OMG, Miley! The tongue, the twerking, the latex underwear, the naked video! Where on earth to begin? Miley Cyrus, the most Googled star in cyberspace, is sitting opposite me on a pale leather sofa, coltishly long-limbed in thigh-high black Louboutin boots, a wispy Black Watch tartan dress and a baby-blue fox-fur cape. Wide-eyed and clear-skinned, mouth a vermilion pout, the 20-year-old singer looks ravishing, even with the tattoo on her ear and the tiny gold gangsta pistol nestling among the chains around her neck.
But I have to start somewhere, so I start with her hair. ‘Miley!’ I cry. ‘Why did you cut your lovely Hannah Montana hair? What did your mother say? She must be furious; I mean, I’m not your mother and I’m pretty cross.’
‘Ha, ha. Yeah, when I did it my mom was shocked at first and tripped out – I mean, she’s got the whole long blonde hair thing going on – but now she loves it and wouldn’t have me with it any other way,’ says Miley. ‘I’m trying to break out of that long hair, big boobs stereotype that women feel they have to conform to. I mean, we’re not living in the freakin’ 1950s – short hair is OK. Have people really got so little imagination? Every morning I look in the mirror and I feel like a blank canvas and I choose who I want to be. In a normal job you have to live by someone else’s rules, but I’m in a job where my work is play and I don’t have to pretend to be something I’m not.’
Before we continue with the various theories as to why Miley has either gone off the rails or is making a stand for female empowerment, a quick recap. In a previous incarnation, Nashville-born Miley was a squeaky-clean Disney Channel princess starring in her very own squeaky-clean show. From the age of 13, she played a girl living a double life; average down-to-earth Southern teenager by day, famous pop star Hannah Montana by night. Her real-life father, the country singer Billy Ray ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ Cyrus, was cast as her good ol’ daddy in the series, which garnered an estimated 200 million viewers. The merchandising spinoffs were immense: from dolls to duvet covers, jewellery to jotters, Hannah Montana was the ultimate wholesome blueprint for little girls everywhere.
But every little girl grows up. And how. Having recorded albums as her TV alter ego, after the series ended in 2011, Miley set about establishing herself as an adult artist with extraordinary gusto. In 2012 she cut off her trademark long locks, symbolically severing herself from her past. Then earlier this year saw the release of her single ‘We Can’t Stop’, with its sexually provocative video in which she writhed around on a bed, french kissed a doll and, to quote her use of rappers’ vernacular, ‘shaking it like we at a strip club’.
Then, at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards in New York, she performed a controversial duet with singer Robin Thicke in which she stripped down to flesh-coloured latex underwear, ‘twerked’ (a move where a dancer squats while wiggling their buttocks) and did unmentionable things with an oversized foam finger. The audience was stunned. Social media went wild. A proposed cover shoot for Vogue was apparently axed on the grounds of Miley’s vulgarity.
Theories abound as to why she appears to be doing a crash-and-burn Britney. In no particular order: she has turned lesbian, she is mounting a rebellion against the strictures of her Disneyfied childhood, she is on drugs, and she is having a nervous breakdown. To her credit, she laughs toothily when I read her the charge sheet and tell her the shockwaves have reached Britain and beyond. ‘Hey, I thought you British were all beer and free speech!’ says Miley in her faint Tennessee drawl, nonplussed as to why anyone might disapprove. ‘People try to make everything so thought out when sometimes there’s no real reason why. My fans love the fact that everything I’m doing is my choice. It’s my body. I want what I do to be memorable and so do my fans – I’m just living, just being.’
But Miley, if you wanted to establish yourself as an adult artist, why the suggestive foam finger? Why not a power ballad, a stint on Strictly, maybe even a crossover duet with Andrea Bocelli – or better still, those nice boys from Il Divo? Actually, I suspect she might devour Il Divo for breakfast. ‘Everything I’ve ever done was how I felt at that exact moment,’ she says with unshakable conviction. ‘You have to have confidence as an entertainer and I believe – I know – that no one can be a better version of me than me. Sure, I could put on a gown and have some beauty pictures taken of me, but where’s the honesty in that? In my video for “Wrecking Ball” I am naked and vulnerable and crying because it’s a song about how it feels when everything around you has been destroyed.’
Appearing naked was really no big deal, she asserts. ‘I’m very confident being naked,’ she says (although admitting it would be a bit too confident for the YOU photo shoot). ‘I feel that stripping off is a way of expressing purity of emotion.’ Quite so; unusually, Miley is the sort of performer who has to be persuaded to pop that cheeky nipple back in, please. But while nakedness can represent raw truthfulness, it’s also the ultimate act of look-at-me exhibitionism and sexual precocity. Her appearance at the VMAs was, by common consent, cringeworthy; but the thing is, Miley doesn’t care. And when you are young and rich and beautiful with a brand new white Maserati, don’t care can’t be made to care. Not one tiny bit. Her target market isn’t fazed by bumping or grinding, even when she does it with dwarves on German telly. The fans who download her music don’t give a monkey’s what Vogue thinks. Parental opprobrium is just another tantalising ingredient in the heady mix.
‘I want to be memorable,’ she says. ‘That’s what my fans want too. Everyone’s talking about me, waiting to see what I’m doing next. And, yeah, I like things to be bright and colourful and fun, but then I make “Wrecking Ball”, which is darker and grey. And then I’ll maybe go back to running around being crazy. I want to keep people guessing.’
Her weeping anguish in the ‘Wrecking Ball’ video wasn’t any sort of relationship catharsis; by her own admission she’s never had her heart broken. Her parents Billy Ray and Tish, who wed in 1993, have an on-off marriage, which is currently on. But Miley’s turbulent engagement to Australian actor Liam Hemsworth, with whom she lived in Los Angeles, is very much off. She clearly hasn’t let it affect her fierce work ethic, and she doesn’t want to talk about the split. She’d much rather talk about her four dogs: indeed, it was the untimely death of one dog, her yorkshire terrier Lila, that was forefront in Miley’s mind as she clung naked to the wrecking ball, a pose that has since been mercilessly parodied on the internet. ‘I love dogs more than I love people,’ she says, suddenly sounding like a 20-year-old rather than a polished pro. ‘I kept this image of Lila in my head and the tears just fell.’
The single comes from her new album, the infelicitously named Bangerz, about which she speaks with disarming, articulate intensity. ‘I want people to think of the album like a movie. You have to fall in love with the character who’s narrating so, when things go wrong for her and she is singing about pain and sadness, like in “Wrecking Ball”, you are connected to her, rooting for her, willing her to win – of course while keeping it fun and moving, but drawing listeners in so that after the tears comes laughter.’
‘Wrecking Ball’ is a well-crafted song, and a drastic departure from the louche hedonism of the catchy ‘We Can’t Stop’. There’s even a critical consensus that the video is beautifully shot – but a feeling, too, that Miley’s nudity undermines the music. This is a shame because Miley is likable and funny and radiates an attractive confidence.
Then again grown-ups like me, for whom twerkin’ ain’t workin’, might think her posturing is derivative, but – and this will make you feel old – there’s a whole new generation out there who never gasped in outrage at Madonna’s ‘Like a Virgin’ or wore Frankie Say Relax T-shirts or whose retinas weren’t permanently seared with that poignant 1990 close-up of Sinéad O’Connor weeping as she sang ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’.
For them, Miley is out there, edgy and genuinely groundbreaking as she metaphorically and literally pokes out her tongue at the adults. Which brings me, reluctantly, to The Tongue. Back in the day when she still wore cowboy boots, we weren’t even aware she had a tongue. Now it’s all over the shop, lolling over her chin and licking inappropriate things – most notably a sledgehammer in her latest video. I’m guessing Miley’s Tongue probably has an agent of its own, and gets a ten per cent appearance fee. It’s all a bit ‘ewww’, isn’t it? Not exactly role-model material.
‘For me, role models are people who are good people,’ says Miley earnestly. ‘I stick my tongue out because straight photos are sooo boring. But even if I do stick my tongue out, that doesn’t change the quality of the human being inside. I’d rather be honest and upfront; being a good person isn’t about sitting with your legs crossed. I’m just being who I am, which is the best example I can be.’
Miley is very much a creature of the Twitter age, where all tweets are good tweets because if nobody talks about you in 140 characters or less (regardless of the content), you may as well be dead. Or still on Bebo. She revealed her relationship break-up to the world by ‘unfollowing’ Hemsworth on Twitter. Ouch! For Miley and her generation, the spurious goal of Being True to Yourself has been elevated to the highest state of being. She famously doesn’t drink, and has spoken in the past about how she thinks marijuana is less ‘dangerous’ than alcohol; but today she’s rather more evasive. ‘Dope? No. Never. Not me.’ Her grin speaks volumes and would tellingly suggest that she tailors her upfrontness to suit her audience.
And here’s the thing: while there’s no doubt that Miley enjoys being naked and flaunting her youth and her lithe body (fears about her ‘dangerously thin’ weight are unfounded; she’s slim not thin, with an athletic physique), her insistence that she’s just living moment to moment doesn’t quite stack up. This is a shrewd young woman, after all, who has been moulded and shaped by major studio marketeers – however willingly – since her mid-teens.
The notion that she’s a free spirit belies her undoubted business brain. Moreover, she’s from a showbiz family that knows how fame – and fortune – works. Every singer needs not just a catchy melody and an irresistible key change but a unique selling point. If Katy Perry is the bubblegum princess, Lady Gaga the Dalí-esque drama queen and Pink the muscular henchwoman of aggro-pop, it’s unsurprising that any young female artist would feel a need – personally and commercially – to differentiate herself. And like them or loathe them, Miley’s strip-show antics have given her a global reach.
‘I am an entertainer,’ she says. ‘What would be the point if I looked like every other singer out there? Being young, it’s important for me to learn and grow and not fit into a box.’ As if; ‘Wrecking Ball’ broke all previous records when it received 19.3 million views on music video website Vevo in the first 24 hours of release. But she wants more. ‘I’m always thinking about what I’m going to do next. I broke the record and now I want to break it in double time.’
The mind boggles as to what she’ll come up with next. Will it be coruscating or just corrupting? Either way, this is indisputably Miley’s moment. And she’s having the time of her life.
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