Miley, YouTube and the “Self-Made” Delusion

One of the “above the banner” stories in today’s edition of the free daily Metro is about a statement that Miley Cyrus made about singers who launch to fame on YouTube and was purported to be a pot-shot at Rebecca Black, the singer in the regrettable but ultimately harmless Friday video.

“It should be harder to be an artist,” said Cyrus in an interview with the Australian newspaper The Daily Telegraph. “You shouldn’t just be able to put a song on YouTube and go out on tour.”

She’s right; it should be harder. It should be at least as hard as arranging to be the daughter of a famous country music artist who released one of the biggest pop/country crossover hits of all time. You should also put in the effort to making sure that your famous celebrity dad moves the family to Toronto when you’re 8 years old, right at the time when the Canadian dollar was cheap compared to America’s, opportunities to get into acting, theatre and television abounded and casting calls in this city were at an all-time high. Posing with celebrity dad for incest-creepy photo shoots in Vanity Fair is completely optional.

The myth of being entirely self-made is nothing new. It’s told in beautiful, almost-poetic form in The Great Gatsby as well as in any given rags-to-riches story, from Horatio Alger’s tales to Jeb Bush, who called himself “self-made” in spite of being the grandson of a big Wall Street banker and senator, the son of a former president and the brother of a president in office. It is fascinating to see the myth retell itself, even in the form of one kid who benefitted from an advantage handed to her by a parent calling out another kid for being in pretty much the same boat.

Malcolm Gladwell should send Miley a free copy of Outliers.