But the Cyrus/Thicke rolling aesthetic disaster can also obscure some things. Specifically, the performance is so dreadful that hating it becomes almost too easy. All you have to do to hate the racism is hate the performance — and how could you not hate the performance? Aesthetics and virtue are perfectly aligned. You don't want to watch bad pop music performed badly by hacks? Hey, you're on the side of the angels.

The problem is that Cyrus isn't racist because she's awful — or at least, her racism can't be reduced to her awfulness. Because there are performers who are not awful who have used race much as she does. Performers like Madonna, who bell hooks famously called out for her appropriation of black styles and of black bodies as props. And, also I'd argue, performers like Janis Joplin.

Joplin didn't use black dancers that I'm aware of, and she didn't use black woman, or black women's bodies, as a code for sex, as Cyrus does. But there are still uncomfortable parallels. Joplin, like Cyrus, deliberately referenced and used a style associated with black women — not twerking, for Joplin, but the female blues singing tradition associated with Bessie Smith. And Joplin, like Cyrus, used that association, and the stereotypes linked to it, to shape her own image against a traditional white femininity. Cyrus uses blackness to be sexual; Joplin used blackness to show she was earthy and real. Her strained version of "Summertime" evinces an almost Cyrus-like desperation, blasting through the songs' subtle longing, fear, and hope, as if she can become one with the black narrator through sheer glottal power.

"Ball and Chain" is a much better effort. But it's still a song emphatically, and even ostentatiously, associated with a black woman, in this case Big Mama Thornton. The metaphor of manacles makes unusually explicit the thematic undercurrent of a lot of blues; the parallel between personal pain and social injustice, and the necessity of endurance in the face of both. In making the song one of her signatures, Joplin picks up on those layers of meaning while erasing their context. Black women's experiences become white women's experiences, and in the process the specificity is lost. The black woman for Joplin becomes not a black woman, but the signifier "pain," as for Cyrus she's the signifier "sex." And in both cases the white woman turns the black woman into one, single thing, in order to sell that thing at a higher price, and to a bigger audience, than the black woman herself ever could.

Of course, Joplin isn't Cyrus. She spoke often about her love for Thornton and Bessie Smith and other performers, and listening to her it's obvious she has an affinity for their music. As a result, her use of the blues tradition of pain and sorrow seems less like simple appropriation, and more like sharing or sisterhood— an effort to connect the troubles and the pain that both black women and white women have in common.