Bangerz Live
miley battles the pink robots
If you told me a couple years ago that I’d eventually be more brain-blown by Miley Cyrus’ stage show than by Gaga’s or Kanye’s, I would’ve said you were insane. Yet here I am.
I was prepared for spectacle, but generally, contemporary pop spectacle is just a little bit behind what I consider to be cutting-edge culture. The stories are usually stories we know, images we understand. There’s an effort to make pictures and performances that are guaranteed legible for the audience, that make them comfortable; images they can latch onto to ease their relationship with the more extreme visual material. Especially during shows with a younger audience, there are almost always compromises.
Miley slid down her own tongue, out of the mouth of a giant version of her own face, her arms in the air like a little kid, and slammed directly into “SMS(Bangerz)”. The moment the first beat hit, the screen behind her exploded into a truly disgusting series of animated vignettes, each one devouring the next, each one melting into the others.The animation for this track was commissioned from John Kricfalusi, who was responsible for creating Ren and Stimpy, so that gives you some idea of how confrontational, deconstructed, and gross the onslaught was— and it was happening at breakneck speed.
I saw distorted, caricatured versions of Cyrus with black eyes and dripping makeup jiggling and warping across the screen, chasing, attacking, and exploding in relation to a host of other animated characters. And I saw a stories-high, rubber-stone face, like something out of an aggressively-scrawled version of The Neverending Story, bellowing the deep, looped hook of the song: “I BE STRUTTIN’ MY STUFF”. Miley echoed in a high, clear, piercing belt, her head thrown back, a stabilizing body in the center of the cartoon chaos.
Yes you be, girl. Yes you be.
The arc and dynamics of the show were impeccably managed. The stomping, party-starting trio of “SMS”/“4X4"/“Love Money Party” collapsed into the aching, crooning “My Darlin” at precisely the right moment. The rapper Future’s autotune-soaked hook filled the arena like hot butter while we were subjected to visuals of various rotating, 3-dimensional objects, blockily animated— tubes of lipstick, plastic office plants, and other marginal hallmarks of the “Everything Is Terrible/Nagel” aesthetic.
As the song built wounded, emotional energy, these rotating objects grew, sprouted, and mutated into other objects— the lipstick developed a lit candle wick and started melting, the office plants were suddenly spliced with hollow-eyed masks, faces— the entire scene had an emotive power that was completely disconnected from any kind of romance I already know. There were flower petals, there was pink and there was purple, but everything felt completely, shatteringly new, piped through the internet and the contemporary teenage experience. I hate to use the words “Teen-Girl Tumblr”, but I have to, here. It was romance viewed as archeological nostalgia, which always makes it hurt more. But it was presented with a bracingly fresh texture. It stung, and so did her voice.
This bizarre atmosphere hung over the whole show, and it makes description of the experience incredibly difficult. I don’t usually have those emotional reactions to super-flat animated storybooks about cute monkeys losing love or giant, pixelated engagement ring gifs. But here, I did. It was contextual, and everything was linked together. It went with the thick, turnt-up boom-bap of her music. This is my world and these are the people and things I know. This is the internet, but more than that, this is our fight against the internet— these distortions and psychedelic onslaughts are the result of the infinite hyperdimensional gateway of the human mind, encountering the internet and going “this isn’t big enough. MAKE IT BIGGER.”
It was something really new.
The imagery was decidedly not all smooth or fluffy or pleasant, though. During “Love Money Party”, the audience was forced to deal with gold-plated, fire-breathing rottweilers and a fractal explosion of diamond Jesus-pieces while Cyrus slunk and pounded across the stage in a pot-leaf-covered leotard. During “Can’t Be Tamed”, a massive inflatable corgi emerged from the wall behind her, and video projection-mapping made it pulse; it momentarily looked carved of crystal.
During some of the costume-change intervals, some of the visuals (like a jet-ski-ing computer animated Cyrus with badly drawn neon makeup being chased by a floating baby head and getting shocked by lightning bolts from its mouth until she exploded into a bug-eye skeleton) were actually, genuinely terrifying. I saw some of the youngest, most conventionally-dressed fans cowering confusedly.
I wasn’t confused at all, though. This was precisely the catharsis my brain and body needed— the simmering, interlocking madness of modern culture was shown back to itself, focused, intensified, orgasmed. Instead of cowering before it, Miley rode it like a horse, battled it like a dragon, and exuded it from her skin like sweat. She gave me hope that an empowered humanity is possible. That all this can be meaningful. She told me, “don’t be scared. Just open wider. You’ll be fine.”
“FU” was one of my least favorite album tracks, initially. But Miley’s performance of it was another touch-point on the through-line of the show’s narrative.
The visuals for “FU” were anxiety-inducing and malevolent; maybe the most accurate representation of a bad hallucinogen trip I’ve seen in the context of live music. At the beginning, her backdrop was a stadium-high castle gate, riddled with baroque patterns that suggested faces, mouths, teeth. It pulsed in places, changed color in others— it seemed to refuse your eyes, to avoid them, and to blur your impression.
As the song’s you-done-me-wrong dubstep waltz lurched to life, a massive, Sesame Street demon emerged and lumbered toward Cyrus; a huge shaggy puppet. This was a St. George and the Dragon situation— a direct confrontation between the negative forces of this strange universe of hers and her tiny, shining human form. She tamed the beast while the background burned and shifted and engulfed her and the monster in a headache-inducing wash of color-changing mushrooms, bloody, dripping eyeballs, and vacant, warped doll-heads; mainline Murakami.
Despite the aggressive, psychedelic, alien, emotionally uplifting mental overload of the artwork she was swathed in for the whole show, Cyrus never got lost. If she had, the show never would’ve worked— it would’ve just been confusing. But the entire point seemed to be that she LIVED in this world— that she was the master and the guide, the human warrior and the angelic symbol. She wanted us to realize that there was no endpoint to the human spirit; that all these things could erupt from her and, eventually, be subsumed in her.
In that vein, most profoundly moving moment of the show for me, the thing that brought it all together, was when Miley covered “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Part 1" with Wayne Coyne, from the back of the arena about fifteen feet in front of my seat. Just a few acoustic instruments, Miley making “HUT-HUT!” karate poses, and the two of them, linking arms, swaying, and harmonizing on a definitive ballad of our age.
It is that, too. And it’s Miley’s statement of purpose. She’s Yoshimi, and she’s practicing her karate on behalf of all of us.
The robots we’re confronting are our assumptions. Our culture. Our 9-5 jobs. Our lack of belief in ourselves. The crisis in our environment. The machine of war. Cancer. Every process that moves forward and seems to ignore our tiny lives, our tiny loves, and our tiny beings. Everything that resists our deep human joy.
Miley’s utter refusal to lash herself to the practical, to the mundane, to the sensible, and to a system of symbols and stories that gives up and submits to making sense— this is the supreme victory of this phase of her career. No matter what happens next for her, this concert made me believe we can do anything.
Her Yoshimi moment was powerful, too, because I was clearly the only person anywhere near me in the audience who knew that song, including the other adults. I sang along at the top of my lungs. It was terribly embarrassing, and the tweens around me had no idea what was going on or who that wild-haired man was next to her.
In other words, Miley is not making safe choices. She is a gateway drug.
She made me feel old, too, honestly. It was probably the oldest I’d ever felt, standing in that audience. Her body was taut and the choreography she and her dancers engaged in (furries, animal costumes, little people, men and women in various stages of undress, yes, there was plenty of twerking) was celebratory, voluptuous, rock-solid. She strutted across the stage in her short blond hair like Peter Pan, the eternal youth, a boy, a girl, a pure expression of life, crackling and, at least for the duration of the show, inextinguishable.
Her voice, pushed through a microphone and heard live, is something to be reckoned with— there’s no thin digital compression to save us, and she attacks her serrated, violin-like high notes with a lack of restraint I remember from my first years of playing in bands and singing in musicals. I’d like to get there again.
Maybe she didn’t make me feel old as much as she made feel like I’d given up, without even realizing it. Those pink robots are insidious. For a moment, she made me remember who I was.
Kim Gordon said once: “people go to rock shows to see somebody believe in themselves for an hour and a half.”
As Miley fought her way out of the warped confluence of culture onstage, as she established order around herself through song and dance, she established order inside me too. Things seemed to move toward a sort of purity, throughout the course of the show— cartoons gave way to lasers, geometric shapes, apotheosic patterns of light. Her default pose was shoulders-back, defiant. She was the lightning rod for all this energy.
She had collaborators for this show, of course; no spectacle this focused or massive could be the work of just one set of hands. But she functions excellently as a creative director— Gaga’s so caught up in a particular kind of “art” and mythology, now defunct, and Kanye wants to do literally everything himself. His anal nature is clear in the singular vision of his show, but also in how arthritic and mono-themed it is. Miley knew how to let us into her world and let us play there. She communicated successfully, even if what she communicated scared half her audience away. It was electrically alive, demonically free.
The climax, the end of the show (before the encore, of course) was a perfect symbol of her leadership. The track was “Someone Else”— and the hook was “I’ve turned into someone else”. But, as with all pop music, this was more than a personal declaration from her— the audience was yelling along, as though they were undergoing a transformation too.
The screen behind her was filled with dark, stormy clouds. The finale of the song involves acceleration, rhythmically and musically, and Miley delivering a borderline-biblical litany, yelled over the beat:
“Love is patient
Love is selfless
Love is hopeful
Love is kind
Love is jealous
Love is selfish
Love is helpless
Love is blind”
As her voice builds and repeats, the clouds behind her seem to shift, to part, to allow sunlight through. The sky goes from foreboding grey to a gorgeous blue, dappled with fluff. And out of the stage, we see something massive rising, slowly, dramatically.
It’s a giant hotdog in a bun. With a saddle.
Miley mounts said hotdog, and rises into the air, working her body, the massive sausage rocking like a giant, graceful mechanical bull. The clouds part, the sky becomes an enormous, blue “exit” door, and she rides her prodigious, gargantuan grill-puppy off into the sunrise. The door slams shut behind her.
Miley has been quoted as saying:
“Even though parents probably won’t think this, I think my show is educational for kids. [Kids are] going to be exposed to art most people don’t know about. People are taught to look at things so black and white, especially in small towns. I’m excited to take this tour to places where stuff like this wouldn’t get accepted, where kids wouldn’t learn about this.”
The hotdog incident, in particular, has been held up as evidence that she’s being ridiculous. What could these kids possible learn from watching her straddle a giant wiener and launch herself into the sky?
Freedom. The kids will learn about freedom. And thank god.
See, people are still afraid, and culture is still trying to deaden itself. Youth and craziness and aesthetic experimentation still, apparently, terrify and disgust people. There were masses of Christian protesters outside the Staples Center, and there are plenty of people out there that prefer that everyone calm down, settle, and make sense.
The war is not over, and we have not won.
Miley knows this. And that’s why she saddled up on that hotdog. That’s why she’s fighting the robots.