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Trying to Make Sense of This Creepy Billy Ray Cyrus Video

It includes the lyrics "Miley keeps twerking, daddy keeps working" and has topped half a million views in 24 hours.

The year is 1991, you're an average Joe, sitting on the couch watching Home Improvement in your baggy Levis which you bought because you saw a cardboard cut-out of Brad Pitt advertising them in the store. You scratch your unshaven pubic hair, take a sip of Bud and throw a peanut into your mouth. The peanut gets lodged in your wind pipe, you choke, and fall unconscious. Oxygen stops reaching your brain. You fall into a coma.

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You wake up 23 years later. Advances in medical technology have revived you from your vegetative state, and while you're a little fuzzy, you basically feel the same. You sit up in your hospital bed and examine the people around you. The jeans are a little tighter, the hair a little more kempt, but things don't seem too different. You look at the TV, with its spectacular brightness and life-like definition. And this comes on.

Larry King, the newsman you trust, is still around. So too, it seems, is loveable hit-maker Billy Ray Cyrus. But that's where any chance you had of understanding this new world ends. Ray Cyrus, once a housewives' hearthrob, appears to have become some Emperor Palpatine-cum-Jack Nicholson pimp, presiding over an intergalactic slave-ship of naked women, while a man - a sort of rapper lobotomised by a Cabbage Patch Kid - tries to make sentences out his crude grasp of the English language. Electronic crack pipes, or are they dildos, are passed round and enjoyed by all. The ship itself is piloted by the heavily-drugged naked women and is seemingly powered by the uncomfortable, and one would imagine bowel irritating, shaking of their behinds.

You call over a nearby skinny-trousered young person. "What.. Is.. This.." you stutter, helplessly.

"I know right," they reply. "The weirdest thing about it is that the butt-naked girls twerking and mentions of 'Wrecking Ball' that are all references to the public sexualisation of Billy Ray's own daughter, which this song is trying to capitalise on. This is a tie-in piece of merchandise to Miley's vagina, basically, and her father is joyously complicit in it. There's even a hot babe dancing next to him who seems specifically styled to look like Miley, grinding behind Billy as if to remind the viewer, 'I can only revive my career because you masturbate to my child.' It's like incestuous capitalism gone haywire."

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You don't understand most of what he just said, or what the word is on his T-shirt, "Bape" it looks like, but you persist anyway. "But why does Larry King mention Muhammad Ali at the beginning? What's it got to do with the boy with the fishing rod? Why don't the raps have any meaning?"

"Don't try to understand, this is just how things are now," says the bored youngster. "People just put stuff out in the hope that people will be weirded out for just long enough to hold your interest. Then everyone moves on to some other thing. This is kind of what we have instead of culture now."

You stare scared into his eyes. Look down at the tubes in your arms that are keeping you alive and one by one, pull them out.

Follow Sam on Twitter: @SamWolfson

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