8A — Tuesday, September 8, 2015
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

ALBUM REVIEW
Miley is clueless 
but fascinating

By ADAM THEISEN

Senior Arts Editor

Just a few months ago, I would 

have been so excited for a new 
Miley Cyrus album. Earlier in the 
summer, 
the 

singer 
started 

posting YouTube 
videos 
of 
her 

“Backyard 
Ses-

sions,” a series of 
stripped-down 
cover songs per-
formed by Cyrus 
and friends like 
Joan Jett, Laura 
Jane Grace and 
Ariana Grande. 
Where 
these 

performances showcased Cyrus’s 
great, matured, husky voice, her 
newly launched Happy Hippie 
Foundation and smart quotes about 
gender fluidity and the epidemic of 
homelessness seemed to highlight 
a newfound awareness and social 
consciousness.

These interviews and videos 

seemed to make clear that Cyrus’s 
next project would be dramati-
cally different from her previous 
full-length: 2013’s Bangerz, a record 
with a pair of great singles and a 
lot of mediocre, faux-provocative, 
blackface-wearing 
pop 
music. 

Cyrus seemed poised for an organ-
ic-sounding folk/country record 
that, for better or worse, would 
announce her arrival as a legiti-
mate, critically respectable artist.

But Cyrus has demonstrated 

in the last couple weeks that she 
can still be totally clueless about 
subjects like race and appropria-
tion, and she blows up any expec-
tations of artistic evolution from 
the second her new album begins. 
The very first line from the first 
song, which you might have heard 
if you watched her “outrageous” 
performance at the VMAs, is a 
heavily distorted “Yeah, I smoke 
pot” that gets laid over a standard 
trap beat practically cut-and-
pasted from Bangerz. “Dooo It!” is 
a disappointing, near-insufferable 
beginning that feels forced and 
immature and sits in this weird 
negative zone between catchy pop 
and experimental avant-garde, 
picking up the good characteris-
tics of neither.

The good news, though, is that 

“Dooo It!” might actually be one 
of the low points of the entire proj-
ect. Recorded with psych-rock vets 
The Flaming Lips, Miley Cyrus and 
her Dead Petz is a 90-minute mess 
that you can’t help but appreciate 
even as it goes on forever and ever. 
The record is like a garage sale 
of Cyrus’s talents and ambitions, 
with different aspects of her art-

istry haphazardly hung and strewn 
about throughout its runtime. The 
sequencing is nonexistent — you 
might as well just play the whole 
thing on shuffle — and I really can’t 
imagine what this record is meant 
for or who will enjoy it, but it’s 
exciting to see a young artist exper-
iment like Cyrus does, and you’re 
bound to find moments of greatness 
within its long, winding runtime.

The first half of Dead Petz can 

sometimes feel like flipping through 
a 500-page textbook looking for the 
one quote you need to cite in a paper. 
Frustrating but at times rewarding, 
very long, unmemorable songs are 
mixed in with obnoxiousness and 
beauty. Second track “Karen Don’t 
Be Sad” sounds remarkably similar 
to “Holes” by Mercury Rev, a band 
with whom the Lips have always 
been closely compared. It’s one 
of the stronger songs, with Cyrus 
showing instead of telling her drug 
use, letting it actually inform her 
work instead of just yelling about 
how high she is. However, songs 
like “Something About Space Dude” 
and “Space Boots” go on for way too 
long without any clear goals. These 
tracks sound like forgotten Flam-
ing Lips album cuts recorded with 
a new frontperson, and it feels odd 
that Cyrus would choose to make 
this record with a veteran band in 
their 50s when she wants her sound 
to be so forward-thinking. Else-
where, Mike Will Made It plays a 
key role, and though he delivers 
the danceable strength that made 
him famous, his presence on songs 
feels like much more of a callback 
to Bangerz than this album should 
be. Cyrus herself often sounds like 
she’s holding back, keeping her 
voice subtle or distorted instead of 
impressing by letting loose. On the 
awful forced monologue of “BB 
Talk,” she sounds like an actress 
reading off lines for a character she 
doesn’t even know, but other times, 
she can tap into a loose, breathy 
singer-songwriter mode that serves 
her well.

“Milky Milky Milk,” track 10 

of 23, then becomes either the 
moment of abandonment or the 
point of no return. Another dreamy, 
jokey track with mediocre elec-
tronic experimentation, it’s a huge 
swing and a disappointing miss. 
But get past that, and the next 
song is “Cyrus Skies,” a slow, tense 
breakdown of a tune with despair-
ing vocals and minimal instru-
mentation. That track kicks off a 
hypnotic comedown that produces 
Miley Cyrus and her Dead Petz’s 
most compelling work, with songs 
that are still messy and deconstruc-
tive but contain soul and complex-
ity. There are still eye-roll moments 
where you really have to wonder 

how Cyrus thinks getting drunk 
and fucked up is worth bragging 
about, but other times, she shows 
hints of chameleonic geniuses 
like Lou Reed or Bjork. “I Get So 
Scared” is a guitar-strummer that 
gives the best glimpse of what 
a folksier Cyrus record would 
sound like, while “Lighter” is a 
Cocteau Twins/M83-style night-
time driving song that once again 
uses drugs as an influence rather 
than the whole substance of a 
song. “1 Sun,” meanwhile, takes 
MIA’s busy electro-punk chaos 
and turns it into this preachy 
garage-punk rave-up.

By the end of Dead Petz you 

feel like you’ve been swarmed by 
ideas and entranced by the unfa-
miliar tricks of Miley Cyrus. It’s 
worth asking “What the fuck is 
she doing?” here and there, but 
it’s also fun to sit back and absorb 
take in her obvious potential bril-
liance. The record concludes with 
a couple of twee piano ballads 
surrounding 
the 
questionable 

appropriation of “Miley Tibetan 
Bowlz.” “Pablow the Blowfish” 
made me smile in its cleverness 
even though it’s a eulogy for a 
dead pet, while “Twinkle Song” 
works because it’s one of the few 
Dead Petz tracks that puts Cyrus 
directly in the spotlight. She 
interesting and talented enough 
that you care when she opens 
her mouth and says something 
honest, even if she’s just talking 
about some dream she had, and 
when the album closes with her 
truly showing off how wild and 
unhinged her voice can get (think 
Stevie Nicks on “Edge of Seven-
teen”), it’s truly satisfying.

The weirdest thing about 

Miley Cyrus and her Dead Petz, 
to me, is how truly unclassi-
fiable it is. That works in its 
favor, as it’s worth listening 
to at least for its experimental 
uniqueness, but it also means 
it doesn’t fit into any easy rec-
ommendation. I don’t know 
who would love this album, or 
when you would want to play 
it. I only know that its creator 
has plenty of talent and ambi-
tion, even if she screws up a lot, 
and I love hearing her when she 
succeeds. Drugged-up with her 
head spinning, feeling fuzzy as 
she explores all that she’s capa-
ble of, Cyrus still hasn’t escaped 
from the influence of the art-
ists who inspire her or from her 
own occasional bad judgments, 
but on Miley Cyrus & Her Dead 
Petz, you can hear her pressing 
her hands against the walls, 
pushing out to try and make 
something truly original.

A-

Miley 
Cyrus and 
Her Dead 
Petz

Miley Cyrus

Smiley Miley, Inc

BOOK REVIEW
Coates demands 
greater social change

By KARL WILLIAMS

Daily Arts Writer

“In America, it is traditional to 

destroy the black body—it is heri-
tage,” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates, a 
national 
cor-

respondent for 
The 
Atlantic, 

in his newest 
book “Between 
the World and 
Me.” 
Coates 

wrote the book 
as an admoni-
tory letter to 
his son about 
the dangers of 
being Black in 
contemporary 
America, where news of an Afri-
can American’s death at the hands 
of the police has become almost a 
rote expectation of weekly life.

Coates surveys history both 

personal and national, creat-
ing an epistolary memoir filled 
with searing social and politi-
cal commentary. He discusses 
his adolescence, fraught with 
the latent violence of the Balti-
more streets and the frequency 
with which it was realized; 
his collegiate years at Howard 
University where he developed 
his intellectual purpose, meet-
ing his wife, his struggles as a 
young writer, etc, and he aug-
ments his memories with caus-
tic, cogent meditations on race 
and American history.

According to Coates, race is 

the legacy of American history. 
Race, and its son racism, is not a 
blight on the otherwise fair face 
of America, but the face itself. The 
plunder and subjugation of Black 
bodies created the wealth and 
power enjoyed mostly by white 
Americans.. These are the foun-
dation of what Coates simply calls 
“the Dream.” As formulated in the 
book, the Dream is a moral efface-
ment, a convenient innocence that 
allows the continuous destruction 
and exploitation of Black bodies.

Coates digs into history quite 

a bit, noting, for example, that 
in the pre-Civil War South 
slaves “were worth four billion 
dollars, more than all of Ameri-
can industry,” but his analysis 
of the contemporary political 
situation, especially his own 
experiences, proves more pow-
erful. In fact, the most compel-
ling part of the book is Coates’s 
telling of the promising life and 
tragic death of Prince Jones, 
a friend and fellow student at 
Howard University. Jones — a 
young, unarmed Black man 
like Michael Brown, Trayvon 
Martin, Tamir Rice, and many 
others — was shot by a police-
man who followed him through 
three jurisdictions in search 
of a suspect who had nothing 
in common with Jones other 
than the brand of their vehicle 
and the color of their skin. The 
officer claimed that Jones tried 
to run him over with his Jeep, 
and, since only one witness 
lived through the encounter, 

the prosecutors believed him. 

Jones’s life differs from the nar-

ratives usually ascribed to Black 
victims of police violence. He was 
affluent, born in the suburbs, a 
stellar student. His mother over-
came abject poverty by attending 
college, becoming a radiologist 
and building a privileged life for 
her son so that he, unlike most 
other 
Black 
children, 
would 

not have to be “twice as good.” 
Jones’s story elucidates a cru-
cial point in “Between the World 
and Me:” that even when African 
Americans achieve the American 
Dream, when they break into the 
suburban landscape “organized 
around pot roasts, blueberry pies, 
fireworks, ice cream sundaes, 
immaculate bathrooms, and small 
toy trucks that were loosed in 
wooded backyards with streams 
and glens,” race imposes a limita-
tion that is both ineluctable and, 
possibly, fatal.

In another intriguing pas-

sage, which is sure to become 
notorious if taken out of context 
enough, Coates says that he did 
not feel sympathy for 9/11 first 
responders: 

“I could see no difference 

between the officer who killed 
Prince Jones and the police who 
died, or the firefighters who 
died. They were not human to 
me. Black, white, or whatever, 
they were the menaces of nature; 
they were the fire, the comet, 
the storm, which could—with no 
justification—shatter my body.”

The attack on the World 

Trade Centers — a place where, 
as Coates notes, slaves were 
once traded — occurred in the 
wake of Prince Jones’s death, an 
event that seems to have shaped 
much of his political views and 
writing since. He’s not being 
contemptuous, but rather bran-
dishing a brutal candor that 
aims to evince the vast dispar-
ity in what the forces of Ameri-
can history, the American state 
and the American legacy mean 
for him and what they mean for 

most citizens. 

In form and theme, “Between 

the World and Me” explicitly 
invokes James Baldwin’s essay 
“My 
Dungeon 
Shook: 
Let-

ter to my Nephew on the One 
Hundredth Anniversary of the 
Emancipation.” He’s more Mal-
colm than Martin, but Coates 
compares better with Baldwin 
than other prominent Black 
intellectual figures, although 
these are all shadows too large 
for any man to fill. 

In his essay, Baldwin writes 

that “it is not permissible 
that the authors of devasta-
tion should also be innocent. 
It is the innocence which con-
stitutes the crime,” an idea 
concurrent in “Between the 
World and Me.” Both writers 
posit an absolute moral cul-
pability in the benefits white 
America enjoys because of 
its enslavement of Black bod-
ies. But Baldwin, writing half 
a century before, has what 
Coates lacks: a legitimate sense 
of hope; he writes that “If you 
know whence you came, there is 
really no limit to where you can 
go.” There are moments when 
Coates let’s rays of hope pilfer 
through (“They made us into a 
race. We made ourselves into a 
people.”), but they don’t break 
his dark evaluation of our con-
temporary situation. After fifty 
years with more stasis than 
change, it feels absurd to expect 
him to share this sentiment.

Coates’s book is not with-

out its faults. At times, he has 
a tendency to generalize, and 
he writes with such severity 
that, in some instances, it seems 
like no progress has been made. 
However, it is easy to point out, 
“we’ve had a Black president,” 
and leave it there. But this is a 
dangerous conciliatory gesture 
that eradicates the impetus for 
change. It is important to real-
ize there has been progress, but 
essential to realize there hasn’t 
been enough.

A garage sale of 
Cyrus’s talent 
and ambition

Between 
the World 
and Me

Ta-Nehisi 
Coates

Spiegel and Grau

July 14. 2015

