Miley Ray Cyrus: The End of Innocence

By Arturo Tora (2 September 2013) It seems almost forever, certainly past the bounds of recent memory, that ubiquitous Hannah Montana has been floating around in the minds of those, especially the younger turn-of-the-century generation, in the Western civilised world. In fact, Disney Channel's concoction of the children's television series, which premiered on 24 March 2006, starring character Miley Stewart, has been so successful that Hannah's persona as the alter-ego teen pop star has outshone that of actress Miley Ray Cyrus who played the leading role. Only recently, since the age of majority, has Miley began to take on a brave new look and direction, and to cultivate an image of a liberated, new world, modern young woman, to great effect. Gone are the natural long tawny tresses of her teenage years, replaced with a closely cropped perimeter, and short bleach-blonde top, perhaps a south-eastern siren update on the indigenous American Indian Cherokee tribal hair-styles of her native home state Tennessee. In one of her most recent music video releases, We Can''t Stop, a single from her upcoming album Bangerz, she delivers a laudable vocal top-line to a mid-tempo light-hearted up-beat pop song, touting her slender, taut young body, and large well-trained and developed tongue, in the company of similar party, in a number of settings displaying the rewards of her success. Of some controversial note, however, in regards to the video's scenes and her more recent performance footage recordings, is the occasional gyrations of her buttocks, as some found public execution of specific exercises to improve the muscle tone of one's gluteus maximus, offensive, distasteful and vulgar. Another interpretation is that the rythmic shaking of her lower fleshy extremities was not done in a lascivious or lewd manner with the conscious intent to elicit sexual arousal of surrounding male members, but an allusion or reference to nestlings of large birds of prey flapping their downy wings on raised perches before taking first flight. Although the Oxford English online dictionary only published the entry twerk in their third quarterly edition update of 2013, the origins of these twerking movements are most likely related to primal pre-coital mating female ritual displays dating back, well before the New Orleans bounce rap music scene of the last quarter of the past century and Josephine Baker and other flappers in the first half, to thousands of years to the dawn of humanity. So let us take the time now to savor and cherish this momentous transformative occasion, weather the storm and celebrate the start of a new blossom, promising a scent of maturity but the end of innocence, with this monumental contemporary American cultural media icon named Destiny Hope Cyrus, also known as Hannah Montana or the unflappable, unstoppable Miley Ray Cyrus.