Originally Posted by roachboy

personally, i don't care about miley cyrus. i only know that she exists because of my addiction to the soup. which is also the reason i know about "the hills"--it is hard to say which is the greater mystery. it does not matter to me that she makes a ridiculous amount of money. it does not matter to me what she does for her 16th birthday, whether she has 500 friends or not. whatever. capitalism is in its cultural expressions as marx said it was--miley is interesting because of speculations about her net worth, she attracts people as a function of speculations about her net worth, and her sweet sixteen is an expression of that commodity nexus. happens all the time. it is not interesting.

if she were more vulgar about all this, maybe it'd become interesting.
but there's something supremely banal about a disney girl renting one of the corporate headquarters to entertain 5000 friends with idisney product, surrounded by disney product blah blah blah.

why i decided to post here is different: mcgeedo makes me laugh.
miley is a result of the synthetic pop combine. it hardly matters who is the singer or group being packaged. what matters is the packaging. so in this, while what the other rb says is true enough, i'm not sure if it's relevant in this case.

miley is the beneficiary of the corporate pop machine. she is an expression of that machine. she is that machine.
functionally speaking, in it's ability to engage in saturation marketing aimed at it's 12-16 year old demographic, it might as well be "socialized" in the sense that mcgeedo talks about above.
there's no real distinction between private and public at this level--all that matters is repetition.
those heroes of the "free market"---consumers---particular little consumers----consumers-in-training----like to like what they are told to like in the way they are told to like it. this is the officially sanctioned way of expressing your individuality.
the corporate pop machine is not that different from north korean pop, except that north korean pop is more interestingly campy. the american corporate pop machine is just as rigid as north korean pop in its range of personalities, choices of subject matter, arrangements, cliches....it is an extended demonstration of an kind of orwellian cultural politics, in the context of which the source of the financial backing is of no consequence at all.

but hey, kids who grow up expressing their individuality through corporate pop learn to express their individuality through corporate means early, so that when they get older they're able to easily find more corporate means of expression that they can use to express their individuality in exactly the same ways. as their ability to acquire Debt increases, so their ability to want in their individual ways exactly what everyone else wants in their individual ways increases. and so the great Nothing that is privately dominated american mass culture can continue to replicate itself, on and on.

in that context, even whether miley cyrus' ongs suck or not is secondary. it doesn't matter one way or another. yay capitalism.