Note: this blog post is actually something I wrote last summer, but never posted on here. I figured I would share it here now.
A few days ago, I heard “We Can’t Stop” by Miley Cyrus and “White Walls” by Macklemore on the radio. And I noticed something.
Both songs have been around for a while, so this is not exactly topical, but it struck me that in “We Can’t Stop,” Miley is censored when she sings about “…trying to get a line in the bathroom…” Oddly, Macklemore is not censored when he refers to a female passenger in his vehicle “doing line after line like she’s writing rhymes.”
Seriously, Cyrus says “line” once and it’s edited out, but Macklemore says “line” twice and both are allowed. Why?
It reminds me of when Cyrus, the female teenager raised in the public eye, was attacked for dancing provocatively, but Robin Thicke, the middle-aged man dancing with her, got a free pass.
Is Macklemore allowed to rap about cocaine because he also raps about politics? Is “White Walls,” the song about driving around in a Cadillac, considered a more mature song than “We Can’t Stop,” the song about dancing?
And are we to consider Macklemore a hypocrite or not, when he bashes brand loyalty and corporate America in “Thrift Shop” and “Wings,” yet writes a song entirely about his favorite brand of car and then makes Dr. Pepper commercials in which he claims that apparently Dr. Pepper encouraged him to have an independent hip-hop label?
I don’t know the answer. These are just questions. But it seems to me that we have strange standards, and these standards do not apply equally, and they do not apply fairly.