FLOWERS

One of those moments.

John Shearer

Sometimes popular culture delivers moments of magic, and I was there for a few of them. I remember walking into someone’s apartment and hearing Carole King’s Tapestry for the first time, the sounds floating in from another room. There was just something about it. You had to listen to it. Your soul wanted to. You couldn’t not. You just knew you were going to buy the album the next day.

I read somewhere recently that that would have been 1971. I was nineteen years old.

Skip to 1983. I’m driving on a Los Angeles freeway going from the Philosophical Research Society to where I was staying in Woodland Hills. Sting’s Every Breath You Take came on the radio, and it was the same sensation. You heard it once and you knew it was a monstrous hit.

Then there was walking into my housemate’s room in a house on Ogden in Los Angeles in 1984, when this music video came on TV and we both slowly sank onto the edge of the bed, mesmerized. It was astonishing. Whoever this girl was, everything about her and everything about this song just summed up the moment in some way, like it was moving the world forward. You couldn’t not think this person you had never seen was going to be one of the biggest stars in the world. Her attitude, her clothes, her everything. The girl, of course, was Madonna. The song was Borderline.

I say all that because, for me, Flowers delivers that same punch. I think I’m going to remember driving with my friend Olivia when I first heard it. I bet I won’t forget watching the video of Miley Cyrus dancing and singing the song on the Grammy’s. And I keep musing on how profoundly it captures the zeitgeist of this moment. What an anthem it is for every woman who has ever thrown off the shackles of a hopeless attachment to someone who doesn’t love her back, but it’s about more than that as well. It’s about throwing off the patriarchy itself, realizing it’s not what we thought it was, and in fact we can do it all much better ourselves. I had never really taken notice of Miley Cyrus before, but I predict her performance of that song on the Grammy’s will prove to be an iconic moment in popular culture.

The true artist is always expressing their personal journey, of course, but they hit a nerve so deep within themselves that it hits a nerve inside the rest of us too. Flowers isn’t going away anytime soon. Like pieces of cultural magic that preceded it, this song is going to stay around, the rhythm and music wafting through our heads for many years to come, I think. It just nails something. It says it all.