It doesn’t matter whether or not you like her music, her attitude, her twerking or her pasties: Miley Cyrus is absolutely, positively wreaking havoc on the pop industry with her wrecking ball — and mostly, her thinkpiece-generating tongue.
Earlier today, the “We Can’t Stop” chanteuse delivered a double dose of Hannah Montana Gone Untamed, premiering the already iconic-looking cover of Rolling Stone (featuring a cameo by Miss Tonguey Cyrus), as well as the jersey-happy clip for her Mike WiLL Made It collabo, “23.”
The slick “23” video essentially takes the more memorable parts of her VMA performance (bend, tongue, twerk), the videos for “We Can’t Stop” and “Wrecking Ball,” and then regurgitates them all into a Miley-fied Michael Jordan jersey. She’s a schoolgirl gone bad — or at least, she’s a schoolgirl gone urban. When you think about it, it’s sort of like a continuation of “…Baby One More Time.” (I see you, Larry Rudolph.)
As for the song itself? “23” is really more in the camp of “annoyingly catchy” rather than “quality,” but it’s an earworm nonetheless. Miley raps about purple drank. The Internet explodes. You see? Once again, she’s won. Hip-hop hooray!
The Rolling Stone feature is even more of a major win for Miley — both in terms of shock value and substance. (Sending out a hat tip to the editors for the perfectly titled “Good Golly, Miss Miley!” See that? More Miley-Molly play. Genius.)
The shocks? She pulls a move straight out of the Ke$ha playbook and gets a tattoo of the word “Rolling $tone” on the bottom of her foot at the very start of the article. And by the end, she’s going skydiving and forgetting to text her ex-beau Liam Hemsworth.
The substance? Miss Mileybird is entirely, completely a self-aware being. She knows that her VMA performance was messy and — as Cher would offer — that her body looked like hell. That was the point.
Miley isn’t bothered by people who called her performance a disaster. “I wasn’t trying to be sexy,” she says. “If I was trying to be sexy, I could have been sexy. I can dance a lot better than I was dancing.” She knows sticking her tongue out isn’t hot and that those weird stubby pigtails aren’t flattering (“I look like a little creature”). And she even knows it’s ridiculous for her to twerk. “People are like, ‘Miley thinks she’s a black girl, but she’s got the flattest ass ever,'” she says. “I’m like, I’m 108 pounds! I know! Now people expect me to come out and twerk with my tongue out all the time. I’ll probably never do that shit again.”
She also (rightfully) goes in on America’s fucked-up sense of decency.
“America is just so weird in what they think is right and wrong,” she continues. “Like, I was watching Breaking Bad the other day, and they were cooking meth. I could literally cook meth because of that show. It’s a how-to. And then they bleeped out the word ‘fuck.’ And I’m like, really? They killed a guy, and disintegrated his body in acid, but you’re not allowed to say ‘fuck’? It’s like when they bleeped ‘molly’ at the VMAs. Look what I’m doing up here right now, and you’re going to bleep out ‘molly’? Whatever.”
And she even goes in on the slut-shaming double standard against women, thus formally positioning herself as a modern feminist:
Miley admits that her performance with Thicke got a little – her word – “handsy.” But she makes a good point: “No one is talking about the man behind the ass. It was a lot of ‘Miley twerks on Robin Thicke,’ but never, ‘Robin Thicke grinds up on Miley.’ They’re only talking about the one that bent over. So obviously there’s a double standard.” She was especially amused by the criticism from Brooke Shields, who played Miley’s mom on Hannah Montana and called the VMA performance “desperate.” “Brooke Shields was in a movie where she was a prostitute at age 12!” Miley says with a laugh.
So, there you have it: Miley Cyrus, continuing to go the distance with her tongue.
My only beef about all this?
Over on the couch, a guy named Cheyne is cracking up. Cheyne, 22, is Miley’s assistant, and also her best friend.
Hold up now. Best friend? What the fuck happened to Lesley?
‘Bangerz’ will be released on October 8. (iTunes)