Miley Cyrus’ “We Can’t Stop”: Watch The Wild, Bizarre Video

Sam Lansky | June 19, 2013 9:05 am

It’s a new day for Miley Cyrus, and that means the erstwhile Disney princess has gone full-blown provocateur with the video for her (intensely amazing) new single “We Can’t Stop” — and I don’t mean “Can’t Be Tamed”-style caged-bird provocateur, but more like, I dunno. Weird? Dark? Sexy? Arty? Ballsy? Disturbing? Dope? Probably pretty polarizing? It’s a lot of things.

The Diane Martel-directed clip has a sort of unsettling, voyeuristic sexualized grossness to it — there’s a lot of gyrating and thrusting and some twerking (as well as the word “TWERK” spelled out in alphabet soup), and weird food things and body things. It’s like a party at Terry Richardson‘s house as filmed by David Fincher that you’re watching after drinking an entire bottle of Robitussin.

The upshot is that it continues to differentiate Cyrus as the genuinely weirdest and coolest person in mainstream pop. The downside is that it’s not quite over-the-top enough to read as tongue-in-cheek (like, most of what you see on screen does seem more or less like a plausible fixture of Miley very casually owning the night and being about that life), but it’s ultimately too over-the-top to be taken seriously (that finger-chopping bit is too stomach-turning for even the gnarliest house party), so it inhabits a sort of tense, ambiguous space where it seems like she’s trying harder than she has to, when actually her weirdness and coolness is pretty effortless. Unless it’s a statement about how she’s perceived as a wild party chick, but satirizing that feels pointless when she actually is all about being a wild party chick?

I dunno. The bottom line is: Miley Cyrus made me think a lot today, and also her stomach looks great. Just watch it already.

Read the song’s full lyrics over at Directlyrics.com, then tell us what you think in the comments below, or on Facebook and Twitter.