For some reason, I am plagued by Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA.” Whenever I turn around, it’s playing at me. I can’t escape it, nor am I moved by it, so I always end up mulling over the lyrics until it’s finished.
If you haven’t heard it, here’s the music video:
The lyrics, for your reference, can be found here. (Warning: eight billion ads, just like every other lyrics site.)
Forthwith, some observations:
1. Not many pop songs reference cardigan sweaters. Maybe only this one.
2. The premise of the song makes me sneer. We’re meant to believe that Miley Cyrus – Miley Freakin’ Cyrus – is a regular old down-to-earth girl who finds herself outclassed and starstruck in Hollywood.
Miley Cyrus has been a household name since she was nine. Her daddy was a household name before she was born. She’s worth about twenty billion dollars, more or less. Get real.
You can tell this is a problem, because the lyric “The DJ’s playing my song” is ambiguous. Is the DJ playing her song, or her song?
3. She references three artists whose songs made her feel happy and at home: Jay-Z, Madonna, and Britney. When asked “Which Jay-Z song, specifically?” in an interview, Miley airily explained that she just picked artists’ names at random.
This means that one of the following is true:
A) Miley doesn’t have any favorite artists, because she doesn’t listen to music.
B) Miley has favorite artists, but she doesn’t want us to know who they are, so she picked famous names at random.
Neither option is particularly flattering.
4. I understand how you can “nod your head like Yeah.” But I don’t understand how you can “move your hips like Yeah.”
I particularly don’t understand how you could “move your hips like Yeah” while seated in a taxi cab.
A cardigan? In LA? I thought it was warm out there. Unless they relocated LA to Wisconsin.
And she’d better watch what she eats–that turnin’ tummy of hers could be food poisoning. I don’t know about that airline food.
Luckily due to my advanced age, I hardly hear any new songs.
Or she didn’t pick at random, she very carefully chose (probably with the help of a focus-group expert) names most likely to get more attention.
I have never heard the song (and am not clicking on the link now). This is because I do not listen to the radio much. There are zero music stations in my area I like. (I do listen to stuff over the Internet, but none of those are local).
Bet she’s never split wood stumps with a sledge hammer and a wood wedge
I listened to this song and a little bit of my soul died. Thanks.
So, is this country? There’s an American flag, so I assume this is country music. That’s pretty much the only way to tell these days.
I’ve probably heard this at the gym. They play nothing but top 40 dreck, but fortunately that’s the only place where I hear this stuff.
Although a third possibility occurs to me: She has favorite artists, but they’re too obscure for her audience to know who they are.
As far as I can determine, there’s stylistically little difference between “country” and “pop” these days.
Hey, my comment disappeared? Anyway, I was just saying, it’s steel guitar that makes the difference to my ear. With = country or perhaps “crossover”, without = pop.
Fiddlin’ also country makes, but it can be used outside country if done with irony and then only very sparsely.
I may be biased, having a fiddling husband and not being a fan of country, but I always think of fiddle as a more neutral instrument. It also plays in bluegrass, Irish, and Blues Traveller-type sounds.
Point taken Jennifer. I was concentrating my remarks on country vs. pop, but obviously there are many types of music beyond what we get fed from the radio.
I may be showing my ignorance here, but isn’t bluegrass and country very closely related?
Whendi- It wheels dangerously close to country, yet it is missing the diagnostic pretension. Ah, I’m joking. I think of bluegrass as closely related and probably the ancestor of country. There’s just something happy about the mix of fiddle and banjo that works for me.
I hadn’t heard this, over here in Japan, and would’ve recoiled had it not been buffered by your astute observations. Ahahaha.
So if one can move one’s hips Like Yeah, I wonder if one can learn to move one’s hips like Could You Pass The Yams Please, or I Demand A Refund, or To Speak To A Service Representative Press Five? Or if said hip-conversation could occur on the back of a speeding train? A careening speedboat? A truck ferrying sod?
Is it me or is Miley looking more and more like a ‘pre-addiction’ Lyndsay Lohan in this video?