By Tyler Evans
One day I awoke from a self-indulgent dream only to find the world I thought I knew in the aftershock of a Miley Cyrus nipple nightmare.
“Daddy, what was rock and roll?” I imagined future generations asking. “I can’t remember,” their fathers would be forced to answer. “There was music, and then there were nipples.”
I searched for relevance somewhere among the haze. The nipples were everywhere, and they were apparently genius.
What was genius about them? Obviously I was too behind-the-times to understand their pure, unadulterated brilliance. I was born a part of the doomed generation, to my eternal discredit, but even I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
Maybe it was because Cyrus unleashed the demons in a warehouse. Maybe it was because she was a forbidden fruit; after all, she was a former Disney star in a country full of drooling half-chubbed family men who all had well-thumbed copies of Lolita in their garage.
There was a piece I couldn’t make fit somewhere. Hadn’t Madonna released a coffee table book of pseudo-porn? Hadn’t Iggy Pop been flopping his old dick out at concerts for years?
Was it a distraction from the music that made Cyrus do it? Was it something innate and primal that made us lunge at it?
And then there was the genius argument. Genius is a word that gets brandished with less and less care all the time. When John Nash was a genius, it meant something. When Miley Cyrus had genius nipples, did it really mean the same thing?
Her nipples just came out to say hello, as nipples are wont to do.
The feminists hailed it as advancement; the Christians condemned it as sin. Both arguments were as genius as Miley Cyrus’ nipples.
Cyrus has yet to do anything truly adventurous, by my estimation. Become a lipstick lesbian, a ravenous drunk or masturbate with a cross, all of it is child’s play. If she really wanted to give the bastards a scare, she should lock herself in a motel room in Juarez for six months with an acoustic guitar and a four-track recorder and refuse to come out until she’s struck real genius.
Or maybe it is genius, and maybe playing into gender roles is heroic because we say it is. Maybe this dark reality is a little brighter because we know what Miley Cyrus’ nipples look like after years of quiet speculation.
The half-drunk hipsters and university mystics will speculate what the next move will be, and why she made the last one, and they will always be right. And as long as Miley Cyrus has nipples, she will be a nipple genius.
“Was there ever a time before music on television, before nipples, where music was supposed to mean something?” I pictured our future generations asking their fathers, themselves two-seconds from masturbating to their own destruction. “Oh, you mean the dark time,” they might answer. “We don’t talk about the dark time. Just be thankful for Miley Cyrus and her nipple genius.”
