Friday's Music Clip - Miley Cyrus: "Smells Like Teen Spirit" Cover

I posted this Miley Cyrus youtube clip the other day on Facebook and it motivated alot of comment.
Miley doing a cover of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit". It is amazingly awful. Like ears bleeding awful. But there is a much bigger problem with all of this if you just take a moment to think this through and look at the big picture.

It seems that when it comes to today's "popstars" doing covers of songs, shows like American Idol have shown us that pretty much everything is fair game. If you like something and you have an audience why not just prepare your own version and ROCK IT. It is all about you take on it and how well you can compare to the original. Like a really bad version of Karaoke, but for these people it is their jobs and their careers.

This seems to have been Miley's somewhat innocent thought process. Here she is, doing a live show in Ecuador on the 29th of April. At the start of the clip she makes an impassioned speech about how responsible she feels for inspiring people as her fans are telling her all of the time just how amazing she is, and how she now wants to share with them a song that she finds inspiration in. Que "Smells Like Teen Spirit".
Que internet shock and horror. WTF the collective crowd of history aware internet users, musicians and pop culture buffs screams. She is doing what? Really?

The shock and chatter about this big bold move by Miss Cyrus and her posse of assorted music moguls and publicists just gets louder and louder. Before we jump into this too much just take a look.

So how do you feel now? Violated?
For anyone that was around and aware of popular culture in the 90's it would be hard to miss the reactionary social revolution that came from the American North Western music scene as a counterpoint to the culture of excess that was rebuilding itself in the US after the demise of the yuppie lifestyle in the late 80's.
The corporatists were re-stamping their mark on the youth and as a result a section of the generation of kids that grew up in the 80's just switched off. The legendary GenX crowd. (proud to be one).
The Seattle scene spawned a generation of music that captured the emotion worldwide of a group of people that, on the whole, were clever enough to "get it" and play the game, but instead chose to opt out of that lifestyle in favour of a more socially independent one. There was a loving lashing of punk theology to the methodology, blended with equal parts anger and compassion. It was a wild ride.

Amongst all of this counter culture emerged bands such as Iggy & The Stooges, Black Flag, Mudhoney, Skinny Puppy, Melvins, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, The Pixies, Butthole Surfers, to name just a few that I in particular just admired.
Nirvana unwittingly become the mainstream face of all of this, and the song "Smells Like Teen Spirit" became an anthem for the disinfranchised suburbianites that were never going to stray far from the path, but far enough to feel the excitement of being a little rebellious.
They unfortunately become the vanilla flavoured, santised, authorised and corporatised face of a movement so far from the MTV Generation that the toll became heavy on those in the limelight, in particular frontman Kurt Cobain. It is hard to imagine the stress all of those compromises must have taken on them. So few bands from that generation are still around today.
A wee reminder - here is the GenX corporate anthem.

After much love on MTV and in the press Nirvana all of a sudden became very accessible. So accessible that even generations on they are getting covered on American Idol and someone "Like" Miley Cyrus is performing covers on stage.
The sad thing is that perhaps we have collectively, as a culture, lost the ability to actual think about things other than what is immediately on the surface. Has Miley even actually listened to the song in context? Does she get it? Does she even have a glimmer of understanding that the song is all about what she represents? How can she get it and then perform a song such as this? It really is quite laughable. And so so sad.
Not only does she not have the intensity or emotion to perform this song as a tribute, but she even lacks the basic co-ordination to ROCK IT. She honestly looks like she is having a seizure underneath all of that contrieved rebellion. The kids of today..... (sounding like a grandad now...) are wound up so tightly on how they are perceived and what people will think of them. The ultimate media whores.
Here we are now. Entertain Us.

And here is a more realistic version of the song, years after it had been soaked up by coporate America. You get the feeling that the band has a very different relationship with the song at this stage!

I could bleet on and on about the significance of this moment in our cultural evolution but this old GenXer has got children to organise, bookwork to finalise and tax to pay.
My how times change.