At the Teen Choice awards the monday before last, Miley Cyrus performed and danced to a new song of hers, "Party in the U.S.A." It raised a ton of contraversy, because she looked like that and--arguably--pole-danced. She is sixteen, like many who watched at home. (judge for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDu2rdrwjWM)
Really, this makes sense to me. When it comes to female pop stars, there is a startlingly consistent trend: become successful when young from first album, then develop more sexual image on second or third album/when the artist is almost out of her teens/'as a natural progression of her style' (yeah, right). It happened with Britney Spears, with Christina Aguleira...almost all of them, unless they had a sexual image to begin with (i.e. Shakira). The exceptions to this rule often went on to pose in Playboy anyway, when interest in their career was dying (i.e. Tiffany, Debbie Gibson: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiffany_(singer)#Back_in_public_eye).
Miley is too young to sell, and like Hilary Duff, Disney is waiting a bit before they change her look...too much. Slowly, though, the transition is being made, and I think that is smart, if a little sad. Here, her dance moves hinted (strongly) at latent sexuality, and the bottom half of her outfit reinforced it. It wasn't out-and-out pole dancing, but it didn't need to be.
I don't think even the honchos at Disney expected this much discussion, though.
Later that week, the Toronto Star listed the top 10 songs on iTunes. "Party in the USA" was the fourth most downloaded song that week; it's also number one this week on the Billboard Digital Songs chart (http://new.music.yahoo.com/blogs/chart_watch/41000/week-ending-aug-16-2009-king-of-country-boots-king-of-pop/). I'd never heard the song on radio, and it hasn't received much play yet. I wonder why...
Source: http://www.thestar.com/article/680434
No comments:
Post a Comment