The most eyebrow-raising aspect of her decision to embrace hip-hop again is that she pointedly, controversially distanced herself from the genre during the Younger Now rollout. Not that Cyrus has ever exhibited concern about seeming opportunistic. Miley herself was crossbreeding country and hip-hop on Bangerz six years ago, so if she’s going to move in a hip-hop direction again, why not jump back on that horse and ride ’til she can’t no more? It feels like a missed opportunity, but maybe to her it just seemed opportunistic. For one thing, her father Billy Ray has been at #1 for two months by hopping on Lil Nas X’s rap-country hybrid “ Old Town Road,” easily the biggest song of 2019. The timing is curious for a number of reasons. With last week’s She Is Coming, the first in a trio of EPs that will eventually add up to an album called She Is: Miley Cyrus, she swerves back toward trap-pop. She’s remained visible via constant awards show performances and other assorted media appearances - she reportedly stole the show at a recent Chris Cornell tribute - but like so many of her A-List pop-star peers, she ain’t making hits like she used to. Her recent Mark Ronson collab “Nothing Breaks Like A Heart,” a genuine smash in the UK, peaked at #43 here in America despite a talk-show blitz and a superficially woke big-budget video. Although the album did eke out a top 10 single with “Malibu,” culturally speaking, it was a blip. Then came 2017’s Younger Now, for which Cyrus attempted to rebrand herself as an Americana-infused soft-rock artist - its own kind of bizarro plot twist in the context of what came before. 2015’s Miley Cyrus And Her Dead Petz was another left turn, an anti-pop experimental scrapbook concocted with help from the Flaming Lips. Recorded with heavy involvement from Mike Will Made-It, the reigning trap producer at the time, Bangerz found her diving headfirst into drug-addled hip-hop, breaking from the squeaky clean Hannah Montana persona she made her name on to mark her instead as a tongue-wagging party girl. ![]() While most major pop stars attempt to reinvent themselves with each new album cycle as a means of maintaining people’s interest, Cyrus has swerved so radically on multiple occasions that some listeners have inevitably gotten lost along the way.īangerz, the 2013 album that gave us “Wrecking Ball,” also yielded “We Can’t Stop” and the can’t-unsee image of Cyrus twerking on Robin Thicke while waving a foam finger at the VMAs. ![]() ![]() That version of Cyrus may be the one that lingers in the public imagination, but her career has not been defined by showing skin so much as shedding it. At the peak of her popularity, those skills coincided: “Wrecking Ball,” her sole #1 hit, was a magnificent power ballad that sent her voice soaring, and she paired it with a video directed by Terry Richardson in which she licks a sledgehammer and swings around in the nude. ![]() In the almost-decade since, Cyrus has proven to be great at singing and even better at riling people up. It was in fact released in August of 2009, which, to be fair, was many Miley Cyrus life cycles ago. Can you believe it’s been less than 10 years since Miley Cyrus released “Party In The U.S.A.”? The song, which reached #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became her bridge from the Disney Channel to a grownup mainstream audience, feels like it has existed for several lifetimes.
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