Review by: Alex Alex
Album assigned by: Syd Spence
The main problem with “Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz” is, there are no references to the dead petz in the lyrics. On the surface this is as expected, for there are, indeed, no references to the “real” beetles anywhere on The Beatles records, same as the tea accessories are not used as intended neither by Pink Floyd, nor Gong.
Investigating just a bit more we, however, easily find the places where the dead petz used to be and are no more. Not willing to speculate how this second death could be much longer and much more painful than the first one, only superficially mentioned in the title, let us show the place in the manner criminologists do and produce a report on what might have happened and how the petz properly died – as with almost all real deaths forsaken, forgotten and unnoticed.
So, we have in The Floyd Song (Sunrize)
The sunrize insists on gladness
But how can I be glad now my flower is dead
which is utterly banal or, what's the same, post-modernistic until we realize it, definitely, used to be
But how can I be glad now my pet is dead
(one can count and compare syllables for more evidence)
This line now is far from banal or even comic – it is utterly disturbing. It provides all sorts of 'is the author, in fact, human?' questions. How serious is he about the death of a pet (we are not even inclined to think the death has taken place as it's all a show) and, more importantly, what about us now that she grieves so much about her fucking pet? (The pet by now seems, indeed, dead, and so the name of the group stops being comical, and starts being really cynical).
This may well be a far-fetched hypothesis. However, what is not so far-fetched is there are no dead pets in proximity. There is a dead flower - as if the song symbolizes directly. It does not, however, symbolize directly otherwise no help from the Flaming Lips 'creators' would have been, indeed, needed.
So, why the pet was dead and gone? Surely, as a result of a censorship or, probably, self-censorship, the two being indistinguishable in the modern record industry making it impossible to seriously comment on any issues as you cannot neither agree to the censorships nor rise against it - same as you can not fight the fly which has already become a part of yourself, as shown in “The Fly” movie.
If someone argues then that this change has been done to make the song less disturbing than necessary consider the following lines:
Why there is a sky
And why do pigs run
We are, of course, absolutely sure it used to be and why the pigs fly, intended to bring all the possible Pink Floyd references and such. Even better if it were Why the pigs fly/And why there is a sky, bringing a much more important (natural, timeless, existential) question to the end of the sentence where it should have been - so we could question the very validity of what Pink Floyd had done before. Alas, there is a large part of the audience who are not aware of anything so pigs just run letting the birds fly in a previous verse.
(NB. One can argue that the phenomenon of the pigs running is caused by the will of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Matthew 8:31) to which we immediately answer that all pigs must die and we do have other artists much more skillful in transmitting the complicated symbolism of such unlikely scenarios)
So what we see are very big compromises done here and there in order to make the record a record as other records but with additional value which would allow the record to be chosen by the customer.
This could nevertheless be fine if the additional value was of any interest which it is, probably, not.
Take these lines and tell me you do not know what they mean:
And I had a dream
We robbed the record store
That's what Miley Cyrus and The Flaming Lips are doing on the record, and what, The Flaming Lips, at least, have been doing all the time.
What they are doing is, however, absolutely not important. They simply want you to understand that they understand together with you and with your help the thing which they are doing. By which time any semantics of doing have disappeared and you are working for Miley Cyrus for free as an idiot volunteer.
And in case you are a real idiot and still do not understand enough to work as a free volunteer for Cyrus & Co they explain a bit more
The one with the yellow door
One good thing of working for McDonalds is you are given the uniform. Records studio with doors colored not yellow are not being served.
So, what we have is the marketing of the album thought of and packaged into the album itself. You are buying an album with a contract and thus the mutual enjoyment is absolutely guaranteed. In the world where money have almost completely lost their value, the spiritual enjoyment you are guaranteed to get from this record is equal, if not bigger, than the financial gratitude the musicians receive from the donations on that free Spotify or how that devilish thing is called.
In this way none of the parties enjoy or even need the joy of inspiration and this is the world in which God does not exist.
The absence of joy is further deceitfully masqueraded as all sorts of love or other relationships problems which the album depicts when it's not busy conceptualizing itself.
The only problem which needs to be solved though is the problem of the existence (http://thefloatinglibrary.com/2009/04/20/suicide-the-one-truly-serious-philosophical-problem-camus/) of the very album itself. The album should commit suicide. This does not mean the album is bad, far from it. This only means that currently we do not have any discovered means to effectively express the protagonist's suicide in the course of the narrative. Hopefully, future technologies will solve this.
My last comment is on the emoji. In one of the songs emojis are mentioned. This is stupid because the reference is going to be dated very soon and further shows how little Miley Cyrus cares about her work, except for the immediate sales.
However, the place where the protagonist tries to explain the meaning of emojis is real fun and does remind of the famous Wittgenstein observation that f(a) = b does not really mean that a and b stand in the relation of f, but, on the contrary, the fact that a and b stand in the relation of f means that f(a) = b.
Thus this album does not in any way diminishes or alters what has been done by the masters of the previous epochs.
The end of the review of Miley Cyrus and her Dead Petz
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