IF YOU liked the lovely songs by the Swedish female quartet Kraja that were posted here last week, please go back and view them again after you take a look at this clip of the teen star Miley Cyrus appearing on the show Britain’s Got Talent last night. Miley’s performance of her song Can’t be Tamed includes a prolonged kiss with another woman, or a person who is supposedly a woman but who looks like a punk demon. This kiss is not surprising. Even the vaunted Metropolitan Opera includes lesbian gestures in its productions. And, in everyday life, women who are not lesbians now regularly stroke, pet, and kiss each other with a level of sensuality once reserved for private moments and for lovers. Miley’s outfit, with its leather connotations of sexual fascism, is something you might see in a police state run by teen vixens.                                                             

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Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

I have recently been writing about Gnosticism and reading the scholarly literature on it, so it is not surprising that various Gnostic implications of the existing cultural scene leap out at me. One of the main points that Hans Jonas, author of the groundbreaking study The Gnostic Religion (1958), makes about Gnosticism is that Gnosticism is obsessively antithetic in character. The Gnostic rejects every normative evaluation and posits as valid instead the direct reversal of the norm. At the fundamental level, Gnosticism rejects the evaluation of he world and of existence as good; it rejects order, implicit in the world, as good. Instead it claims that the world is intrinsically evil and inimical to those who have been elevated to sainthood by acquiring the secret knowledge to which the word Gnosis refers. If normative evaluation insists that something is good, Gnostics are bound by their antithetic dogma to insist that the opposite thing is good whereas the original thing is evil. 

People might think that I am shifting from the sublime to the ridiculous, but it occurs to me that the contrast you recently pointed out between the Swedish vocal quartet Kraja and the latest version of the American pop star Miley Cyrus is germane to the discussion. The latest version of Miss Cyrus belongs to the Gnostic perversion of ordinary life. 

The four girls of Kraja, who sing usually without instrumental accompaniment, present themselves under an ordinary, longstanding image of late-girlhood or early womanhood, as conventionally beautiful without the need for makeup or elaborate clothing, as a bit shy or perhaps merely modest, and as enthusiastic about the traditional songs that they sing. The cover of their second album shows them with their bicycles on a country road somewhere in Sweden. Their lyrics are conventionally moral – about young women who fend of suitors because they are thinking about their sweethearts, or who think about marriage with someone “true.” 

The Miley Cyrus video that you posted struck me as almost conspiratorial in its determination to reverse every evaluation implicit in the Kraja-videos that are posted elsewhere at The Thinking Housewife. 

First, the directors of that video take the girl – who although no longer a teenager is still about the age of a college sophomore – and (pardoning the expression) strip her of every semblance of normative girlhood. To say that the visual construction prostitutes the girl would not be too strong a description. Instead of the pulled-out-of-the-closet wardrobe of the Kraja girls, we have the metal-and-leather garb of a pornographic dominatrix. (Your term, “sexual fascism,” is to the point.) Next, the elements of music, lyric, and dance are reduced to a lifeless mechanical minimalism. Musically rhythm dominates in what is basically a sexual throb; there is no real melody, as such. The girl’s dance-steps are stiff and strutting – and perpetually open-legged. The imagery is crudely demonic. One dancer-figure, who kisses Miss Cyrus halfway through the number, is not only facially demonic, but his body is made up to appear as though a blade had slashed it repeatedly. We have, in sum, the sexual theme of a prostituted girl and the sacrificial theme of a mutilated body. 

Whether the singer understands the rudimentary lyric is beside the point. The refrain, “I can’t be saved,” is deliberate provocation. Miss Cyrus sings without life; her dancing is also stiff and corpselike. Watch the lurching way she comes down the stairs at the beginning of the performance. (Perhaps she is reacting unconsciously to the betrayal of her actual, but suppressed, girlishness.) All of this the producers offer to us as an esthetic object. But it can only be an esthetic object on the reversal of everything that the word esthetic – or the word art – implies. Hence from a normative perspective, it is not art, but anti-art; and Miss Cyrus is not a girl, but an anti-girl. She is not pretty; she is sweaty and ugly. Not that we haven’t seen it all before in spades – but this is a particularly studious exercise in what its advocates call “transgression,” by which, of course, they mean something that is, to them, good.

Laura writes:

These are the words to the seventeen-year-old Miley’s song Can’t be tamed:   

For those who don’t know me, I can get a bit crazy
Have to get my way, 24 hours a day
‘Cause I’m hot like that
Every guy everywhere just gives me mad attention
Like I’m under inspection, I always get the 10s
‘Cause I’m built like that

I go through guys like money flyin’ out their hands
They try to change me but they realize they can’t
And every tomorrow is a day I never planned
If you’re gonna be my man, understand

[Chorus]
I can’t be tamed, I can’t be saved
I can’t be blamed, I can’t, can’t
I can’t be tamed, I can’t be changed
I can’t be saved, I can’t be (can’t be)
I can’t be tamed

If I see my reflectiona bout my intentions
I’ll tell ya I’m not here to sell ya
Or tell ya to get to hell
I’m like a puzzle but all of my pieces are jagged
If you can understand this, we can make some magic
I’m on like that

I wanna fly I wanna drive I wanna go
I wanna be a part of something I don’t know
And if you try to hold me back I might explode
Baby by now you should know

[Chorus]

I’m not a trick you play, I ride a different way
I’m not a mistake, I’m not a fake, It’s set in my DNA
Don’t change me (x4)
(I can’t be tamed)

I wanna fly I wanna drive I wanna go
I wanna be a part of something I don’t know
And if you try to hold me back I might explode
Baby by now you should know

[Chorus]

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