The world — but more importantly, Will Smith’s family — gaped at Miley Cyrus’ lecherous performance, heavy on twerking and foam-finger humping, at the MTV Video Music Awards. After everyone had a chance to absorb what happened on stage, the jokes flowed freely. The highlights: Robin Thicke’s Beetlejuice suit, Cyrus’ uncanny resemblance to Angelica Pickles’ Cynthia doll and that busy, lizard-like tongue.
Pinpointing exactly when Cyrus began the not-so-calculated attempts to shed her clean Disney image is difficult — was it the infamous salvia-smoking incident of 2010 or the leaked photos of her pretending to lick a phallus-shaped cake in 2012?
If she were any other 20-year-old dealing with the trials of young adulthood, like her parents’ fractured marriage or the anxiety of transitioning from childhood to adulthood, her behavior wouldn’t seem so out of the ordinary. Cutting off her hair and bleaching it? Smoking a joint now and then? Discovering the novelty of provocative dancing and tossing around the F-bomb in conversations, just because? That’s, like, all in a day’s work for any given high school girl. But Cyrus’ career is based on the Disney brand she embraced for years, and asking fans to accept the bad-girl image she’s trying to craft is a stretch.
It seems that Cyrus is trying to emulate the smooth transition Rihanna made between her early years to now. In 2005, Rihanna entered the music world with long hair and glossy pink lips like every other pop ingénue, but between “Good Girl Gone Bad,” “Rated R,” “Loud” and “Unapologetic,” a series of iconic hairstyles, drastic changes to her image and the public account of her complicated relationship with Chris Brown, she transformed into a hardened, edgier artist. Now, she’s a powerhouse. When she introduces new work, people listen. When Miley Cyrus introduced her new look and sound, she was mocked.
“Maybe it’s just her way of letting the world know, once again, that Miley Cyrus is All Grown Up,” Entertainment Weekly critic Grady Smith wrote.
Everything about Miley Cyrus smacks of trying too hard, especially her claim that she “never played the Disney game of smiling and being a princess.” Her commercial success entirely has to do with her dad’s fame and her early work with “Hannah Montana.”
Rihanna never relied on industry connections to start her career. It’s undeniable that her attractiveness is part of her success, but she had a sense of self-reliance that Disney-groomed Cyrus never had.
“I’ve been paying my own bills since I was 17, living in a foreign country,” Rihanna said in a 2010 interview with W Magazine.
Miley Cyrus will never sell her bad-girl image, but she certainly won’t stop trying. Sweet niblets!
A version of this editorial ran on page 6 on 8/27/2013 under the headline "Tongue, teddy bears and twerking: Miley’s botched bad-girl transition"
