NO STOPPING MILEY CYRUS
PROVOCATIVE SINGER TRANSITIONS INTO GROWN-UP ARTIST – WITH NO APOLOGIES
It was a water-cooler moment for the ages — Miley Cyrus unchained at the MTV Video Music Awards the night of Aug. 25, leaving memories of “Hannah Montana” in the dust as she rocked a furry bustier emblazoned with a cartoon mouse while flanked by dancers with teddy bears strapped to their backs.
She worked her tongue with more aplomb than any major artist since Gene Simmons, squeezed a female backup dancer’s bum and twerked hard for the money in an entertaining spectacle that flipped the script on your typical former-teen-star-acting-out by putting Cyrus at the wheel, sexing it up like the weird outsider she was born to be.
And then, she hung around to upstage Robin Thicke, losing the mouse bustier to reveal a tiny two-piece that couldn’t have been much closer to her skin tone while suggestively using a giant foam finger to turn the tables on the “Blurred Lines” singer.
The FCC received 161 complaints. The man who invented the giant foam finger was outraged, and others accused her of minstrelsy, saying she’d used her Black dancers as props, and cultural appropriation (for twerking). And just like that, she became the most talked-about figure in pop for 2013, a distinction duly reinforced a few weeks later when she followed through with “Wrecking Ball,” a music video in which a naked Cyrus rode a wrecking ball and licked a sledgehammer. This led to further outrage and more jokes at Cyrus’ expense. It went on to end the year as Vevo’s most-viewed video with more than 371 million views.
Between all the twerking and sledgehammer licking, the star effectively served notice that 20-year-old Miley Cyrus was not to be confused with the character Hannah Montana, the tween star she played on a wildly successful Disney Channel series from 2006 to 2011. She’s all grown up now.
“It’s an important time in her career,” says Doug McVehil, who runs content and programming for Vevo, a video-hosting service headquartered in New York City. “We Can’t Stop,” the song she performed at the awards show, was “also a huge video and was incredibly irreverent — also risky, I think, for her in that it was made to look lowbudget.”
And then, she followed it up with “Wrecking Ball,” a video he praises for taking a beautiful song and putting a visual to it that’s “beautiful and provocative at the same time.”
A savvy player
Provocative is a key word in the Miley Cyrus reinvention tale. And that’s to be expected. The public sacrifice of one’s own innocence — or the perception of one’s innocence — can be a rite of passage for a former child star hoping to transition into a sustainable career. Ask Britney Spears. Or David Cassidy.
As Howard Kramer, director of curatorial at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, sees it, “They all have to shed their skin in some way, and some of them are more successful at it than others.”
For now, Cyrus appears to be pulling it off in spectacular fashion, riding out the backlash like it’s just another wrecking ball. In addition to being last year’s mostviewed video, “Wrecking Ball” became the singer’s first chart-topping entry on the Billboard Hot 100. She had two of last year’s 20 biggest singles, “Wrecking Ball” and “We Can’t Stop.” And her latest album, “Bangerz,” hit the charts at No. 1.
So anyone looking for Cyrus’ headline-grabbing antics to blow up in the singer’s face may have to wait awhile. And Cyrus appears to be playing a savvier game than most. By the time she appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone, tongue out and topless, in late September — the Hot List, naturally — she was already indicating that the time had come to put the VMAs behind her.
“Now people expect me to come out and twerk with my tongue out all the time,” she said. “I’ll probably never do that s--t again.”
When the video to “Adore You” appeared in December, it did feature Cyrus in bed, barely clothed, but the mood of the clip was surprisingly grown-up — definitely sexual but more in keeping with the soulful essence of the song than an outward attempt at another provocative talking point to keep her in the headlines.
This month, Valley teen Matt Peterson’s video inviting Cyrus to his prom went viral. A Cyrus superfan who came on board with the premiere of “Hannah Montana” and “teared up a little” when the final episode aired, the Arca- dia High School junior says he loves the bold new image.
“I think her new music is unreal,” he says. “And her new image? I respect it. She doesn’t care what people think and she puts herself out there. That’s something I look up to and respect.”
Growing up
The first time Cyrus was accused of growing up too fast was in 2008, when, at 15, she posed for the cover of Vanity Fair draped in a sheet that appeared to be all she was wearing. A year later, some viewers accused her of doing a pole dance as part of the “Teen Choice Awards” (in truth, it was an icecream cart and Cyrus did not bump or grind). And so on, from beer-drinking photos to bong-hitting scandals to the video that surfaced in 2010 of her giving a lap dance to a 40-something man.
Steven Worth of Columbus, Ohio, says his 17-year-old watched every episode of “Hannah Montana“when she was growing up. He’s not offended by the make-