Will anyone else besides Miley Cyrus and the drove of drag divas flanking her every side remain visible in our memories of the 2015 VMAs one, two—20 years down the line? Forget Nicki Minaj’s collaborative attempt at a classic VMA opener with Taylor Swift (no really: forget it if you haven’t yet; no one need remember their scarlet glittery Vegas ensembles that only Cher has or ever will pull off.) Even Minaj and Swift singing "the night is still young" reminds us of the VMA’s promise, the water-cooler moment that must be saved for the broadcast’s finale ('cause this sure ain’t it.) Despite their superstar wattage, Nicki and Taylor’s performance is simply the wait time for the debut of host Miley Cyrus, who has that rare iconoclastic quality of being the debutante at any premiere—even those not her own. As the MTV Music Video Awards master of ceremonies, Miley’s opening bit swept the stage of Minaj and Swift to ready our eyes not for the next performer or award, but for her: Miley, the pop singer who can at once birth a slew of think pieces while ensuring audiences question her intelligence, not to mention taste.

-=-=-=-Amidst the standard introductions and segues, Miley gave the role of host a heavy dose of herself—more accurately, the hosting enterprise took a big hit from Cyrus’ blunt(ness), as when she cajoles the entertainers sitting behind her to shout "One, two, three—marijuana!" in a selfie-stick countdown. Flash / Snap / Insta, and within a few moments all of mainstream American viewers are turned from flippantly drug-friendly Miley to that most immaculately well-kept diva, Britney Spears. Likely coincidental, the transition nevertheless makes for a stark moment of reflection for those old enough to remember singing along to "Hit Me Baby (One More Time)". Britney stands on stage pristine in a silver’n’gold sequined mini-dress, her flesh nakedly in its prime—her walk to the podium set to the song that broke her good-girl image apart, "I’m a Slave 4 U".

If, as critic Wayne Koestenbaum writes in The Queen’s Throat, "The diva acquires divinity when her predecessor passes on privilege, stature, beauty secrets, fashion tips, and vocal tricks," then Britney in her twilight marks the momentous inheritance Miley will receive. Britney offers Miley the Diva’s Dowry: the illusive ideal body on display, a beauty bound to bow out when youth arrives in a figure like Miley. But the divine body is an inheritance—gift or curse—that Miley refuses with her body-blurring performances throughout the night, culminating in a musical performance of "Dooo It!", a new single from her unannounced free album Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz. If Britney’s legacy meant to bequeath to Miley her own "I’m a Slave 4 U" moment—in which Miley asserts an adult sexuality that previous forays into self-exposure (even nude ones) fell short of—then "Dooo It!" rebukes being a "Slave 4 U" and UR fetishization of "adulthood." In place of sex, Miley makes drug use the focal point of her adulthood’s resounding roll call.

To fully appreciate Miley’s performance of "Dooo It!", it’s necessary to backtrack to her last album Bangerz, which had already given us drugs and sex as the two thematic strands Miley weaves throughout the work. Back then, too, Miley’s debut of a lead single seemed overlaid with her debut of Miley-the-Legal-Adult at the VMAs; and there too, she fused her proper sexual objectifying premiere with an effort to assimilate drug use into the actual performance of pop music, not just the genre’s private affair. However, after "We Can't Stop" brought molly (and EDM youth subcultures) to mainstream culture’s conversation, "Wrecking Ball" and the ensuing hullabaloo over its video made Bangerz an album destined to be (over)sexualized. Briefly, "We Can’t Stop" made Miley Cyrus seem like the prototype New Millennial offering our age group a new identification with Generation Y as Gen Y The Fuck Not? As if representing a femme intervention in Big Media’s narrative about our generation as self-absorbed and entitled, my girlfriends and I listened and imagined Miley as the lead crusader ushering in a new discourse centered around a generational hedonism and derangement of the senses in order to unfeel a deranged world. Soon, of course, the politics got lost to the body, no matter what the discourse around that body might say.

Almost as if correctives to the (mis)steps taken by Bangerz to plant Miley’s body in firmly palatable sexuality of Spears-style ingénue territory, "Dooo It!" and Miley's performance bring the druggy subcultural element back into focus in a fringe-worthy way that no one can miss. If Britney's "Slave 4 U" set the mold for pop starlets seeking to fly the teenybopper demographic coop, then Miley's VMA performance and Dead Petz aim to shatter the mold forever by painting her liberation with strokes both sexual and political. In the song’s opening lines, "Yeah, I smoke pot/ Yeah, I love peace/ But I don’t give a fuck, I ain’t no hippy," Miley delivers exactly the kind of generation-making cultural work which I once idealized. The chorus is a chant invoking the millennial poptimism that pervades my peers whether they listen to pop or rap or rock: we are all getting high and happy in the daze of immiscible demands to succeed and to be at this time in this place. The cosmos-eyeing verses describe Miley radicalism, which espouses peace but only commits to singing that espousal while stoned, because "singing what you love" makes you happy. Miley ideology dances around the dialectic between being and getting fucked. Less "World Peace!" more "Yeah, peace…"