she's gotta be from out of town

Recently I made a very dramatic confession on Twitter. Ahem.

I like Miley Cyrus. I hope we can still be friends.

Now I do need to clarify something straight off the bat, which is that I don't necessarily LIKE Miley Cyrus, because in fact I find her, as a person, only mildly tolerable. But when it comes to her catchy little songs? Her pithy little teen pop anthems full of fun melodies and chorus lines that lend themselves to being shouted at the top of one's lungs while driving with the windows down? Those? THOSE, I LOVE.

So, I like her songs. So, I sing them. So, I'm now securely part of a fan base that is mostly comprised of seven-year-old girls. I am not totally unlike them. We all have ovaries, some of them just aren't quite functional yet. DETAILS. The point of all this, this embarrassing confession, is that I realized something today while listening to my current favorite Miley song, "Party In The U.S.A." There's a line in the song that reminds me of something that happened to me way back when I first got to New York last fall.

Pretty much as soon as I got off the plane in October I was working for The Tripwire and helping to cover one of the city's biggest music festivals, CMJ. The very first story I ever wrote for the site talked about the things I learned on my first night of my first ever CMJ. Of course at that time I imagined there'd be many more to come, so it was probably a good thing I got all these life lessons in on the first go. Anywho.

One particular lesson learned ended up being pulled and used as the headline for the story: "Only people from Tennessee wear flip-flops to rock shows."

Indeed I had felt reeeeeal out of place in my sparkly flops since everyone else was wearing high heels or biker boots or flats or shoes crafted out of newspaper and old recycled baby diapers and worn by someone who was constantly equalizing his own carbon footprint simply by existing because he was so green that his very farts were probably ozone-friendly.

And Miley feels my pain on this one. In "Party In The U.S.A." she sings "Everybody's lookin' at me now, like who's that chick that's rockin' kicks? She's gotta be from outta town. ... It's definitely not a Nashville party, cause all I see are stilettos. I guess I never got the memo!"

Sing it, girl, because I didn't either.


cheers,
elizabeth