It does still punch for the mainstream, but by making Cyrus’s most full-throated, nostalgia-soaked, capital- R Rock statement yet. She’s said Plastic Hearts is a creative and emotional reset in the aftermath of these life events. ![]() Then her Malibu mansion burned down in a wildfire-taking with it some of the material for two follow-up EPs-and her marriage ended. Neither phase wowed the public, but you got the sense that she was exercising the rock auteur’s prerogative to make music for the creator and not the audience.Ī promisingly omnivorous, pop-minded 2019 EP hinted at the return of Miley Cyrus the world conqueror. Albums of abrasive psychedelia and cutesy folk then laid out the yin and yang of her creative inspirations: the druggy explorations of the Flaming Lips and the peppy country of Dolly Parton. Her Hannah Montana–era work served up mall-mosh fare in the lineage of Avril Lavigne, with some impressive forays into country balladry, such as on the 2009 hit “The Climb.” Even in the circa-2013 stretch, “Wrecking Ball” showed how Cyrus’s musical abilities suit the spaciousness, the drama, and the endless possibility for emotional escalation afforded by rock. For most of her career, Cyrus has tried to be a rock star. Though Cyrus’s infamous teddy-bear rave at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards solidified an image of the star as a hip-hop-appropriating, Gaga-adjacent nightclub diva, the truth is that was her vibe for only one album cycle. (Tremble at such a gaze three minutes and 42 seconds into this recent performance.) There is also a Miley Cyrus attitude, which blends cheekiness, earnestness, and a feeling that she’s returning the camera’s gaze with hundredfold intensity. There is, however, a Miley Cyrus voice, which is always molting from a pudding-mouthed mumble into a dragon-fire geyser. As Hannah Montana petered out, Cyrus launched an actual pop career that remains viable today, even though her spot in the mainstream musical firmament in less obvious than it is for some of her peers. It’s trippy to think back to how the Disney show that made her famous was about a girl who leads a double life as an arena-packing pop star. Plastic Hearts processes Cyrus’s divorce in much the same way Cyrus has processed lots of things before-with a defiant embrace of how she’s being perceived. From the outside, as the gossip media’s reaction conveyed, it had the feeling of prophecy fulfilled: Hollywood girl experiences a Hollywood marriage. From the inside, as Cyrus’s excellent breakup single “Slide Away” communicated, the split with Hemsworth was not easy. “I wore a dress on my wedding day because I felt like it, I straightened my hair because I felt like it,” Cyrus, America’s most out-and-proud pansexual, wrote in an open letter afterward, “but that doesn’t make me become some instantly ‘polite hetero lady.’” Just eight months after the wedding, she and Hemsworth separated-right around the time she was spotted cuddling with the reality star Kaitlynn Carter. In December 2018, her years-long, on-again, off-again relationship with the actor Liam Hemsworth culminated in marriage. It follows a period in her life that was especially exciting for the tabloids. Cyrus’s rowdy new album, out last Friday, is one of her stronger provocations. ![]() She has, instead, seemed to become more Miley with every phase, and by flipping her finger to the public, she’s only drawn more interest. She has never really bothered with countering the criticism. As she morphed from kid’s TV idol into tongue-wagging pop provocateur in the early 2010s-and then, across the decade, spent time as art punk, queer activist, and demure folkie-she has been ridiculed as excessive, desperate, fickle, insensitive, immature, and bad at twerking. ![]() It’s basically everyone-because for the general public, people like Cyrus exist as examples of what fame does to a human life.Ĭyrus knows by now that the concept of Miley Cyrus can’t be separated from the expectations that have followed her since tweendom (and maybe even before, as the daughter of the country star Billy Ray Cyrus). It’s the casual fan and casual hater, the pundits and influencers, and the friends and rivals. It’s the actual audience of Hannah Montana who tracked Cyrus into adulthood. It’s the imagined audience of Hannah Montana, the fictional pop star Cyrus portrayed in her early teens on the Disney Channel. But who’s the “they”? It’s you, the listener. ![]() She’s apologizing to a lover she let down. “I’m everything they said I would be,” Miley Cyrus sings, her voice dewy with disappointment, on her new album, Plastic Hearts.
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