Johnston Pickleworth ponders philosophy in his study

I was recently privy to Miley Cyrus’ masterpiece “Party in the USA”. Not since visiting the Anne Frank museum while listening to a BBC documentary about the legendary floating gardens of Babylon narrated by Nelson Mandela have I felt so inspired.1 In all deference to Ms. Cyrus’ angelic voice, it was the substance of her opus magnum that brought me, weeping, to my knees. Here, I provide a “guide for dummies” to the key portions of the song.

“I hopped off the plane at LAX”

The opening line is more a Zen coan than a lyric. The initial informality is deceptive; the phrase “hopped off the plane”, surprisingly, does not literally refer to “leaping from a flat, two-dimensional surface”. In colloquia, “to hop off” may be used to imply “disembark”, and outside of geometry, “plane” is occasionally shorthand for “airplane”. Ms. Cyrus is ending one journey – that of mundane, physical translocation via aerial conveyance – only to take up a journey of the spirit.

“with a dream and my cardigan”

Note the careful use of the phrase “a dream” – not “my dream”. The implication here is that Miley Cyrus is stealing our dreams! But why? Well, to paraphrase Sartre, the existence of our dreams precedes their essence, and possession precedes existence, so logically, by the transitive property, precedence exceeds persistence.

“welcome to the land of fame excess, (woah)

am I gonna fit in?”

Do any of us, truly, fit in? Certainly this lyric “fits in” when examined in the original Hebrew. Let us replace the alephbet characters with their numerical counterparts and run a simple Fourier transformation:

Revelatory! It is certain that this exact formulation led to the enlightenment of the Buddha in the Bodhi Tree. For the less mathematically inclined, a rough translation could be “in life’s journey, remember to stop and smell the roses” –indeed, the next line’s use of “cab” strengthens this point; it elicits travel, journey, frequent braking and smelling remarkable organics. Clever, Ms. Cyrus, far too clever!

1. Also I was wearing a Miley Cyrus t-shirt at the time, which was just fantastic. [↩]