the eclectic and strategically placed, as well as comparatively sparse, sampling picked up from all kinds of crazy places - like the jarring breakdown halfway through New Slaves into Hungarian space-rock - but the more notable samples are the dips into Jamaican dancehall every now and then, which I wouldn’t have thought would work well at all, but in fact work really, really, really well. Despite all the leanings towards descriptions like ‘noise’ and ‘industrial’, the whole thing is a very tight ship, bearing all the hallmarks of professionalism that we’ve all come to expect from Kanye – he’s still never made a bad album, and part of that is because he has an excellent ear for what sounds awesome and what can go into a track to make it grab your attention.

Yeezus is brimming with energy, and Kanye makes no effort to restrain himself, leading to hyped-up bouts of insanity like the Black Skinhead. Guilt Trip, especially, feels like what is in my opinion the album’s most resounding success, with its chiptune-and-piano vortex of trap where Kanye’s flow sounds particularly at home. Hold My Liquor also deserves a mention for its unnerving echoing-through-emptiness production and weeping synths, as well as another stirring bit of participation from Justin Vernon, who’s all over this album as he was in Dark Twisted Fantasy. In fact, as I’ve mentioned before, the relationship between this album and Kanye’s previous is a fascinating one, as they both work in much the same way and show the same level of invigorating creativity – the most notable difference is that Yeezus lacks the throng of guest appearances that peppered Dark Twisted Fantasy, leading to an album that’s very noticeably more about the man himself – I mean even more so than usual. Which brings me to something that needs to be addressed, even though as you can hopefully tell from my enthusiasm, Yeezus is an excellently constructed album and as indulgent a piece of entertainment as his last effort, which was arguably one of his best, if not the best. But there’s a problem that dwelt within that album that remains with this one, and to really express what that problem is, we need to talk about the man himself.

First of all, Kanye’s not a great rapper; never has been, never will be. He’s had a few decent lines here and there, but it’d be lying to say that his more obvious presence on this album matches the quality of the more technical, musical side that runs alongside it. I never really know where I stand with Kanye – he staggers between toothless social commentary and an incredibly off-putting lack of maturity that clash awkwardly with each other. And a lot of his lyrics are just plain stupid. Here are a few examples:

“Hurry up with my damn croissants!”

“Your titties, let em out, free at last,

Thank God Almighty, they free at last”

“Eatin’ Asian pussy, all I need was sweet and sour sauce”

“I wanna fuck you hard on the sink,

After that, give you something to drink”

I mean that’s the kind of shit we’re dealing with here, and the problem is that I just can’t run with it, it just seems to display Kanye's inability to write with any sense of tone or feel or anything, and is mostly made up of uninspired rhymes and references. For a rap album, the rapping is noticeably poor. What's worse is Kanye’s poorly-concealed intention for the music he makes, and the lyrics he writes for it, to be interpreted as having serious artistic merit. I mean, I understand that he knew what he was doing naming his songs things like ‘I Am a God’ – for Kanye to lose his wanton arrogance is to strip him of his most effective marketing asset – but there seems to be an attempt at real heart on Yeezus that, to make another comparison with the sister album before it, falls weakly flat.

For a man who’s forever linked by fathering a doomed child with Kim Kardashian – the last person you’d associate with anything other than totally vapid philistinism – he seems to love writing songs that beg to be heard as heartfelt testaments to having a depressing time having meaningless sex with meaningless people with meaningless wealth, and he seems to genuinely believe that this constitutes an evocative critique or some sort of message other than vacuous descriptions of an affluent and hedonistic lifestyle with a depressing slant shallowly built into it. The world he evokes through his songs is surprisingly lifeless, and seems to be mostly built on bland misogyny. Blood on the Leaves, I’m in It, Bound 2 – these are all great beats, but despite all his trying to prove his artistic capability as a deep and complex individual, his lyricism comes across as the best he can possibly manage, which is shallow and directionless. Blood on the Leaves is actually a great song, but the decision to use Nina Simone’s ‘Strange Fruit’ in a song about a rich cokehead going through a divorce sits uncomfortably, and seems to be a good example of Kanye’s lack of any real sensitivity.

Kanye is many things – he’s talented, exciting, charismatic, consistently relevant, and I do honestly believe, good-natured, but it's an uncomfortable truth that he's not as intelligent as he thinks he is. Kanye may be skilled, and musically he has serious clout, but he’s clearly trying to reach greedily above the level of hip-hop beatmaker to be seen as someone with real depth, even though he’s a man to whom the world beyond the superficial universe he inhabits might as well be invisible. Yeezus is gripping on a musical level, but for an album that seems to be making attempts at being strongly personal, it all seems as shallow as ever. However, if you don't care about boring questions of artistic authenticity in regard to someone as preposterous as Kanye West, as I'm sure most people won't, then on a level of solid musical entertainment, Yeezus is bursting with vibrancy and filled with creative flashes, and is another worthy effort in Kanye West's impressive discography.

Kanye West - New Slaves

The Knife - Shaking the Habitual

Everyone’s been describing this, the first brand new album from The Knife since 2006’s darkly fantastic Silent Shout, as ‘difficult listening’ – like it’s an album that’s dense with thought and feeling, built with meticulous ingenuity and, when cryptically decoded, speaks volumes about this, that or the other. I’m not so sure about this myself. While the Swedish soul-serenaders have made a point of running, terrified, from the evil giant of electropop conventionality, presenting here an album that’s about twice the length of their previous effort, I find myself wondering if this was an ambitious stumble in the right direction. It’s not immediately clear exactly how Shaking the Habitual is the mysterious family duo re-shaping preconceptions or breaking any real boundaries, as has been flaunted by many, except maybe the boundary of human patience.

Yeah, as excited as I was for this album, the consensus going around that there was going to be a strongly political heft to it made me sceptical. I love The Knife as much as anyone, but mainly for their strange and sinister synthpop, where concrete and tangible ideas seem to get lost in the fog of the catchy dance rhythms and menacing atmospherics, and while I appreciate the gender-bending aspects to their image and sound and Karin Dreijer Andersson’s trans-androgynous pitch-shifting, I’m not sure that Shaking the Habitual is the intellectual statement on the group’s political views that I think they might have intended. And if it is, it’s buried so deep under a mound of byzantine inaccessibility that I’m perfectly comfortable with being quite unable to ‘get it’. What I was expecting from this album wasn’t what it would say to my brain but what it would say to my ears – and on a purely sonic level, it’s a mixed bag, shifting between sounding frantically urgent and solemnly doom-laden, pausing occasionally (but not always briefly) for some ambient interludes, all the while balancing between exciting and tedious.

There’s a theme of tension running through all the tracks on this album; the songs are brimming with portent, and frequently sail off into some enjoyably dark territory. Because that’s what I really enjoy about The Knife – revelling in their world of weird foreboding, and having a little internal souldance at the same time. The more danceable highlights include the awesomely frantic ‘Full of Fire’ – nine minutes of industrially-driven madness – and several tracks make a show of the duo’s love for the percussive, like the woodblock jungle of ‘A Tooth for an Eye’ and the tribal drumming of ‘Without You My Life Would Be Boring’. But it’s the more oppressively sinister parts of the album that really stick a skewer into your heart. ‘Wrap Your Arms Around Me’ is a track scarred with vulnerability, a piece groaning with sexual malignance. But probably the most delectably bleak corner of Shaking the Habitual can be found in ‘A Cherry on Top’, which is a masterfully crafted vacuum of foreboding. It has that gothic-insanity feel, like spending a night alone in a madhouse. It’s just that sort of pantomime craziness that The Knife can pull off spectacularly, not least because of Andersson’s shape-shifting, intensely disquieting moan of a voice is one of the duo’s most powerful assets.

So, there’s a lot of good here, sure. I like the earthy clunk and squeaky siren calls over ‘Raging Lung’, a song that’s like travelling on a rusty tug over a misty ocean – I love the spongy trumpet sound and the heave of the background’s metallic bass snores. I like the introduction of other vocalists on ‘Stay Out Here’, the album’s most conventionally house-y song, which I think really adds to its unsettling power. All of this is well and good. But that’s not to say that this is a good ‘album’. Part of the problem is that Shaking the Habitual is astonishingly long – way, way, way overlong, which I think was a significant lapse of judgement on The Knife’s part – this is not an album that should’ve been an hour and a half in length, there’s just simply not enough material here to justify it. Especially considering that most of the ‘material’ I’m talking about might not even be considered music. The album has long, ponderous stretches of ambient noise and sound – two of the tracks here, ‘Crake’ and ‘Oryx’, are short spurts of rubbish that seem to exist for no other reason than their titles reference Margaret Atwood, thereby proving The Knife’s intellectual credibility to absolutely no-one. ‘Old Dreams Waiting to be Realized’ is probably the track you’d first notice as clocking in at nineteen minutes, and consisting entirely of reasonably quiet and brain-calcifyingly boring sounds of not much in particular. This, coupled with the needless and ineffective ‘Fracking Fluid Injection’ – ten-ish minutes of irritatingly repetitive squeaking that goes nowhere – means that at least half an hour of the album’s running time should’ve been snipped and shelved and The Knife should admit defeat and concede that these wanderings of madness stymie the album’s flow to a treacle-fast sludge.

But even with these tedious missteps of arty nonsense gone, the album remains pretty ineffectively paced, with even the best songs sometimes outstaying their welcome and becoming a little bit tiring, even if the momentum behind the tracks seemed so initially promising. The Knife are still cultivating some pretty powerful sounds here. It’s definitely not as bad as my frustration may have made it out to be, and when you skip all the boring bits, which are nicely organised into just one or two tracks, it’s a real delight of pained terror and urgent post-pop fun. But in many ways, the piece as an actual album is a failure, in that it’s impossible to make heads or tails of the socio-political polemic that is apparently somewhere to be found within it, and in that to listen to it all in one go is one very long, very unfulfilling act of hardship bordering on self-abuse. Saying that, however, I do recommend that you give it a listen, as there’s goodness to be found within its depths, and The Knife may sometimes stagger over to the wrong side of ‘arty’, but their unique talents are still inspiring and often riveting. If you like the weird shit then you’ll definitely be in luck here.


The Knife - 'Full of Fire'

Adam Green & Binki Shapiro - Self-Titled

The unusual foray I’ve been making into indie recently has led me to the new supercollab by the boringly-named Adam Green and the sickeningly-named Binki Shapiro; he’s one half of Ellen Page Soundtrack band The Moldy Peaches, she’s from ho-hum indie band Little Joy. Together they form this fairly pleasant ‘anti-folk’ album, according to its Wikipedia page, which is a moniker that has always irritated me, since it sounds as if it’s flaunting itself as some kind of movement as opposed to being inconsequential singer-songwriter rubbish that thinks it’s a movement. Like most relationship-focused twangly indie music, it’s frothy enough to leave you puking foam for about a week, and hails from that corner of the New York State of Mind that completely disgusts me, where aloof pretentiousness meets a self-aware “isn’t-life-great” mentality, but nonetheless, there’s enjoyment to be had here underneath all the twee, against which all cynicism remains super effective.

Well, I say it’s twee and frothy and all that, which makes it sounds as if this means that the subject material is happy-go-lucky, sunlit contentment, the kind of sound that can be heard in both of these indie darlings' previous outfits, but really the lyrical content’s more wan and wistful, sung out of two audibly pleasing vocal cords and cradled in a variety of acoustic instruments. The semi-narrative theme here is The Relationship - as in, y’know, that “it’s-complicated” up-and-down back-and-forth archetype that all couples around the world who believe themselves to constitute a ‘relationship’ love to relate to and even subconsciously kind of aspire to. That market is catered to here. In dealing with this theme, which is like the most standard topic for all modern music, I’d say that the album is a success. The duetting parts feel a little bit cheesy, but that’s the territory we’re in here, and besides, the cheese factor is diluted by the lyrics being not-terrible, elevating the duo above comparable She & Him levels of froth, which is the kind of boy-girl duetting we’re all used to. ‘Pity Love’ is a good one. The tales told in these songs never reach the depths of tragedy, or the highs of being joyously in love with another beautiful indiefuck like yourself, but it takes a sensible middle-ground option that sounds as if I’m calling the whole thing banal, but it’s not boring, it’s nice. And nice is good.

I should be finding some real problems enjoying this album, seeing as it’s a product of a world I have no wish to inhabit, and I’m not exactly in the know when it comes to this scene of model-beautiful strolling-in-the-park sort of music, but I do kind of enjoy it, to an extent, and it is fairly meritorious considering that it sounds as if it would be total drivel. It's a little sweet, that's part of its charm, but I wouldn't say it ever gets too saccharine. I think that what really steers it away from the chasm of mediocrity are the voices, the two sets of lovey-dovey lungs that pervade throughout. Saying that, it’s true that Shapiro’s voice is the far superior, and I’m glad that she gets a track or two to herself, like ‘Casanova’, where she gets all Roy Orbison on our country/western asses, and reminds me of Nicole Atkins. I love her voice; it’s got that necessarily adorable quality, but it also sounds tired and consciously weary, almost, y’know, like she means the shit that she’s singing about. It stands head and shoulders above her album-partner Adam Green, whose voice isn’t bad I guess, and at times it does sound like a self-conscious Lou Reed impersonator, but it has the ability to be loaded with a nice bassy sensation and yet sound strangely uninterested at the same time, which suits the hipstamatic-tinged universe that this album inhabits. I mean, from what I've heard, that’s what all this ‘anti-folk’ nonsense is about – playful but impassioned, jovial but lightly serious. And I can see the appeal in that.

This album’s one to play to your girlfriend/boyfriend if you want to display some sort of musical affection towards them but, secretly, you aren’t really into them. Not brilliant, but it represents a musical tide that could be worse.


Adam Green & Binki Shapiro - Pity Love