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