Why I Actually Like a Miley Cyrus Song

Let me begin by admitting that I am a highly critical person. I criticise the things I like. The other day, I had a discussion spanning nearly the entire length of the song about how stupid I think Party Rock Anthem by LMFAO (and oh boy did I have reasons to back up my argument!), which ended when my friend retired from the argument in confusion after learning that I actually love the song. (What can I say? It’s just crazy fun.) Furthermore, I really don’t like Miley Cyrus as a singer. Her voice ranges from “approximately the quality of most of my female friends in a karaoke room” to “shrill chipmunk torture,” her lyrics are stupid, and her attempts to sound “country” come off as insincere considering that she has never lived in an environment lacking plenty of California influence. It’s especially bad in Party in the U. S. A., in which she attempts to sound like an innocent country girl only to feel comforted at the sweet country stylings of… Jay-Z and Britney Spears?

So, last night, after recommending some ASL song translations as examples to a friend who was wondering if she was the only person who found fingerspelling to be the hardest part of learning the language (answer: no, if you don’t want to break the flow of the conversation, fingerspelling is insanely hard), I settled back to watch a bit of Stephen Torrence, A. K. A. Captain Valor on YouTube. Among his ASL translations are Miley Cyrus’s 7 Things and Party in the U. S. A., so since I put everything on a playlist, I watched/heard them, and I realized that, while I kinda like Party in the U. S. A. in spite of its stupid lyrics, bad singing, and rhymes that don’t even rhyme in that slant way that some rap lyrics do¹, I find myself liking 7 Things on its own merits, rather than just because it’s kinda fun to listen to.