Is it still OK to talk about Miley Cyrus?

“The public dislike novelty because they are afraid of it.”

I didn’t expect Oscar Wilde to make me think about Miley Cyrus. Here is how he got to me:

“A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them [the public], and whenever it appears they get so angry, and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions — one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true. The former expression has reference to style; the latter to subject-matter.” — Oscar Wilde, 1891.

Most of us are followers.

A herd of sheep that is as easily swayed by exuberance as by hostility. If one runs, they all run, for whatever reason most of them don’t even know.

Miley Cyrus.

So distasteful, so shocking, so inappropriate, so immoral, so unintelligible.

So was Madonna. So was Marilyn Monroe. So was Elvis. So was Kurt Cobain. Don’t make me list them all.

They were, in a lot of regards, the Miley Cyrus of their day and age.

How do we perceive them now? Icons.

You can obsess over Miley Cyrus all you want. Gossip doesn’t make her go away. It makes her bigger, more powerful.

“Opinions are the cheapest commodities in the world.” — Napoleon Hill

Everyone has an opinion, which devalues yours to about two cents.

Miley Cyrus doesn’t give a f*ck and that angers people.

There are norms and mannerisms we are all supposed to oblige to. If we don’t, who knows what would happen?!

We might all be swinging naked on a giant ball,
wrecking ill-constructed brick walls
that stand for the norms which YOU are defending.

A set of rules that are in place to keep us all in check. No individualism allowed!

A real life Truman Show in which YOU, of course, are the Star because YOU do everything as you’re supposed to.

But that still doesn’t make you a shepherd.

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