Paul T Reynolds

Or more specifically, getting over her act on Sunday night at the Video Music Awards (an MTV production).

So what happened? Well, essentially she wore almost nothing, simulated sex with a (married) co-performer and made many lewd gestures with the help of a giant foam finger.

As a result, Cyrus herself rejoiced over her ability to attract an apparent 300,000 tweets for each of the several minutes of her “performance”, most viewers were shocked, many were appalled, it was generally agreed that she is a hopeless dancer and some people thought it was great that she was doing what she wanted to do without fear of what anyone thought about it.

What made people particularly horrified was that Miley Cyrus used to play the role of Disney creation Hannah Montana, a pleasant enough tween/teen in a family-ish TV series based around a real singing career created around the character. For years she played to live audiences of tens of thousands of screaming tweens and pubescents, and parents were happy to go along, safe in the knowledge that they were getting nothing but what they felt was morally appropriate entertainment.

Miley Cyrus is now 20 years old however, and has long since shed any pretence at appealing to tweens or children. In fact, she’d rather those folks would go away because it detracts from her credibility as the serious artist she thinks of herself as being.

Sunday’s act was not off-the-cuff. It was choreographed, planned, thought about by her managers and agents, and settled on as a great way to finally put the lid on Hannah Montana and move her posters from the walls of 10 year old girls and onto the walls of 15 year old boys.

Maybe it works for her, maybe it doesn’t.

But why the outrage? Was anyone seriously surprised by this? And why do people seem to think this is anything different from what’s already going on? Have any of the horror-struck people ever heard of Lady Gaga, Madonna, Christina Aguilera, Pussycat Dolls, Britney Spears, Beyonce Knowles…etc., etc…? Newsflash folks: this is what modern pop music is.

That’s why I’m slightly confused, even concerned, at the warnings I see written about how parents must keep their kids away from Miley Cyrus material. I mean, I agree they should…but what music videos SHOULD they be watching? Are people leaving their kids in front of MTV unsupervised? Of course many are doing just that, and have done ever since MTV became to kids and tweens what pacifiers/dummies are to babies. But Cyrus’s antics are little different to what is already saturating the music video market.

Further, had anyone noticed the lyrics of the song she was dancing to?
“It’s our party we can do what we want
It’s our party we can say what we want
It’s our party we can love who we want
We can kiss who we want
We can see who we want…
Doing whatever we want
This is our house
This is our rules
And we can’t stop
And we won’t stop”

This has been riding high in the charts for weeks, so no-one should have been surprised at the dance moves that accompanied it. Children across the world have been singing along to Cyrus’s self-absorbed, immature, sexually promiscuous lyrics without many people saying much of anything about it, and all she’s done now is perform a dance routine entirely in keeping with what she’s been singing.

Hopefully what this will do is make more people realise MTV is not a safe place if you want your children/teens to grow up with any sense of self-respect or godly attitudes to (the other) sex. If it takes Miley Cyrus’ desperate act of sexual attention-seeking to wake people up to the moral sewer that is the music video industry then great, but please let’s not lay this all on Miley Cyrus, or talk as if she’s markedly more immoral than the next attractive young woman using titillation to make money.

She is merely trying to carve her own sordid niche in an already morally bankrupt industry.