celebrity gossip, academic style

Cyrus has spent a lot of time recently toying with racial imagery. We’ve seen Cyrus twerking her way through the video for her big hit “We Can’t Stop,” professing her love for “hood music,” and claiming spiritual affinity with Lil’ Kim. Last night, as Cyrus stalked the stage, mugging and twerking, and paused to spank and simulate analingus upon the ass of a thickly set African-American backup dancer, her act tipped over into what we may as well just call racism: a minstrel show routine whose ghoulishness was heightened by Cyrus’s madcap charisma, and by the dark beauty of “We Can’t Stop” — by a good distance, the most powerful pop hit of 2013.

A doctoral dissertation could (and will) be written on the racial, class, and gender dynamics of Cyrus’s shtick. I’ll make just one historical note. For white performers, minstrelsy has always been a means to an end: a shortcut to self-actualization. The archetypal example is in The Jazz Singer (1927), in which Al Jolson’s immigrant striver puts on the blackface mask to cast off his immigrant Jewish patrimony and remake himself as an all-American pop star.

Cyrus’s twerk act gives minstrelsy a postmodern careerist spin. Cyrus is annexing working-class black “ratchet” culture, the potent sexual symbolism of black female bodies, to the cause of her reinvention: her transformation from squeaky-clean Disney-pop poster girl to grown-up hipster-provocateur. (Want to wipe away the sickly-sweet scent of the Magic Kingdom? Go slumming in a black strip club.) Cyrus may indeed feel a cosmic connection to Lil’ Kim and the music of “the hood.” But the reason that these affinities are coming out now, at the VMAs and elsewhere, is because it’s good for business.

It’s gross, it’s exploitative, it’s unfortunate. But what fascinates me isn’t the critique — although there’s much more to be said, especially in terms of gender and self-exploitation and postfeminism — so much as Cyrus’s immunity to it. These critiques may shade our understanding of her image; when someone writes a star study of her, decades from now, this performance, and the response to it, may or may not hold as much significance as, say, her turn as Hannah Montana. But her stardom will endure — and not even because of the old maxim that ‘all publicity is good publicity.’

Cyrus, and other pop stars with negative publicity swirling around them, are immune for a rather simple reason: their power, and resilience, doesn’t stem from their images. It’s in their music. And so long as you can turn on your Top 40 radio station and hear a super catchy song — catchy enough that it overrides your personal politics — it doesn’t matter what they do, so long as the music remains infective.

Take the most blatant example of a Pop Star Behaving Badly: Chris Brown. In what has now become well-trod public knowledge, on the night of February 9th, 2009, Chris Brown physically attacked then-girlfriend Rihanna. The severity of the beating only became evident when a picture of her battered face, leaked to TMZ, quickly spread across the internet. In the years since the event, Brown has managed to make himself look like even more of an asshole, tattooing a picture of a battered woman, who just happens to look like Rihanna, on his neck, and making all matter of equally egregious statements. But I don’t need to convince you of Brown’s douchery: it’s common knowledge.

And yet, his records still sell. And not just a little, amongst the Brown defenders, but a lot. Number One album, Number One Singles, tons of award nominations a lot. His video for “Look at Me Now,” released in 2011, has received over 220 MILLION YouTube views. “Don’t Wake Me Up” was EVERYONE last summer.

Now, I love Top 40 radio. I’ve always loved it. I love its comforting repetitiveness; I love how it familiarizes me with the newest pop, for better or for worst, while I’m driving to the grocery store. But I loathe Brown and the choices his image represents, so I change the channel when one of his songs comes on — even the implicit, passive endorsement is too much for me. But I can’t change the channel when I’m pumping my gas and the loud speaker is playing that same Top 40 station or when it comes on during a sports game.

Do all these Clear Channel radio execs endorse domestic abuse? Does the owner of the gas station? Do the players on the sports team? Do most of the kids listening at home or playing the YouTube video in the background while they do their homework or chat online? Do the moms who let their kid use the song for her ringtone? Probably not, no. But the songs are catchy. And because you’re not looking at Brown’s face as the song plays in the background, you can deal. It’s the banality of catchy Top 40, and it’s very easy to tolerate. If Brown’s music were shitty, he’d no longer be popular. Simple.

But why doesn’t this disarticulation of performer and product work with other celebrities? Why can’t we tolerate what Paula Deen does in her private life, with the understanding that she’s a “good” cook? What about Mel Gibson, who’s still a decent actor, but has arguably behaved less abhorrently than Brown? Because celebrities in general — and film and television actors in particular — are wed to their actual faces. Every time I see Mel Gibson onscreen, I’m reminded of the infamous mugshot. Every time I hear his voice, I hear the transcript of racial epithets. Every time I see Paul Deen’s face, I see her clumsy, back-handed apology for her own racial epithets. The thing that makes the star a star — the talent — is yoked physical appearance.

Granted, pop stars are pop stars in no small part due to their ability to manufacture an image to accompany their songs. Without her boyfriends and break-ups and best friends and bitch face, Taylor Swift would not be Taylor Swift. But the source of her power and charisma is not in her appearance, per se, or her speaking ability — as clearly evidenced last night at the VMAs. It’s in her catchy-ass music that worms into your head and refuses to leave. Britney’s a great example here: now that she’s basically become a recluse, her new releases still sell like crazy. It’s not because she’s a good singer — she’s not, really — but because she has great production. Max Martin, Dr. Luke — if they make it, it doesn’t matter who sings it, or what the body behind that voice has done, you’ll listen to it.

Or take the so-called “song of the summer, “Blurred Lines,” which may or may not be “rapey.” If it were a poem, submitted as assignment by a student, I’d probably go for the later. But put it with a Pharrell beat, and every time it plays at a summer wedding, you’ll be on the dance floor — it’s easy to forget about how condescending the video is when it’s that easy to move to.

There are dozens of other singers who have committed crimes, cultural or literal, that we ignore. And as much as Cyrus’s performance engenders intelligent conversations about race and sexuality, the fact remains that her song — “We Can’t Stop” — is infectious. Cyrus herself may not understand that the song’s power and poignancy stem from its sadness (someone on Facebook said “it sounds like the funeral music for a young person”), but that infectiousness makes Cyrus, the industrial earner, immune.

Cyrus won’t make money because of this performance — she makes money because of the song that undergirds it. And so long as she continues to make that much money, big name, super talented producers will continue to make songs for her, which will continue to dominate the radio and top 40 charts. She could become a lesbian, she could date a guy twenty years older than her, she could leak a sex tape, she could convert to Scientology, she could cloister herself in a Buddhist monastery, she could appropriate the signifiers of yet another culture, she could join the Occupy Movement, she could change her name to a symbol — so long as this was still her single, and she still had the muscle of a major label behind her, this song would still be one of the major hits of the summer.

You know the one thing she probably couldn’t do? Become an outspoken, radical feminist. Which, contrasted with the embrace of Brown, should tell you something about what our culture will and will not tolerate from our idols.