Miley Cyrus’ new record Flowers is a huge international hit, spending 10 consecutive weeks (as of May 24) at number one on the charts. It’s a catchy tune with clever lyrics, but I contend that its enormous success is tied to our peculiar circumstances.
At first listen, it might sound like a conventional break-up song, but then you might notice something’s missing. The grievances the singer has against her ex are only tangentially implied as in “[I can] say things you don’t understand,” and presumably not have to explain herself to a partner. That seems a pretty mild complaint when put up against cheating, drinking, or even physically abusive spouses/exes, or even the aggrieved party in the relationship lamenting their beau falling for someone else. Those are the things that you find in almost every classic heartbreak song, right?
When Cyrus sings:
I can buy myself flowers
Write my name in the sand
Talk to myself for hours
Say things you don’t understand
I can take myself dancing
And I can hold my own hand
Yeah, I can love me better than you can
Can love me better, I can love me better, baby
Can love me better, I can love me better, baby
she’s dating herself. No not that way! I mean she’s describing literally taking herself on a date, or actually multiple dates, basically courting herself. Now a quick scan of such lyrics might lead one to think that this is a female-empowerment song, like I Am Woman of honored feminist memory. She pours it on with the next verse, but adds a little extra something,
Paint my nails cherry red
Match the roses that you left
No remorse, no regret
I forgive every word you said
Especially after she makes it explicit that she doesn’t blame her ex, or at least forgives him, we realize that this song is basically PG-rated nascent auto-eroticism. That’s big, loaded terms for, “she’s courting herself but just hasn’t gotten herself into bed yet.”
I remember reading The Missing Piece by Shel Silverstein in a Kindergarten classroom in the 70s. No, not when I was a kindergartner, I was the janitor, later demoted to teacher—long story. Everybody else seemed to think this was a smart, empowering parable for kids. I was appalled. The basic story is an attempt to refute Plato’s idea that a human needs to come together with another human (of the opposite sex, but that’s optional these days) to find fulfillment. The Missing Piece was told with talking rocks, but that’s the parable part. The opposite of this parable is an ancient concept embedded in the Bible and the Chinese Tao symbol as well as Plato. Why would you try to learn to live with ‘the other’, with someone who obviously thinks differently from you and comes from a very different background? Why? In a word, sex. We have a built-in incentive to understand someone different from ourselves. Of course there are traditional methods of evading the problem like rape, marrying for money or sex and ignoring your partner otherwise. Those solutions are what we used to wisely call perversions, of course.
Then, there’s kids. Sorry to tell you, but your child is not you, and you do a disservice to both of you by trying to make them into you. To live right, you have to learn to understand this ‘other’, and preferably love, support, and protect them.
But back to Miley Cyrus and her jaunty little tune. Many, if not most of us, spent good chunks of 2020 and 2021 locked away from others, and even masked like bank-robbers if we did go out. One of the consequences of that lock-down has led us to the hyper-accelerated work-from-home revolution, where we can just mute that annoying co-worker, or even our boss, on those video conference calls.
At the same time Artificial Intelligence and robotics are advancing quickly. Some worry about SkyNet nuking the world, but some realists have warned that the true subversive result of this technology is sexbots. With a sexbot that can never get offended and will always learn your preferences to better serve you, why would you bother dealing with a messy real human relationship, where you have to learn what somebody else likes and wants? Why have kids? After all they’re messy, expensive, and frequently disappointing. Putting more money into your retirement fund is probably a better investment.
No nukes necessary. Humanity ends with a whimper, not a bang.
After all,
I can buy myself flowers
Write my name in the sand
Talk to myself for hours
Say things you don’t understand
I can take myself dancing
And I can hold my own hand
Yeah, I can love me better than you can
Musings of a Restless Mind 