In case you missed the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards, Kanye West is running for president, Justin Bieber is crying like a baby and Miley Cyrus released a sprawling 23-song album at the end of her risque hosting gig of the event, breaking the Internet with a selection of songs that defy everything mainstream culture believes about commercial pop music.
See more: 10 things you may have missed at the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards
“Dooo It!” starts off the album (morbidly titled “Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz”) with a lit marijuana chorus sung in the form of a melody that fits on a Beatles record, if there wasn’t a booming trap beat holding down the bottom end of it. It sounds almost too weird to be true, but it works.
Don’t get used to this sound. With the exception of a few club jams, the rest of “Dead Petz” has a ‘70s psychedelic vibe that would make The Grateful Dead proud. No one ever expects a wild child like Miley to reach back to the classics for inspiration, but that is exactly what has happened here.
While Miley’s go-to beatmaker Mike Will Made It shows up on a few tracks, it’s The Flaming Lips singer Wayne Coyne and the rest of the band that appear on nearly every song, sprinkling an acid-rock feel over the entire album. There is also a Lana Del Rey feel to her voice on this album, but Miley’s signature country twang comes in every now and then to remind listeners who is really singing here.
See more: The Flaming Lips cover The Beatles on 'With a Little Help from My Fwends
This is a collaboration that shouldn’t work, but it does beautifully. Songs like “Karen Don’t Be Sad” and “The Floyd Song (Sunrise)” are slow-burning folk songs that would work as the soundtrack to an acid tripper’s day at Woodstock.
On “Karen Don’t Be Sad,” Miley sings. “You can make them powerless, don’t let them make the rules,” which is exactly how she came to be such a notorious popstar in the first place. She breaks through society’s boundaries of the “taboo” subject of fearless sexuality with lyrics that are surely going to scare some moms and dads out there.
“Want to lick it so much that it’s almost like I taste it on the tip of my tongue,” is a line Miley delivers on the song “Bang Me Box” over a smooth Mike Will Made It groove that has Motown written all over it. This would be a shocking lyric a few years ago, but the world is now used to this from her, and it’s almost exciting to see how far she will go to ratchet up the raunch factor.
Even through all of its glorified sexuality and partying, the album has a somber feel to many of its songs. Her “Dead Petz” are a metaphor for lost lovers that she still reminisces about from time to time, aching away over endless blues jam with her boys in The Flaming Lips.
The song “BB Talk” describes the Millennial puppy-love relationship experience perfectly through spoken word-soaked verses and even brings up the fact that an emoji can speak louder than words.
“You know, it's sweet and you couldn't be more opposite of my last dickhead, but I don't know if I can get over the f-king goo,” tells of dealing with an over-affectionate lover. Miley’s over it, until the last verse when she thinks that the “goo” might be good.
Of course with Miley, sometimes there just isn’t a way to make sense of what she is doing, and “F-kin F-ked Up” is a perfect example of that. This 50 second interlude is made up of the weirdest carnival-themed trap beat you will ever hear. When it’s 3 a.m. at the club, and I can’t find any of my friends, this is the song that plays in my head.
It’s a tough to judge an album with so much content after just one listen. Being a writer that is pressured to push a review out as fast as possible to satisfy the gods of journalism is an annoying facet of this profession that shows no respect to the artist whatsoever.
If Miley put as much time into all 23 songs on her album as I did in reviewing her album, “Dead Petz” would sound like an unpolished turd floating in a truckstop bathroom.
Instead, the album has a spiritual shine to it that will hopefully grow brighter with each listen. There is a lot to explore here, and if anything, “Dead Petz” is Miley’s statement to the world that she is in fact a bonafide popstar with singing talent and songwriting chops to match her avant-garde sex symbol persona.
If only her pets could hear her now.
Related Links:
10 things you may have missed at the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards
Media attention fuels Miley Cyrus's independent image
Reach the arts editor at jhgolds2@asu.edu or follow @misterjacobgold on Twitter.
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