The pop song trope for the last decade and a bit has been a verse melody built on sizeable interval leaps. So you go A up to E down to G# up to E down to F# up to F# etc. This is nothing new. Listen to a lot of fifties doo wop and teen rock and hear how little variation there is in the tension around the C - A minor - F (or D minor) - G progression. We hear a lot of it now and think everyone's writing the same song but it's just the same process and it's as old as formalised western music itself. If there's an ageist slant on this it's most likely to centre on this, as though pop songs in the good ol' days were Bach fugues and now we're down to endless loops of Three Blind Mice. The other objection might be that no one seems to have moved on from mindless pop o' yore: that the kids today aren't as bad as disappointing. Both views are of course utopian bullshit and should be met as such.
Why begin with such apology? Because all the mud slung at Miley Cyrus for her racy (by the average classroom standard) dance routines that make the good folk go "whoa!" and frighten the horses. Yeah, like David Bowie never happened. These are the same people who were fired up at the thrill of seeing punk ridiculed on TV in the late seventies, the early X-ers who still believe that they fought on barricades until the Man relented and the world was safe from vacuous culture. I'm from that generation and know, when cutting through the nostalgia, that that war was a failure, that its subculture was just absorbed in the maw of Mammon and all the bitter politics were spat out like a snake spits out an eggshell. Today, it's nothing for a Good Charlotte to look all tatts and piercings but sound like Toto (which they do) and kind of thought of as punk. It's nice to have the memories but the cause is the stuff of archaeology now.
The reason that there will always be plain and simple money spinning pop is the same one as that which explains why rock guitarists still think that an overdrive pedal makes them blackhatted badguys: formula, persistent regurgitated regulated formula. Which brings us back to Do.
Wrecking Ball begins with this leaping chirp of a melody the same as countless other pop songs. There's a second section for relief in the relative tonality and then there's the great BIG chorus in which the title is repeated a couple of times in the formulaic 4th to major 3rd. A middle eight establishes some thinking space where the least hyperbolic thoughts in the lyric are aired and then back into the chorus and then end.
But here's my real problem with Wrecking Ball: it's good. It's really good. From the leapy first lines and the fiddly little autotune flourishes (that have been de rigeur since Cher made us wonder what we heard back in the terrible summer of '98) to the massive explosion of the chorus that features a kick that really does have the aural feel of a wrecking ball and Miley's tone perfect anguished teen operatics, this is massive pop. It not only should be celebrated but already has been by every kid who's mimed it into the shampoo bottle in front of the bathroom mirror.
Pop doesn't need brains; it only requires processed emotion. The worst of it saturates and stays in its era along with all the couture and hairdos that need a generation's ridicule to re-emerge from dormancy. Wrecking Ball will remain firm because through all its slick production and observance of praxis it sounds like she means what she's singing. Only just in her twenties when it was handed to her by a committee of Ro-Men she obviously felt the heart-in-mouth pain of the powerlessness of a dissolving teenage romance from recent memory. I'm guessing at that and I'm happy to assume it was her rather than the direction of a producer because the voice wails about "breaking your walls" and then sings "but you wrecked me" in an aching broken glottal stutter that ends the chorus in choking tears: "you wre-eh-eh-ecked me!".
The director's cut of the video is telling. The official or first release clip is quite routine alternating between Cyrus miming directly to camera in white underwear and images of walls bursting from a wrecking ball (sometimes with the singer riding it and some of those naked) and Cyrus playing with a sledge hammer like it's a giant hard on. But high profile and controversial photographer Terry Richardson recut it to fix tightly on Cyrus' head so that it almost fills the screen.
The infinite white background could be a cosmetics shoot or a human sized steriliser. Cyrus' face is almost blue from it, the eyes accentuating it and the dark magenta of the lips proving it by their breach. Tears bead from her eyes. There is even a slight nasal trail. The single shot allows her no escape from us.
We see her flub some lip synch and we remember that she hasn't just been doing videos for years but practically grew up in front of the camera. The transition of the second verse to the chorus is even odder as she stops altogether. This is meant to enhance the impression that we are watching a single continuous take (they coulda used a dissolve and gotta way with it) and even though it only happens so that Miley can emote the big chorus it sill looks like she's overcome. It's these moments, and there are others, that give the impression that this is the real image, the one beneath the tongue-poking, crotch-rubbing panto of the public image, the tear breaking through the clown makeup. It's just more public image but, boy, do we suck it up.
After the single credit, white chalk-board cursive on a black field, we get a micro showreel with Richardson and Cyrus, goofing around and, yep, here comes that tongue as she makes a face. Cut!
But the resonance hums on. The pity still whimpers through the blitzkrieg. We've felt that for real. We remember it.
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