Miley Cyrus Releases Song, Video in Support of Occupy Wall Street

From AlterNet:

To pre-empt any criticism: Miley Cyrus may be a teen star who got her start with corpo megalith Disney, but that's precisely why she's possibly the music world's most valuable Occupy Wall Street ally to emerge yet. The 19-year-old has loads (millions!) of young fans whose parents are Red State, Christian, working class or poor, who may be OWS holdouts but who would be served well by the movement. She's incredibly influential for young girls (the song's opening rap seems directed at them), and she's making protest seem cool (which it is). Maybe this song, "It's A Liberty Walk," isn't Bob Dylan, but that's not the point: within the pop landscape, her incorporation of dubstep and techno leanings are right on point, plus the chorus is awesomely singable. Also, if she were seriously trying to co-opt the movement, would she release a video with so many images of it—and of the cops getting brutal on protesters?

Click here to watch the video.

The 2006 documentary film The US vs John Lennon makes a very compelling argument that the reason he was deported in the early 70s is that he was just on the verge of taking big time what had been a fairly low key and artsy peace project managed by him and Yoko.

Indeed, Lennon had been making friends with 60s radicals and activists who had been showing him the ropes, and who were also very optimistic that he would join the anti-war movement for real instead of just kind of cheering from the sidelines. As he prepared to tour the United States, as not only a rock music performer, but also as a radical peace activist, presenting guests such as Abbie Hoffman and others to middle American audiences, President Nixon's Immigration and Naturalization Service presented him with a deportation order, which was ostensibly based on a trumped up pot charge from years earlier in London, but was probably more about Nixon's abject terror that the cute moptop Beatle who everyone loved was about to go into politics. Lennon had to cancel the tour and go to court. He eventually won, and got his green card. But by that time, the Vietnam War was over, John had a son, and he was tired of public life--he went into semi-retirement, and we never got to see just how influential a beloved pop star might be if he took politics really seriously.

Miley Cyrus is, of course, not John Lennon, and it hasn't been the early 70s for forty years. But, thanks to her run as Hanna Montana on the Disney Channel, she has a very similar fan base, clean cut middle American kids who are in the process of coming of age, of defining their identities, of figuring out where they stand on the political spectrum. Her joining the movement may not be as significant as John Lennon doing so, but it is quite significant, nonetheless.

Occupy Wall Street looks like it's going to be around for a while. And it's probably going to grow in ways nobody could have ever expected.

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