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Showing posts with label Miley Cyrus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Miley Cyrus. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
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As shiny new 2015 hoves into view, I've got to admit I'm going to miss the ol' scuffed up, 2014. I squeezed in an awful lot into 365 days, so with New Year approaching here's a few traditional 'Best of' lists. Today: gigs! To come: albums, films, plays, art and maybe videogames.
Honourable Mentions:
Eels at Royal Albert Hall, 30th June 2014
After a physically and mentally exhausting Glastonbury Festival the last thing I wanted to do was troop across London to see yet more live music. But then Beautiful Freak was one of the first albums I ever owned and for many years Eels were my favourite band. A couple of years of middling albums haven taken the shine off them, so I was there out of duty more than genuine passion. But Mark Oliver Everett and company knocked me for six, reminding me precisely why younger me was so doolally over him. The perfect way to get through the post festival blues.
'Miley Cyrus: Bangerz' at the o2 Arena, 6th May 2014
They laughed - laughed - at me for splashing out £50 on a Miley Cyrus ticket! Joke's on them, she was one of the funnest/weirdest/bonkers things I saw all year. Admittedly, a 30 year old man turning up alone to a Miley Cyrus gig isn't the greatest look, but I don't regret a single moment. Even leaving aside the bonkers cartoons and psychedelic cat projections, Bangerz is a goddamn excellent pop album, and hearing songs like Adore You, SMS Bangerz and 4x4 played at ear-splitting volume made me grin like an idiot. Pop concert as sensory overload.
St Vincent at The Cambridge Junction, 19th August 2014
Well I didn't manage to score Kate Bush tickets (not for want of trying mind you), but Annie Clarke was probably the better gig. 2014 was the year St Vincent blossomed from 'merely' great into spectacular. After knocking me dead at a festival gig over the summer I immediately got gig tickets to see her in Cambridge (her Roundhouse gigclashed with an ultimately disappointing Lady Gaga gig). It was amazing, the kind of artist that turns her fans into evangelists and blows your mind clean out. While she plays there may as well not be any other musicians in the world. Annie Clarke is a class apart, a woman so talented you feel privileged to be spending time in the same room as her.
WINNER:
Dolly Parton at Glastonbury Festival, 29th June 2014
After 4 days and nights of non-stop partying, torrential rain and glue-like mud I thought I'd exhausted my brain's serotonin reserves. Running on just a couple of hours sleep, Sunday afternoon at Glastonbury found me a numb zombie, barely able to lift a paper cup of beer to my mouth. I am no real fan of Dolly Parton; but like most people I like 9 to 5, Jolene and so on, and figured as everyone was going I may as well go along too.
The very second she took to the stage it was like I learned how to experience emotion for the first time. She sent waves of good vibes careening around the 100,000 strong crowd, sending us into a worshipful fervous. It was powerfully amazing, leaving me astonished that, of all genres, country and western gave me a bigger buzz than all the mad-mental-crazy dance music that's my festival. From then until the day I die, Dolly Parton will hold a very special place in my heart.
Glastonbury was amazing, but she was the cherry on top of the cake.
Sunday, July 6, 2014
Sunday, July 6, 2014
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Just a quick report from Curious Duke, my favourite local gallery. They're on a bit of a winning streak at the moment with their exhibitions, picking punkish young artists with street-honed sensibilities and a drive to reexamine the cityscape. For the last few months they've exhibited the work of individual artists, but now that the summer's here they've put forward a multitude of works. Here's some things that caught my eye:
First up was Mark Powell's Needle Craft, a bic biro drawing upon an antique document. I immediately found this wistful, relaxed picture of Amelia Earhart incredibly sad. The Earhart story of a woman successfully battling against gender boundaries and grasping the infinite freedom of the clear blue sky has a pleasing poetry to it. Counterbalancing this joy is the tragedy of her mysterious death while trying to fly around the world. Powell's piece marries much of this into one image, Earhart posing with practical, posed femininity and pausing to look at a plane soaring through the clouds.
Interposed between the two Powell has inserted one of his trademark birds. Rendered in scientific, clinical detail its placement has an air of the hallucinogenic to it, as if this is the representation of the thoughts flickering through Earhart's mind at this particular moment. The bird feels like an omen of her eventual demise and perhaps an indication of the aviatrix forever reincarnated in the the skies. Exacerbating this sad air is the aged, ragged edges of the magazine, what was once forward looking and futuristic is now slowly being forgotten and destroyed.
Now, in one unlikely stride we move from Amelia Earhart to Miley Cyrus. DS's Miley Smash Hits is perhaps one of the most brazenly cheesed up pictures I've ever seen on a gallery. This is the epitome of the ephemeral; a screengrab of Cyrus from the Wrecking Ball video with some crude photoshop filters applied over the top smashing up the Disney logo. In the corner stands Mickey Mouse, quite understandably glaring in annoyance. As a visual depiction of Cyrus's metamorphosis from squeaky clean teen queen to crotch rubbing, tongue lashing party bitch it's pretty effective... but why?! It's the kind of image that'd be right at home blaring out from a Camden Market T-Shirt shop; something devoid of class, subtly and taste - but I kind of love it. I respect the gumption of any artist that exhibits something that waggles a middle finger this hard in the face of bourgeois respectability and aesthetics.
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| Needle Craft - Mark Powell (sorry for the reflections) |
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| Miley Smash Hits - DS |
But what most jumped off the walls at me here was Dan Rawling's Building the Den 01 & 02. These are antique wood saws that've been assaulted with a plasma cutter, forestry scenes being carved from the sheet metal of the saws. First and foremost they are beautiful, intricate objects; the worn sturdiness and weight of the saw contrasting perfectly against the detail of the design upon them. The minute gaps beetween the leaves of the branches are a sight to behold - organic chaos in flat metal. But there's also a playful humour in action here - a hall of mirrors effect in which the very thing the saw is meant to destroy is outlined in such beauty. It's ace.
This is but a small taster - there's a ton of interesting stuff down at Curious Duke. Much of it I've covered before in these pages - from the satirical microcosms of Roy's People to the stylish fashion dogs of Agnetha Sjögren to Tannaz Oroumchi's warped maps of London to Darragh Powell's apocalyptic, deathy bird populated cityscapes.
With the Whitecross Street Party scant weeks away the street has begun its annual blossoming into a nerve centre of the London art world. Curious Duke sits at the epicentre of this, and (60) Days of Summer works as a perfect smörgåsbord of what's in store for us over the next few months. Whet your appetite, check it out and tell 'em London City Nights sent you.
This is but a small taster - there's a ton of interesting stuff down at Curious Duke. Much of it I've covered before in these pages - from the satirical microcosms of Roy's People to the stylish fashion dogs of Agnetha Sjögren to Tannaz Oroumchi's warped maps of London to Darragh Powell's apocalyptic, deathy bird populated cityscapes.
With the Whitecross Street Party scant weeks away the street has begun its annual blossoming into a nerve centre of the London art world. Curious Duke sits at the epicentre of this, and (60) Days of Summer works as a perfect smörgåsbord of what's in store for us over the next few months. Whet your appetite, check it out and tell 'em London City Nights sent you.
Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Wednesday, May 7, 2014
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Miley Cyrus is honest in the way that a millions of earnestly gloomy guitar twiddlers can never be. Her primary pleasures in life are smoking weed, MDMA, masturbation, smoking more weed and wiggling her ass, and she's on an evangelical crusade to drag us into her hedonistic world. And fuck it, why not? There's a sense of the last days of Rome in Bangerz; the show a drug-frazzled, psycho orgy trying desperately to drown out the sound of reality of the world outside.
Bangerz is an escape into a fucked-on-amphetamines candy-world. Kaleidoscopes of epileptic animated cat gifs blur into PS2 graphics Mileys on jet skis blur into a neon Nintendo LSD Mushroom Kingdom blur into buttfucking furry-costumed pervs blur into a 30 foot dog shooting lasers out of its eyes blur into a multiheaded Miley-hydra thrashing a hundred jammed out tongues at us. Somewhere on stage a little woman dressed as a joint is furiously twerking at a man dressed as a zippo lighter. All this while an insistent ultra-trashy dubstep meets line-dancing 4/4 beat wobbles through the guts of the crwod.
She's grasped the high voltage cable of internet culture, transforming herself from a slightly dippy, balladeering popstar into the offspring of 4chan and FYAD, a style stitched together from viral internet videos that millions of people watch and immediately forget. Sure there's no substance here, but there's a difference between 'yer regular Bieberish vapidity and the aggressively nihilistic meaninglessness of Miley Cyrus. In a touch of zen, the whole point of Bangerz is that there is no point, the songs, visuals and flashing lights all aiming to drag us down, to make us dirtily writhe in the sweatiest, goopiest, candy-flavoured pop culture detritus.
Despite the near constant crotch-rubbing, revealing outfits and omni-gyrating, none of this is sexy. Bangerz works from some crazy fractured abstraction of sexuality; the purpose of masturbation no longer to make yourself cum but to define yourself as an individual devoted to their own pleasure. The swipe of fingers through a moist gusset is the Miley salute, the calling card of an army of bangerz banging away at themselves to the cold glow of laptop light.
Importantly, Bangerz isn't designed to make the audience want to fuck Miley. Throughout the show there's repeated attempts to uglify her; giving her deformed hillbilly teeth, videos slicing her into disconnected ribbons, her flesh blasted away by to reveal a screaming skull underneath - perhaps most obviously in introducing her through through a John K. cartoon - a spindly pop music gorgon with a slatheringmprehensile tongue. Even live, with a flesh and blood person on stage, it's difficult to imagine this strobe-lit, besequined creature as a real girl, more a walking personification of panicky, exploding libido.
So, for me the low point of the show was when she actually tried to be human. There's a lengthy acoustic bit in the middle where the action relocates to the centre of the auditorium and the band dutifully picks up wooden, stringed instruments. Miley even wears a flannel shirt - albeit one studded with diamonds and rubies - but a flannel shirt nonetheless. She ends up covering Dylan's You're Going to Make Me Lonesome - a choice which largely baffles the teenage audience. Dammit Miley, if I wanted soulful folk music I would have gone to a soulful folk music gig. Things pick up a bit when she moves onto a foul-mouthed cover of Dolly Parton's Jolene, gleefully re-writing the song: "Jolene, Jolene, that cunt Jolene!".
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| John K's Miley Cyrus from the stage show. |
Adding insult to injury there's a painfully waffly segment where she talks at length about a magic Chinese man who fixed her in hospital, interspersed with explanations of how great weed is, how she'd really like us to be smoking weed and how much she's looking forward to smoking a big fat bifta after the show. Even across a stadium you can pretty much see her band members glancing furtively at each other and rolling their eyes, wondering just how long she's going to rabbit on for. On the whole Miley Cyrus works far better as a bundle of interesting ideas, imagery and sounds than she does as a human being - and the closer she strays to personhood the less engaged I am.
So, when the synths wail up again it's a relief to return to the bad trip nightmare Miley Cyrus that I know and love. A giant seizure-inducing dancing animated cat gif swirls on the background behind her as men in fursuits frot up against each other. Miley climbs atop a giant fibreglass hotdog (which is actually a banger, though I doubt she had this in mind) and climbs into the stratosphere. The whole thing gets off to a climax with glitter cannons, pyrotechnics, Siamese twins women connected by foamy Mt Rushmores and that little person clanging about the stage waving the crack of her Liberty Bell in our faces.
This is pretty much the epitome of pop, a chaotic cocktail of new ideas - some intelligent, some ridiculous - all interesting. Interspersed are the old; underground graphic art of the 1990s, early 2000s videogame graphics and black velvet acid art. But is this ultra-hip psychedelic soup all Miley? Isn't she merely the calculated product of some besuited exec? Is this all a money-making exercise to wring money from gullible teenage girls (and me)?
Who really gives a shit? The end product is what matters, and Bangerz is a superlative, outstanding bit of pop-theatre-music-performance art, a hedonistic microcosm where taste, self-respect and dignity are largely forgotten. At the final curtain, Miley Cyrus emerges as the real voice of a generation; a tongue-waggling, pussy-banging pop-Charon ferrying us across her digital River Styx. It's one hell of a show.
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