By Brian Arsenault
Trash is the new norm. How else to explain anything on Bravo and Miley Cyrus.
It seems to me, though, that all the phony outrage over Miley is just that, phony. She was simply playing “one up” (no pun meant) on all the strip acts as art efforts that have danced through the VMAs for years.
Why not get honest and have real strippers really naked. They won’t have any less musical talent and they might have more rhythm.
In an era when “ass” is the funniest word on sitcoms and “housewives” do girl talk about the latest BJ on their latest “husband” what Miley did was at about the same taste level.
I have a friend who claims that Ulysses, the great work by James Joyce, won’t be in print in twenty years. There will be no one to read it.
The first time I heard him say that I thought, “Nah, can’t be true.” Then I went home and ran through the cable dial.
The crawl on the cable news networks and the local news is just full of terrible misspellings, erroneous verb tenses and grammatical errors. The movie channels are loaded with promotions for toys and video games for badolescents in the guise of “hit movies.”
How may superheroes does it take to rot your brain? Can you hear the pitch to the studio? “And this time the Hulk will fall in love but she’ll be killed and then he’ll really go crazy. The destruction will be sublime.”
But wait, wait, there’s a raging controversy over Ben Affleck playing Batman, just when I thought he might be a grownup director. Oops, Spiderman’s on Broadway or has he swung off?
Justin Timberlake gets a “lifetime achievement award” at the MTV Video Music Awards. Alert, alert: there is no such thing as “video music.” I guess Justin does deserve the award, though, as he took things to a new level some years back by exposing a Jackson breast at the SupeBowl. The signal: anything goes. Except real music.
There’s nothing really to complain about with Miley, is there?. Except all Disney kid performers apparently should be euthanized by their teen years. Maybe sooner if we want to ever again raise literate kids with musical taste.
Biggest comeback of the year: The Smurfs.
Chris Matthews of Hardball infamy will now take questions, how very faux populist of him. Only if they’re tweeted, though. Wouldn’t want to have a full paragraph or anything. Someone might actually make a coherent point in their query.
Still, we can follow the latest Brown or Bieber punk behavior and, oh look, one of the Kardashian’s husbands of the month was picked up for drunk driving. Really, though, can you blame him. Was he driving north by Northwest?
Remember those halcyon days when we worried about how young girls can develop a strong positive self image in the shadow of Hollywood titties. Well, it’s been realized on all those Housewives shows. The preteen girls can simply dye their hair blond, pretend they have a singing career and get plastic surgery everywhere. Problem solved.
Who knew that Jack Warner would seem an artistic icon all these years later. Maybe because we now have Ryan Seacrest.
Americans used to be offended that the French and other Europeans considered us uncultured boors. Or is it boobs? So we’ve spent the last ten or twenty years proving them right. That’ll show ‘em. Except for the fact that they trek mindlessly to the latest zombie movies too.
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The International Review of Music 