A Brief History of Sex and the Video Music Awards

In Camille Paglia: Miley, Go Back to School, the well-known social critic takes a scathing, albeit academic, shot at this recent effort from Miley Cyrus:

It was nasty performance, indeed.

But the real scandal was how atrocious Cyrus’ performance was in artistic terms. She was clumsy, flat-footed and cringingly unsexy, an effect heightened by her manic grin. 

How could American pop have gotten this bad?

Maybe since Britney Spears, at the same annual event - MTV Video Music Awards - in 2000:

Most of the media backlash focused on Cyrus’ crass opportunism, which stole the show from Lady Gaga, normally no slouch in the foot-stamping look-at-me department.

Did Paglia just mention L.Gags?

Young performers will probably never equal or surpass the genuine shocks delivered by the young Madonna, as when she sensually rolled around in a lacy wedding dress and thumped her chest with the mic while singing “Like a Virgin” at the first MTV awards show in 1984. Her influence was massive and profound, on a global scale.

Here's the virginal trendsetter herself, wearing said-wedding dress:

Plus, one of her unwitting protégé, who has a stalker clearly keen on doing it to her from the rear:

The Cyrus fiasco, however, is symptomatic of the still heavy influence of Madonna, who sprang to world fame in the 1980s with sophisticated videos that were suffused with a daring European art-film eroticism and that were arguably among the best artworks of the decade. Madonna’s provocations were smolderingly sexy because she had a good Catholic girl’s keen sense of transgression. Subversion requires limits to violate.

But more important, Madonna, a trained modern dancer, was originally inspired by work of tremendous quality — above all, Marlene Dietrich’s glamorous movie roles as a bisexual blond dominatrix and Bob Fosse’s stunningly forceful strip-club choreography for the 1972 film Cabaret, set in decadent Weimar-era Berlin. Today’s aspiring singers, teethed on frenetically edited small-screen videos, rarely have direct contact with those superb precursors and are simply aping feeble imitations of Madonna at 10th remove.

(image credit)

Pop is suffering from the same malady as the art world, which is stuck on the tired old rubric that shock automatically confers value. But those once powerful avant-garde gestures have lost their relevance in our diffuse and technology-saturated era, when there is no longer an ossified high-culture establishment to rebel against. On the contrary, the fine arts are alarmingly distant or marginal to most young people today.

That may be true, about fine arts, that is.  But I can hear the vast hordes retorting "Who cares?"  I can hear the up-to-the-second figure - 7,804,894 - tattooing this on their collective forehead "It's viral, sweetheart!"  Virality doesn't discriminate between extraordinarily good and extraordinarily bad, just as long as it's extraordinary.

Sadly, whether we like it or not - and it's clearly not, for a greater number - Miley Cyrus' nasty effort was extraordinary.