A Line-by-Line Analysis of Miley Cyrus’ “We Can’t Stop”

Miley Cyrus, daughter of notable country star and probable redneck Billy Ray Cyrus, has long been an object of media scrutiny.  However, she has changed all of this with the release of her new video “We Can’t Stop.”  This video sets Miley apart, as she takes on subject matters rarely heard in pop music such as partying, and hooking up with others.  However, not all of us are smart and mature enough to understand Miley, because she’s really artsy and mature now and we just don’t understand her because she’s that fucking deep.  So as someone who took an english class once[1], I’ll do the service of explaining this magnificent song elucidating its meaning to those not capable of understanding.[2]

The Great Gatsby Movie Drinking Game

The first time I read The Great Gatsby I was all, “holy living shit that was good, but it’s kinda missing something?” Seven years later, it turns out that something is Lana del Rey. But this Friday all of my Baz Luhrmann-fueled dreams come true with the premiere of the 2014 Oscar winner for Best Picture Best Costumes, The Great Gatsby.

And while we appreciate the power of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American novel, we would be failing Jay Gatz thoroughly if we were anything less than West Egg Wasted by the time we leave the theater. So grab a bottle of your finest bootleg vodka, bring this list with you, and enjoy the show.

“I don’t care. I love it.” – Gatsby

Drink every time:

• Daisy is the definish of an anti-feminist

• You think, “Wow Baz I know this movie is about gratuitous excess, but honestly you really just overdid it here.”

• Leo DiCaprio should have won for The Aviator

• You get that deep feeling of simultaneous power and helplessness that only F. Scott can inspire. Take two more drinks if the first drink helped you ignore those annoying “feelings.”

• Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” is applicable

• Miley Cyrus’s “Party In The USA” is applicable

The Perfect Shower Beer Playlist

It’s a Wednesday night, you got a 31 on your midterm, and you just remembered that your landlord pays your water bill. Sounds like it’s time for a shower beer! If you haven’t been introduced to the joys of a cold beer in a hot, steamy shower yet, have no fear! I’ll walk you through it. But before you get all lathered up, there are three things you’ll need:

1. Beer. Although shot gunning a can of Busch Light may be a great way to impress the ladiez, it isn’t a shower beer. Try something that doesn’t taste like piss water.

2. A place to put your beer to keep it shampoo-free.

Holds your beer, so you don’t have to!

3. This playlist*

LMFAO – Sexy And I Know It

Who doesn’t feel sexy dripping wet and slightly buzzed? It’s time to DANCE!**

Adele – Someone Like You

Use any excuse to belt this song at the top of your lungs. Plus, the acoustics in the bathroom are pretty great

OutKast – Hey Ya

Throwbacks are 259% better while drunk. So are emotional rollercoasters brought on by listening to this immediately after Adele.

Taylor Swift – We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together

Remember that emotional rollercoaster I was talking about?

Macklemore – Thrift Shop

So I’m a little obsessed with this song right now (who isn’t?) and it gives me an excuse to practice my sexy bass singing voice (I don’t care if biology says girls can’t sing that low, someday I will sing bass!)

Miley Cyrus – Party in the USA

No playlist is complete without a song about America. And this one is just so damn catchy…

Rose Royce – Car Wash

Car wash, face wash…same thing

Katy Perry – Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)

The perfect combination of funny and sexy: you can sing the words you know and dance to the ones you don’t.

Carly Rae Jepsen – Call Me Maybe

Everyone else may be sick of this song, but I know all the words, and I love singing it in the shower. Pro tip: beer bottles make excellent microphones.

The Police – Roxanne

You know the game where half the room drinks every time they say “Roxanne” and the other half drinks whenever they say “put on the red light”? This is the same, except you are both teams. If you haven’t finished your beer yet (it’s OK if it’s your second…or fourth), bottoms up!

That’s it! Now go grab a PBR and some coconut body wash.

-Tabitha McHunter

*This is by no means a good combination of songs and should not be taken as such

**Sherman Ave is not responsible for any injuries incurred while dancing in the shower.

An Open Letter Apology To Attendees of Last Night’s Hannah Montana Concert

To everyone who attended last night’s Hannah Montana concert:

After spending some time thinking about my actions last night, I have no doubt in my mind that I owe the most sincere and heartfelt apology to everyone who suffered the grave misfortune of seeing my behavior. Boasting a blood alcohol content presumably over .4, I acted in a manner that was immature, unruly, and worst of all, wholly unfit to be seen by the many children who were there.

It's probably a good thing I was not allowed to constitute a leg of Hannah's heinous throne.

I truly wish I could even give an explanation for my presence at the concert. To be perfectly honest, yesterday was a bit of a whirlwind – I woke up this morning in the arms of a homeless person on Michigan Avenue, and only came to discover the nature of this incident through a series of hardly comprehensible text messages, a police citation I found stuffed in my boxers, and a rather unflattering article on the third page of the Chicago Tribune. Needless to say, I was horrified to learn about the magnitude of my heinousness at last night’s show.

I suppose I must begin this apology by acknowledging the abject inappropriateness of my attire. According to a slew of picture messages sent to a wide variety of ex-girlfriends, I chose to arrive at the concert clad quite scantily. The teal, sequin-covered top was hardly something to which the eyes of young females should be subjected, especially considering the unnecessary reveal of my midriff, and with it, my neon-orange-dyed happy trail. Moreover, I showed an unreasonable lack of foresight in choosing to wear a three-sizes-too-small pair of hot pink running shorts. I’m sure you’ll agree that they didn’t look especially becoming with my knee-high black army boots. I hope that the future mothers of America weren’t terribly haunted and scarred by the image of an out-of-shape twenty-year-old dressed like a whorish cheerleader at a Belly-dancing class in South Jersey.

Regrettably, my ill-advised attire wasn’t the extent of my behavior last night that warrants profuse apology. My general display of social unawareness is made quite obvious in a video uploaded to YouTube shortly after the concert. Apparently, in my altered state of mind, I was under the impression that “Party in the U.S.A.” was a jingoist musical manifesto, and treated it as such. It was completely unpardonable of me to strip off the few pieces of clothing I was wearing and run laps on the stage, waving an American flag and provocatively touching Miley Cyrus every time I passed her. I am genuinely thankful that a few upstanding members of the Chicago Police Department took this as their cue to pin me to the stage and savagely beat me with clubs; I shudder to imagine how I might have acted if I had still been in the audience during “Hey Now.”

The looks she shot me while I screamed at her "TAKE IT OFF DIRTY GIRL" weren't quite this seductive.

However, it does seem that I found my way back into the concert, though I can’t explain how. This is probably the part of the night that calls for the most pronounced apologies. The way I accosted young female tweens was simply unacceptable, and I can make no excuses for myself. To begin with, it is in no way fair to assume that they “would all grow up to be back-stabbing whores who only want to use me to get closer to my older brother Mitch.” Additionally, use of the words “underdeveloped” and “flat-chested” were absolutely unjustified. Most of all, I must apologize from the bottom of my heart for screaming that I wished for them to all die in childbirth.
I assure you all that I am usually an upstanding young gentleman, and that this is an extremely isolated incident. I guarantee that I will never again come to a Hannah Montana concert and drunkenly heckle young girls. Please accept this apology; I can only ask humbly for your forgiveness for the unspeakable atrocities I committed.

Cordially,
Ross Packingham

Authors That Would Make Bad Writing Infinitely Better

As a manipulator of the English language myself, I hold several beliefs dear to my heart. They are as follows:

1) If you are over the age of 12 and still cannot successfully distinguish when words should have apostrophes (confusing “it’s” and “its,” “your” and “you’re”), I cannot respect your education. Why are you stupid?
2) If you can’t write something nice, don’t write anything at all. I’m not talking about pleasant or polite; I’m referring to “nice” writing as the opposite of writing that is bad, boring, poorly written, wrong, pointless, confused, frustrating, or Rick Perry.

Yeah, I know. It’s radical. Of course, not as radical as Rick Perry. But let’s face it: there is some literature/film/music that simply should have been penned by someone other than the original author. In some cases, aforementioned art is a slice of brilliance that got tarnished in the current writer’s incapable hands; in other cases it is an unsalvageable failure whose only option is to get worse so as to become presentably heinous.

In fact, may I make a few suggestions?

Twilight
by Terry Pratchett*
We’d all like this series so much better if Ms. Meyer’s attempt at a love story about a girl next door (translation: exposition on How To Have A Dysfunctional Relationship) had relatable and quirky characters with different fonts for every time they spoke. P-rad knows exactly how to make a totally impossible instance (Death playing Santa Claus? Criminals becoming post-men? Women in the army and not in the kitchen?) plausible, insightful, and funny — qualities which are all completely lacking in the hands of its current author.

Miley Cyrus’s memoir, Miles to Go
by Lemony Snicket
I haven’t read the original, but here is what I imagine it will read like, “My daddy is the only reason I’m famous. My brother croakmoans uncomfortably horny music to an audience that hasn’t got boobies yet. My boyfriend is way too old for me. I like drugs.” Are you attached to any of these characters? Do you care if the melancholy wit of Lemony Snicket creatively kills them off? Me neither. Just add a narrator who regularly urges you to stop reading, a meaninglessly depressing end,** and illustrations by Brett Helquist, and we’ve got ourselves acceptable piece of literature. It might even be appropriate for children, unlike everything else about Miley. Which brings us to:

“Party in the USA”
by Adele
Face it. She’d sing it better. Adele’s been so angsty lately (trying to set fire to the rain and all. She must be so frustrated) I’d like to see her getting down and shaking those God-given gifts. We know that when a Jay-Z song is on in Adele’s taxicabs, you better believe she puts her hands up.

Freud’s Early Theories
by Tara Gillespie
If you think about it, it wouldn’t be too different: My Immortal (the world’s worst fanfiction) and Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams are both mostly about sex/mostly wrong about sex. But if our favorite “goff” wrote it, we’d have the added pleasure of trying to decipher what words were behind the awful spelling in addition to laughing at his concept of penis envy and her concept of orgasm. Maybe she’d throw in some Harry Potter references*** along with her My Chemical Romance worship, extensive description of fishnets, and use of the phrase “passively frenching.” On the negative side, there will undoubtedly be a morbid amount of it’s/its confusion, but on the plus side, as far as we can tell, Tara wasn’t on cocaine, unlike Freud.

Glee
by Tommy Wiseau
Oh hai: it’s another artist who lacks command of the English language. Be honest with yourself — you don’t watch Glee for its**** gripping storyline. Having America’s most multi-untalented artist write/direct/produce/star/fornicate in the musical TV show can only make it more interesting. You know you want more of the writing that made Tommy’s masterpiece, The Room, so fantastic — what better way than to sit down with a bowl of popcorn to a fusion of pop culture featuring quotable magnificence such as, “You ah tearing me apaht, Wachel!” and “I did NAHT hit on Kurt. I did NAHT.” Best of all, we get to hear more of his wonderfully attractive accent/speech impediment as applied to music. Which, of course, he’ll arrange and sing entirely by himself.

Unfortunately for you, I have no suggestions on how to improve your terrible English paper. And so, I leave you with the immortal words of Dr. Seuss:
You have brains in your head, you have feet in your shoes,
You have heinously read all Sir Twattingworth spews.
You can steer yourself any direction you choose
(Just as long as it sounds like Erman Shmavenues).

——————————————————————————————————————————
*Another soul who understands the beauty in a footnote. All I want for Christmas is his semen in a petri dish with the reproductive cells of Bristol Bacchus. Bristol, dibs on being godmother.
**I’m all for realistic children’s literature, but I was really attached to Uncle Monty. And did anyone else develop a phobia of Lachrymose Leeches in Lake Michigan?
***Godwin’s law of NU: the longer a conversation continues between two NU students, the more likely a Harry Potter reference becomes.
****Did you see that apostrophe? No, you didn’t, because it does not belong there. It belongs in the first sentence of that paragraph.