Will anyone else besides Miley Cyrus and the drove of drag divas flanking her every side remain visible in our memories of the 2015 VMAs one, two—20 years down the line? Forget Nicki Minaj’s collaborative attempt at a classic VMA opener with Taylor Swift (no really: forget it if you haven’t yet; no one need remember their scarlet glittery Vegas ensembles that only Cher has or ever will pull off.) Even Minaj and Swift singing "the night is still young" reminds us of the VMA’s promise, the water-cooler moment that must be saved for the broadcast’s finale ('cause this sure ain’t it.) Despite their superstar wattage, Nicki and Taylor’s performance is simply the wait time for the debut of host Miley Cyrus, who has that rare iconoclastic quality of being the debutante at any premiere—even those not her own. As the MTV Music Video Awards master of ceremonies, Miley’s opening bit swept the stage of Minaj and Swift to ready our eyes not for the next performer or award, but for her: Miley, the pop singer who can at once birth a slew of think pieces while ensuring audiences question her intelligence, not to mention taste.
Amidst the standard introductions and segues, Miley gave the role of host a heavy dose of herself—more accurately, the hosting enterprise took a big hit from Cyrus’ blunt(ness), as when she cajoles the entertainers sitting behind her to shout "One, two, three—marijuana!" in a selfie-stick countdown. Flash / Snap / Insta, and within a few moments all of mainstream American viewers are turned from flippantly drug-friendly Miley to that most immaculately well-kept diva, Britney Spears. Likely coincidental, the transition nevertheless makes for a stark moment of reflection for those old enough to remember singing along to "Hit Me Baby (One More Time)". Britney stands on stage pristine in a silver’n’gold sequined mini-dress, her flesh nakedly in its prime—her walk to the podium set to the song that broke her good-girl image apart, "I’m a Slave 4 U".
If, as critic Wayne Koestenbaum writes in The Queen’s Throat, "The diva acquires divinity when her predecessor passes on privilege, stature, beauty secrets, fashion tips, and vocal tricks," then Britney in her twilight marks the momentous inheritance Miley will receive. Britney offers Miley the Diva’s Dowry: the illusive ideal body on display, a beauty bound to bow out when youth arrives in a figure like Miley. But the divine body is an inheritance—gift or curse—that Miley refuses with her body-blurring performances throughout the night, culminating in a musical performance of "Dooo It!", a new single from her unannounced free album Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz. If Britney’s legacy meant to bequeath to Miley her own "I’m a Slave 4 U" moment—in which Miley asserts an adult sexuality that previous forays into self-exposure (even nude ones) fell short of—then "Dooo It!" rebukes being a "Slave 4 U" and UR fetishization of "adulthood." In place of sex, Miley makes drug use the focal point of her adulthood’s resounding roll call.
To fully appreciate Miley’s performance of "Dooo It!", it’s necessary to backtrack to her last album Bangerz, which had already given us drugs and sex as the two thematic strands Miley weaves throughout the work. Back then, too, Miley’s debut of a lead single seemed overlaid with her debut of Miley-the-Legal-Adult at the VMAs; and there too, she fused her proper sexual objectifying premiere with an effort to assimilate drug use into the actual performance of pop music, not just the genre’s private affair. However, after "We Can't Stop" brought molly (and EDM youth subcultures) to mainstream culture’s conversation, "Wrecking Ball" and the ensuing hullabaloo over its video made Bangerz an album destined to be (over)sexualized. Briefly, "We Can’t Stop" made Miley Cyrus seem like the prototype New Millennial offering our age group a new identification with Generation Y as Gen Y The Fuck Not? As if representing a femme intervention in Big Media’s narrative about our generation as self-absorbed and entitled, my girlfriends and I listened and imagined Miley as the lead crusader ushering in a new discourse centered around a generational hedonism and derangement of the senses in order to unfeel a deranged world. Soon, of course, the politics got lost to the body, no matter what the discourse around that body might say.
Almost as if correctives to the (mis)steps taken by Bangerz to plant Miley’s body in firmly palatable sexuality of Spears-style ingénue territory, "Dooo It!" and Miley's performance bring the druggy subcultural element back into focus in a fringe-worthy way that no one can miss. If Britney's "Slave 4 U" set the mold for pop starlets seeking to fly the teenybopper demographic coop, then Miley's VMA performance and Dead Petz aim to shatter the mold forever by painting her liberation with strokes both sexual and political. In the song’s opening lines, "Yeah, I smoke pot/ Yeah, I love peace/ But I don’t give a fuck, I ain’t no hippy," Miley delivers exactly the kind of generation-making cultural work which I once idealized. The chorus is a chant invoking the millennial poptimism that pervades my peers whether they listen to pop or rap or rock: we are all getting high and happy in the daze of immiscible demands to succeed and to be at this time in this place. The cosmos-eyeing verses describe Miley radicalism, which espouses peace but only commits to singing that espousal while stoned, because "singing what you love" makes you happy. Miley ideology dances around the dialectic between being and getting fucked. Less "World Peace!" more "Yeah, peace…"
When Cyrus struts the catwalk with a cadre of drag queens following her, she attempts more than to stoke the media’s fires—bedecked with drag queens, Miley’s drug imagery now gives a whimsical (and probably high as fuck) take on an Otherness (though she has notably struggled with intersectionality, particularly with regards to race). Aligning druggies and club kids with drag queens, Miley aims to embody these two waves of taboos on the verge of mainstream acknowledgment, if not embrace. Helped most notably by the Haus of Edwards trifecta (Alyssa Edwards and drag daughters Shangela and Laganja, the latter’s 420 zaniness and spitfire rap making her a rare missed opportunity for Dead Petz, which could have used a drag diva cameo or two), Miley curates the 2015 VMAs’ conclusive turn toward the culturally verboten, the unspoken. Thus, she risks and in fact dragaliciously courts commercial "failure," but this only adds to the queer appeal of the work: "Dooo It!" and Dead Petz self-indulge so relentlessly, the music wavers joyously at the point of tripping over itself. "Miley, what’s good?" may be just the question Dead Petz leaves listeners asking.
Problematic as she may be at times be, Miley Cyrus has re-established herself as a shock provocateur with more than base audiences and carnal, sexual maturity on her side. In many ways, Miley Cyrus gives a fuck in more real, artistic ways than her politically tepid contemporaries. If the best we can say is that stoners and drag queens had their day with the 2015 VMAs, then how bad can the day be, really—when racist drug policing continues to ravage communities of color, and when trans* people (including drag queens) still face frighteningly high rates of violence in everyday life? Miley may not be the ideal candidate for political pop’s potential to make material social change for the disenfranchised, but she’s the most likely to even have a platform—high as she may be. In a gurlesque blaze of drag diva aesthetics and drug inspired metaphysics, "Dooo It!" inaugurates the Dead Petz era as one devoted to the marginal spaces in the ever-evolving idea of "pop."