Welcome to Well, That Sucked, our weekly compendium of exactly what it sounds like. Thrown in this week’s garbage: The sort of people who stop talking mid-sentence as soon as a waiter comes around with the menu because they can’t focus on complaining about work while also deciding between cobb salad or quinoa salad.
We should all be ashamed of ourselves. MTV has never been less relevant than it is now: Teen Mom and Jersey Shore are off the air, Vevo premieres music videos before they do, and you can create your own Daria marathons online.
But let us never underestimate the viewing public’s capacity for outrage. On Sunday, Miley Cyrus hosted her own version of a debutante ball, only instead of wearing long gloves, she wore a furry onesie that, when ripped away, revealed a plastic white-flesh-tone bikini. (The exact same outfit I wore to work the previous Friday, how embarrassing). Flanked by her traveling band of Professional Cool Black Friends, Cyrus made MTV relevant again, if only for a few seconds, and if only on Twitter.
Come hither, she bellowed from her butthole, firmly planted against the bacteria breeding-ground that is Robin Thicke’s groin, watch me grow up in a way that makes you uncomfortable because you knew me before I knew about Invisalign. For six minutes, she flopped around onstage with the grace and elegance of someone who just found her libido at the bottom of a box of Fruity Pebbles and has no idea what to do with it.
Even though she’s being criticized for her performance, either for being too sexual, or plain gross, or racist, or poorly done, she’s having a great week. Not since her Gollum-inspired photo shoot has she had this much attention paid to her and her medical condition. (I am assuming here that her tongue has been diagnosed with some kind of severe chronic palsy deserving of its own PBS telethon.)
Much of the outrage towards Cyrus’ performance, though, centred on how it distracted the public from real, actual issues—that people shouldn’t have spent so much time analyzing or critiquing the performance because Syria, you guys. Syria. Even Billy Ray was talking about Syria while his daughter was getting a foam finger pregnant. (I’m pretty sure that’s how it works.)
It’s almost as if competing thoughts—one about an impending war in Syria, a second about butts and tongues and how whenever Robin Thicke walks across the stage, he leaves a slimy residue like the mollusk that he is—cannot coexist in our world.
Indeed, it must be hard to think about two things at once if you are an idiot.
Of course, it’s easy to understand why people felt that an issue as serious as the one developing in Syria was overshadowed by bad twerking, considering the extent to which tweets about Cyrus rolled in at a clip that outpaced … pretty much everything else. That’s particularly troubling because, as we know, anything that happens on Twitter is now automatically news, and if Twitter ignores a major news event, it means that nobody, anywhere, is thinking or paying attention to anything else.
The cutest part about that argument is the suggestion that were it not for the VMAs, all of society would be zeroed in on what’s happening in Syria. Our collective attention is usually so unshakeable, you see—unlike Cyrus’ ass, of course, which effortlessly shook its way into our hearts. She was the only person, the only event that could tear our eyes from the atrocities occurring in the Syrian streets and steer them towards the atrocities occurring in a theatre in Brooklyn.
What this has also shown us is exactly how many people don’t know how to spell Syria.
Even still, there is some import in discussing the racial implications of a major pop star on international television using black women and black faces as toys and props in her show, and the fact that no one thought to stop her and say, ‘“Wait, you know this doesn’t look good, right?’“ (Naturally, some people have since written very well on the subject.)
After the VMAs, Cyrus released a new song with Justin Bieber called ‘“Twerk,’“ creating a holy trinity of things my dad doesn’t understand and will call me about later. If recent history has taught us anything, the video for the single is sure to be released to coincide with American military action against Syria. If anyone can distract North Americans from a matter as pressing and complicated as military interference in a foreign country—a topic we are so notoriously educated on—it’s Miley Cyrus, her fuzzy tongue, and her teeny, tiny butt-cheeks.
Well, That Sucked appears every Friday.
