Creepy Little Sneaky Little

Miley Cyrus, "Fly on the Wall"

(No mp3, duh.  Disney'd string me up by my nutsack and order merry, 2-D woodland creatures to gnaw at my innards.)

My father worked for the airlines.  Nothing glamorous - and at the start of the 30+ years he worked for Delta, I think there might have still been something glamorous about public air travel.  (Then it became serviceable, then a chore, then a nightmare.)  But he was just one of those guys behind a counter that you yelled at when stuff went wrong.

He took odd shifts because night differentials paid more, he worked overtime all the time.  We didn't have any money and there was a mortgage, and bills, and food had to get from market to mouth.  He worked holidays, as many as he could, they paid double time.  When I was very young we did Christmas morning at something like 2am which, for a kid, is awesome.  We'd suffer through stollen, my parents would watch me rip open presents, Dad would leave to go pay for them, Mom would sanely go back to bed.  I, high on powdered sugar and Santa droppings, would stay up and work hard at making my new things mine.

One year - I have no idea how old I was, five, maybe? - I had asked for, and received, the Super Jock Super Toe Football Game.  (I might have seen this ad.)  Super Jock was a foot-tall plastic blue statue; you pounded his helmet, a spring-action leg kicked.  I don't remember it looking this pathetic, but I guess it did.  He came with a hollow plastic pigskin and a set of uprights and the "game," I guess, involved a competitive kicking contest.  But the goal was to whack the dude's head and send the projectile at anything that presented itself.  Dangling ornaments, the dog, imaginary holiday-threatening beasties.

My mother never let me play with guns.

I stayed up, that Christmas morning, whacking the hell out of Super Jock.  Like, five solid hours of wham wham wham until Mom got up and made a proper breakfast and tucked me in for catch-up sleep.  After that, other than to include him in the ritual "What did you get?" parade for my friends, I never played with Super Jock again.  Didn't even have the decency to break the thing.  Just tossed it into the toy trundle and moved on to being bored with something else.

Fifteen-year-old Miley Cyrus is at the center of a Disney Channel industrial complex called Hannah Montana.  I've never seen its show, or watched its 3-D movie, because I am not a preteen girl and I do not have any preteen girl children.  Apparently the premise is that, like Angel, its main character leads a dual life:  By day, Cyrus is Miley Stewart, mild-mannered school girl; by night, she's Ms. Montana, pop star.  Cyrus toured under the Hannah Montana banner and managed all manner of hosanna(*); indulgent parents sold their second-born children so their firstborn could attend.

There was a Hannah Montana soundtrack, natch, and a second one that came bundled with Cyrus' first "solo" disc, Meet Miley Cyrus.  Hello!  Miley Cyrus' birth name was Destiny Hope Cyrus (her father is Billy Ray C of "Achy Breaky Heart" infamy) and Destiny HC, not Miley C or Miley S or Hannah M, got writing credit on a bunch of tracks.  I have not heard those.  Cyrus' "second" album, Breakout, is streaming at AOL, this week (for some reason you have to click every track individually, which is really fucking annoying).  So why not see what's got the kids in a tizzy?

Because there's not much on the record that's going to appeal to anyone over fifteen?  I guess that much of Cyrus' appeal is that an everygirl, and she comes off as nice enough, nonthreatening.  Uninteresting.  She's got a decent voice, some promising rasp and twang, some lousy habits (every vowel seems multisyllabic).  There's uptempo (though I suspect for its audience, it's just midtempo) post-Josie(**) galleria-punk pop, there's some slower, thicker stuff.  "7 Things" does a good job bouncing back and forth between those, has an agreeable amount of gloss; the pop country ballad "These Four Walls" capitalizes on Cyrus' simplicity.  (There's no numerical theme, that's just a coincidence.)

The words Cyrus plies throughout are banal, empty, whatevs.(***)  The title track, which has a nice beat and a single surprising keyboard moment, promises that "We're gonna have some fun, gonna lose control!  It feels so good to let go-oh-oh (oh-oh-oh)."  Agenda includes "break some hearts" and (good line) "dance ‘til the dance floor falls apart."  But the sound's so dully procedural, fun is mentioned but not actualized.

You hope for a record that's smart and exciting instead of capable and active.

"Fly on the Wall" stands out because it's better, odder.  The full-throated bridge ("A little communication!") is maybe unintentionally funny, but it's a good place for a laugh.  The fuzzy "Rock Lobster" riff - the only enticingly weird thing on Breakout - and applause sign file footage handclaps help distract from how hollow Miley/Destiny/Hannah's de-tarted Britless club hoochie really is.  "Hearsay!  Hearsay!"  Have you heard any good rumors?  She doesn't sound like she's got any secrets worth keeping.  Sort of brags about it.  Like most people, she thinks she's a lot more interesting than she really is.  Manufactured non-intrigue, not worth figuring out.  You would think an underage multi-millionaire with at least a couple aliases would do more than make you shrug.

It's the best song here, but it's not a keeper.  It's a toy, one I've enjoyed whacking on its head for a few hours.  Look for it at my next garage sale.

(*)  Whee!

(**)  Former Letters to Cleo frontwoman Kay Hanley, who sang the lead on 2001's seminal Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack, tours with a Cyrus as a back-up singer.

(***)  Lyrically, the record's nadir is a well-meaning bit of noise pollution called "Wake Up America."  "It's our home so let's take care of it.  You know that you want to!  You know that you got to!"  Eat your vegetables!  There are worse things to write anthems about, but it's terrifying to think tweens will take urgings like "every thing you do matters in some way" to ego; imagine a subgeneration more self-important than their twentyeverything elders.  "Clean up after yourselves, you little shits" would have made a nice chorus.

*

"One of the rules when we were making this record was, when we were doing the vocals and the lyrics, that it had to be embarrassing. If someone I knew was listening to it and I was in the same room, if I wasn't embarrassed to have them there listening to it, then it wasn't worth doing."

There've been rumors Local H will be touring with Electric Six this fall.  Woohooville.

*

"And tragically, Violence."

tags: miley cyrus  hannah montana  

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