Rarely do celebrity careers collide so publicly and then reverse so sharply as did those of Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke.
Who can forget the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards?
There was Ms. Cyrus taunting the audience with a foam finger snuggled
between her thighs. And Mr. Thicke, singing his No. 1 summer hit,
“Blurred Lines,” strolling triumphantly toward her, crowing “Lord have
mercy” as she bent over in what can only be described as a vertical lap dance.
Rihanna
watched slack-jawed. Niall Horan from One Direction covered his mouth
and tittered nervously. Twitter exploded — with mesmerized users posting
an average of 306,100 tweets per minute mentioning the performance. The
next day, Mika Brzezinski of “Morning Joe” called Ms. Cyrus’s dance
disgusting. “She is a mess,” she said. “Someone needs to take care of
her.”
Fast-forward to this year’s Video Music Awards.
Ms. Cyrus cuddled up to the British singer Sam Smith and caused another
sensation — this time, asking a homeless youth to accept the Video of
the Year award for “Wrecking Ball” on her behalf.
“Wrecking Ball,” directed by the fashion photographer Terry Richardson, has been viewed more than 715 million times on YouTube.
Ms. Cyrus has appeared in Marc Jacobs’s spring 2014 ad campaign. And
there doesn’t seem to be a magazine cover she hasn’t graced in the last
year: Rolling Stone, Harper’s Bazaar, W, as well as dueling covers for
Elle and Seventeen in May.
And where is Mr. Thicke? Getting knocked around by the tabloids.
Within
a year of having the best-selling song of his career, he has since been
sued by the family of Marvin Gaye over copyright issues involving
“Blurred Lines” and confessed to a Vicodin addiction. His new album,
“Paula,” is an ode to his wife, now estranged, the actress Paula Patton.
It flopped, selling only 46,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Other
singers have had jagged turns. Janet Jackson disappeared after Justin
Timberlake tore open her costume in television’s most watched “wardrobe
malfunction.” His career soared. Madonna went on to her successful
Re-Invention World Tour after French-kissing Britney Spears in 2003 on
stage at the Video Music Awards. Ms. Spears went to rehab a few years
later.
But
even by those comparisons, the reversal of Ms. Cyrus’s and Mr. Thicke’s
trajectories was dazzling. In this era of social media, the speed of an
artist’s ascent or descent is measured in moments. “Everything is
unfolding in real time,” said Jayne Charneski, an audience and consumer
strategist who used to work at the talent agency Creative Artists
Agency. “Remember, Madonna changed her look every album. Now Lady Gaga
has to change her look every day.”
(Neither Mr. Thicke nor Ms. Cyrus would comment for this article.)
Certainly,
Twitter and Instagram have played a role in the Miley Cyrus/Robin
Thicke story line, accelerating both Ms. Cyrus’s reclaimed popularity
and Mr. Thicke’s fall from grace. After he was photographed grabbing the
derrière of a fan at a party — and the photo was sent to Ms. Patton via
Twitter — fans wondered about the sincerity of a musician who said he
was a happily married man. For her part, Ms. Cyrus embraced her
20-something sexuality and wrapped it in youthful rebellion: smoking
pot, partying with friends and chronicling much of the frivolity on
Instagram.
“You
have lots of fans saying, ‘I’m proud to be a rebel,’ ” Dave Bakula,
senior vice president for industry insights at Nielsen Entertainment,
said of Ms. Cyrus. “You don’t have a lot of people saying, ‘I’m proud to
be a womanizer.’
No comments:
Post a Comment