The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic by Jessica Hopper Page B

powerful cultural force abdicate her own might, but it’s understood that claiming it comes with its own cross.
    Swift’s mastery of her own feckless image is as finely-honed a piece of work as any of Red ’s half-dozen singles; it engages many of the common expectations of girlhood, so much so that it presents us with an impossibly perfected persona. The controlled iterations of Swift are subject to constant remix due to her celebrity status, where her songs conflate with the tabloid fare of her life and create a larger, narrative work. Be they peer, cad or Kennedy, each new Swift boyfriend presents or disproves a song theorem of Red . In the latest widely circulated pap shot of Swift, she’s exiting a tropical isle alone via small craft. It reads as forlorn from a distance of a pixelated 30 yards and adds chiaroscuro to “Sad Beautiful Tragic.” Swift’s got a Joni problem now: The interest in whom she’s seeing and speculation over which song is about which dude now obfuscates the merits of her work (though it is hard to suggest any human force could blunt the thundering Max Martin’d chorus of “Trouble,” but alas).
    To be galled by these women’s advances upon their audiences is to play the Pollyanna about how any product gets across the transom to us. In their manipulations and fluid manifestations of their images, they each show incredible deftness—a cultural prescience that speaks to their ambition and interest in being understood. All this girlish guile makes their art no less pure.

WE CAN’T STOP: OUR YEAR WITH MILEY
    Village Voice Pazz & Jop Critics Poll, January 2014
     
    Is there a scribe among us—save for Wire writers and those whose bylines eagerly accompanied reviews of that Larry Coryell reissue—who didn’t pull down at least $40 for Miley musings in 2013? Perhaps a shocked-and-awed news item, a post-VMAs reaction, a pondering of that preponderance of tongue? If not, I hate to break it to you, but you got ripped off. It was her year, whether we liked it or—well, yeah.
    We wrote about Miley perhaps not so much because she fascinated but riled us with her every move. And to be sure, it was the moves—of her masturbatory fingers, nude body, her twerking, her waggling tongue, the way she used other women’s bodies and her own in videos and performances. Her actual album, Bangerz , was a tertiary concern at best.
    It was a long year for pop aggrievement; exempting Bruno Mars’ five-week run at the top of the year, the No. 1 spot on Billboard in 2013 was occupied by white artists. While those Baauer, Macklemore, Robin Thicke, and Lorde hits got their share of controversy and think-piece lather, nothing disquieted us as thoroughly as Miley. She did a mere three weeks with “Wrecking Ball,” but spent the last half of the year as a lightning rod for our censure and outrage; we cut off her head and she just kept writhing, unchastened.
    Writing about Miley is simple because she’s impossible to define and easy to vilify—whatever we want to billboard onto her sticks because all at once she is enrapturing, repulsive, hysterical, ignorant, white, young, female, ultra-rich, sexy, scary, skeezy, unafraid, feminist, an artist, not feminist, privileged, talented, sad, visceral, fake, real, too real, and friends with Terry Richardson. What can’t we say about her? Apparently nothing. Bad girls are infinite. Miley possesses us in a way that fully clothed Lorde never will.
    Yet the sins of Miley were real. She made egregious missteps amid her attempts to telegraph her artistic primacy, appropriating black cultural idioms and playing on historically racist stereotypes. She claimed she doesn’t see or consider race, and of course she doesn’t have to consider race—she’s a very rich and successful white woman living in America. To ask her to see the scope of her privilege—to understand what it means to mean-mug and then push in her gleaming grill, to really get how a swipe of her tongue