huffingtonpost.com
Miley Cyrus skipped her Video Music Awards after-party on Sunday, but according to the New York Post, she had a good reason: Cyrus was supposedly in the studio with fellow VMA performer Kanye West, who the tabloid says tapped her for a feature on a remix of “Black Skinhead.”
The song was the lead single off West’s recently released album, “Yeezus,” and offers searing commentary on America’s racial politics. West describes America as a place where people “see a black man with a white woman at the top floor” and “come to kill King Kong” and rips Catholics and “conservative Baptists” for fearing him (“claiming I’m overreacting like them black kids in Chiraq”; “Chiraq,” a combination of Chicago and Iraq, is a reference to the high levels of violent crime in the city).
West’s label had no information about the rumor when reached by HuffPost Entertainment. For what it’s worth, the rapper has been known to hit the studio after big performances in the past.
Including Cyrus on a supposed remix would add a new layer to the ongoing debate about Cyrus’ own use of black culture and comes on the heels of her VMAs performance, which has been characterized as a grotesque minstrel show that again featured black women as props for 20-year-old Cyrus’ transformation from Disney starlet to molly lobbyist.
West himself is no stranger to complicated uses of existing cultural artifacts. The rapper performed “Blood on the Leaves” at Sunday’s awards, a track which samples Nina Simone’s cover of Billie Holiday’s song about lynchings. West’s song drew the ire of critics who bemoaned that he spends the entirety of his verses rapping about infidelity, molly, cars, cocaine and sitting courtside at basketball games. At the VMAs,West sang the song in front of an image of a tree used in real-life lynchings.
