RUSH: Did you happen to see…? You might have, ’cause you have a teenage child. Did you happen to watch, did you watch the MTV awards last night? Miley Cyrus. You know, this is fascinating in so many ways. Miley Cyrus, who is known primarily as “Hannah Montana,” who was clean and pure as the wind-driven snow. She was a Disney character. Hannah Montana has now become Miley Cyrus.
Miley Cyrus I don’t even think is 21 yet.
She did a stage routine with Robin Thicke last night that was just this side of on-stage pornography. She showed up in a scanty two-piece… There it is. Take a look at Fox right now and you can see it. I mean, what do you think was just depicted there with that guy standing behind her as she bent over and she’s wearing a nude-colored two-piece? She got there by… Now take a look at that. All kinds of sexuality and sex is being stimulated on stage. It was pure…
No matter how you look at this, it was pure, unadulterated rot. And there is… I’m holding here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers, there’s a picture that got tweeted out of Will Smith, and I think his wife is there, and two kids, and they’re looking at this. They’re in the front row, and they’re looking at this with their mouths wide open, with their hands over their mouths. Well, now, Will Smith is looking at it and smiling. I gotta be honest. Will Smith does not look disappointed.
The other family members look like they can’t believe what they’re seeing. Look at that. They can’t believe. Total trash. It’s just this side of pornography. It’s the MTV Music Awards, I think that’s what it was. Anyway, this picture up close of the Will Smith family as Miley Cyrus was performing, they can’t believe what they’re looking at. They can’t believe it. They are stunned; they are shocked. Will Smith is mesmerized. Now, here’s my question.
This is an honest question. Why is anybody surprised? The people that watch this. Because every news item… Grab sound bite 18. We’ve got a media montage of this. I find it here. Yeah. There it is. We have media montage. This is the top story in America, by the way. This is the number one story at Yahoo. It’s the number one story wherever you go: Miley Cyrus, MTV awards. And we have a montage here of media people talking about her — and “twerking” is what this is called. What she was doing is called “twerking.”
SAVANNAH GUTHRIE: (music) The Internet is on fire over Miley Cyrus’s racy performance at last nightÂ’s MTV Video Music Awards.
NISCHELLE TURNER: (b-roll noise) Miley Cyrus t’twerk her way right into my twitter timeline, #WOW.Â’
ROBIN MEADE: But the way she worked her foam finger. (crosstalk) Wow!
LARA SPENCER: (b-roll noise) Another wow, Miley Cyrus.
STEVE DOOCY: Hey, Miley? What exactly were you trying to (sfx) do last night?
ANNA KOOIMAN: (music) This was just raunchy. All she was doing was gyrating and twerking.
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: Miley Cyrus, her racy performance. Twerking.
GAYLE KING: (b-roll noise) Can we just ban twerking?
CAROL COSTELLO: One thing that Miley Cyrus did accomplish: Every parent in America now knows what “twerking” is.
RUSH: Yeah, but here’s the question that I have: Why is anybody shocked over this? Why isn’t this being praised as great performance art? Why isn’t it being talked about in the same league as… What’s the babe that spread chocolate all over herself on stage when she was nude? (interruption) Karen Finley. Yeah, something like that. Yeah. Performance artist. With our tax dollars, she went out there on stage and lathered chocolate all over herself nude. It was said to be great.
I think it was funded by the National… I don’t know. (interruption) Yeah, Endowment for the Arts. It was said to be great. I mean, this raunchy… “Just this side of pornography” is exactly what the Miley Cyrus routine was. I’m shocked anybody’s upset about it. Even the people on the left were kind of blown away. I mean, this is exactly where this culture’s been headed for the longest time. Could it be that they finally reached the bottom? Fat chance.
But the reaction to this, nevertheless — you know, in a socially, culturally analytical way — is somewhat interesting in that this was even too much for some of the people who are responsible. I mean, some of the people who had put this show on are responsible for this kind of thing happening. She didn’t just do this in a vacuum. She thought it was what was gonna take to get mentioned, which worked, get noticed — which worked.
This was the kind of act she had to do to be accepted as she transforms from Ms. Clean and Pure as the Wind-Driven Snow to whatever. But this picture of Will Smith family, they can’t really believe it, and yet this is what they wrought. Not the Will Smith family specifically, but the whole pop culture. Anyway, the Leonard Marshall question, and what happened with Miley Cyrus and the reaction it’s getting (and how dominate is the coverage of the Miley Cyrus story) is another answer to how come all these conservative books end up number one in the New York Times and it ends up not mattering?
This is another reason why.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: All right, I gotta make a correction. I don’t know how big a correction it is, but it’s nevertheless necessary. The picture that was tweeted out… “Tweeted.” There is no “tweeting out.” The picture tweeted of the Will Smith family with the shocked reaction on their faces was to Lady Gaga. It was not to Miley Cyrus, as I’ve now been told. It was Lady Gaga eliciting that response in the Twitter photo of the Will Smith family.