Why twerking is racist

On stage as well as in her video she used the tedious trope of having black women as her backing singers, there only to be fondled by her and to admire her wiggling derriere. Cyrus is explicitly imitating crunk music videos and the sort of hip-hop she finds so edgy — she has said, bless her, that she feels she is Lil' Kim inside and she loves "hood music" — and the effect was not of a homage but of a minstrel show, with a young wealthy woman from the south doing a garish imitation of black music and reducing black dancers to background fodder and black women to exaggerated sex objects.

Cyrus's approach to cultural appropriation is as sophisticated as Robin Thicke's view of female sexuality, making it delightfully apt that they, inevitably, ended up duetting together. In a brilliant blogpost on the song, writer Wallace Wylie points out that while Thicke's song, Blurred Lines, doesn't endorse rape, as some have alleged , it does present the most tediously reductive view of sex and women with the idea of "a good girl" just needing to be liberated by alcohol and a penis to become "an animal".

It's an idea that was satirised six years ago in SuperBad by teenagers and yet remains as credible in pop songs today as it does in porn. It's one of life's ironies that pop music is supposedly a progressive and young person's art form, yet the messages it sends are generally as retrograde as the gruntings of an embarrassing middle-aged uncle at Christmas dinner.

It's downright bizarre that a carnival that celebrates its 50th anniversary next year should look so much more modern than anything in the pop world. So like King, I too have a dream: I have a dream that female celebrities will one day feel that they don't need to imitate porn actors on magazine covers and in their stage acts. I have a dream that the predominantly white music world will stop reducing black music to grills and bitches and twerking.

And I have a dream that stupid songs about seducing "good girls" will be laughed at instead of sent to No 1. The racial motivation, and indeed the racism, is unsullied by talent, genius, or even interest.

Specifically, the performance is so dreadful that hating it becomes almost too easy. All you have to do to hate the racism is hate the performance — and how could you not hate the performance?

Aesthetics and virtue are perfectly aligned. You don't want to watch bad pop music performed badly by hacks? Hey, you're on the side of the angels.

The problem is that Cyrus isn't racist because she's awful — or at least, her racism can't be reduced to her awfulness. Because there are performers who are not awful who have used race much as she does. Performers like Madonna, who bell hooks famously called out for her appropriation of black styles and of black bodies as props. And, also I'd argue, performers like Janis Joplin. Joplin didn't use black dancers that I'm aware of, and she didn't use black woman, or black women's bodies, as a code for sex, as Cyrus does.

But there are still uncomfortable parallels. Joplin, like Cyrus, deliberately referenced and used a style associated with black women — not twerking, for Joplin, but the female blues singing tradition associated with Bessie Smith. And Joplin, like Cyrus, used that association, and the stereotypes linked to it, to shape her own image against a traditional white femininity. Cyrus uses blackness to be sexual; Joplin used blackness to show she was earthy and real. Her strained version of "Summertime" evinces an almost Cyrus-like desperation, blasting through the songs' subtle longing, fear, and hope, as if she can become one with the black narrator through sheer glottal power.

But it's still a song emphatically, and even ostentatiously, associated with a black woman, in this case Big Mama Thornton. The metaphor of manacles makes unusually explicit the thematic undercurrent of a lot of blues; the parallel between personal pain and social injustice, and the necessity of endurance in the face of both.

In making the song one of her signatures, Joplin picks up on those layers of meaning while erasing their context. She is, in her position, just American. But we have to be careful what we classify as repulsive here. There are people disgusted that black girls twerk at all—and most would classify them as uptight grouches on the sidelines. Somehow we have an easier time with that when the twerker is black. Where are we going with this?

Intellectual sorts need to be especially careful here.