Lindsay Zoladz: Hello, I am a person who once attended a feminist punk festival called C.L.I.T. Fest, and yet never in my entire life have I been to a show with a higher female-to-male ratio than last night’s Miley Cyrus concert at the Izod Center in East Rutherford, New Jersey. After searching high and low, I managed to find the two men who attended this concert, Ryan Dombal and Jordan Sargent, and together we will try and make sense of what we witnessed—which included a life-size Big Sean bobblehead, a teenage girl dressed as a pizza, and a person on stilts wearing a Ronald Reagan mask, gracefully waving his hands in the air to the closing strains of Cyrus’s 2009 hit “Party in the U.S.A.”—and why, haters be damned, it will probably be the most fun we will have at a concert in 2014.
Jordan, let’s start with you, since I know you were a Bangerz fan going into this, and you seemed to be enjoying yourself last night. I’ll ask you the question that our entire audience was grumbling as they closed out of this tab five seconds ago, “Why the fuck are these people talking about Miley Cyrus?”
Jordan Sargent: Personally, I would ask "Why the fuck are they not talking about Miley Cyrus?" Though I completely understand the desire to pretend that she doesn't exist, there's just so much going on with her, and we saw all of it blown out into its own kaleidoscope world last night. Miley is why pop culture is great—or she's why pop culture is awful, which also makes her why pop culture is great.
Also, it should be noted that her latest album Bangerz is awesome... which was emphasized last night when she played every single song from it. Pharrell and Mike Will were the hit-makers of last year, and they basically did this entire album. It's simple math!
LZ:Ryan Dombal, even though your name is an anagram of “bout that life,” you were more of a Miley skeptic going into this. Did last night’s show change how you felt about the artist formerly known as Destiny Hope Cyrus?
Ryan Dombal: Well, I refuse to fit into your curmudgeon-old-man box (I like the singles, listened to the album a few times, but did not buy a pot-leaf belly ring at the show) but, in a word, yes. For one, the whole thing was like the concert equivalent of staring at an endless succession of the best GIFs you've ever seen for two hours, and I have been known to stare at some GIFs. For another, I am a human being, and watching Miley Cyrus sing "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" ("You might not know it, but this is a song by Bob Dylan") while a 15-foot tear leaked down her Jumbotron'd face was downright heartbreaking. Her dog just died. And for many American 21-year-olds, the death of a pet is the first real sense of loss they will feel. This is a universal emotion, and it ran through the whole show, through several bouts of onstage near-sobbing. Granted, most 21-year-olds will not be able to grieve in front of thousands while leaning on a eight-story-tall inflatable replica of their deceased pet, but that's why Miley is Miley.
R.I.P. Floyd Cyrus
One moment that struck me though, was when she was crying on the big screen at one point while several teenage girls could be seen in the background smiling uncontrollably and just shamelessly trying to get in the shot. Do you think Miley's more cartoonish poses—which were also in full, brilliant form last night—have disconnected her emotional bond with her audience in any way?
LZ:Actually, I don’t. Given everything I’d read about this tour, I went in with the expectation that Miley would be this kind of larger-than-life robotic party monster whose entire vocabulary consisted of three words: “LOVE. MONEY. PARTY.” And although her performance of “Love Money Party” was one of the most joyous things I have had the pleasure of witnessing in 2014, I was also floored and even genuinely moved by how much vulnerability she displayed last night—how sloppily human the whole performance felt. As you mentioned, Dombal, Miley’s beloved dog Floyd died earlier this week, and at her Boston show as well as last night, she has not been able to hide the fact that she is an absolute wreck over this. She told us about it in a very poignant monologue at the beginning of the show (“I’m sorry if I’m not very fun tonight”), and it felt like a more emotional version of the Yeezus Tour’s patented Kanye Rant: Here’s how I’m feeling tonight, #nofilter.
I did not expect to feel feelings at a Miley Cyrus concert, and then there I was trying to discreetly un-smudge my eyeliner as she struggled through “My Darlin'”, which she dedicated to Floyd. One of the last big arena shows I saw was Drake’s immaculately titled Would You Like a Tour?, and though I was highly entertained by that performance, I did not really feel anything from it. Drake has this reputation right now for being pop’s Feelings Guy, and yet if his dog died the night before a concert, I get the impression he’d cancel the show before allowing himself to be as vulnerable as Miley was last night in front of 20,000 people.
I don’t think Miley has the strongest pipes of any pop star out there right now, but something that last night’s show highlighted is that there’s this incredible pathos in her voice. Some of the best songs on Bangerz are not the bangers but the ballads, and her live show really hammers that home. “My Darlin'”, her duet with Future, is one of my favorite tracks on the album, and part of the reason it works is that she manages to sound as sad Future without really using much processing on her voice at all.
JS: I do think that, to an extent, the first impression of Miley 2.0—twerking, mimed analingus, ill-advised wearing of a grill—has obscured that her vocals are soaked-through with emotion even though she's not, like, someone who would turn the chair around on "The Voice" or whatever. To me, she treads this line between being wounded and being very strong; it's like she's constantly trying to pull herself up a mountain but is incredibly determined to do so. Even a song like like "Adore You"—in which she sings about marriage—is sort of quavering, but I think she draws an immense amount of power from that place. Rihanna, by the way, has this same quality, and it makes a lot of her ballads very affecting as well.
It was an emotional show, at its core. But we should circle back to the visual aspect, I think, because that's what arena pop shows are more or less about. As Ryan alluded to, this was sort of like being inside the internet. That in itself isn't exactly novel: M.I.A., for one, long ago brought glitched-out Tumblr imagery to pop (before Tumblr was really a thing). But Miley's felt very idiosyncratic: there were seapunk animations, hoedowns, a Dr. Seuss-esque monster thing and a bunch of other shit, but the thread that connected it all was hip-hop, which feels as true to life as it should in 2014. Diane Martel was the creative director of the tour, so it's not really a surprise that there was an animated scene where Miley rode a jet ski through a sea of cough syrup.
But that aspect was much more artfully delivered than it was in the "We Can't Stop" video, which is still very cringeworthy. Also, we'd be entirely remiss to not mention the life-size Big Sean bobblehead, which somehow might have been the highlight of the show.
RD: Yes, let's talk about the Big Sean bobblehead. To be clear: This was a person (presumably not the real Big Sean) who wore normal-sized clothes that Big Sean may wear, but also gargantuan sneakers and a gold chain and, yes, a huge Big Sean head. To me, this was one example of Miley—who has certainly had a rocky relationship with the hip-hop world—bringing rap music into her psychedelic toyland realm, rather than the other way around. This trend continued throughout the performance (in which Bangerz guest stars were depicted in creative ways; Future as a neon sign, French Montana's lyrics as a series of texts) and was a very smart way of getting around the fact that these rappers could not travel with the tour. That said, I would prefer to see the Big Sean bobblehead instead of the actual Big Sean onstage any day.
Also, when taking in this whole experience (and it really was an experience), you see how those now-infamous award-show performances did a serious disservice to her vision. That's right: Miley Cyrus has a vision, and it is clouded with weed smoke and slurred by mushrooms and raised on Adult Swim. But, in its completely random way, it makes sense, and feels so true to internet culture that it's eerily comforting. If you take one zinging aspect of this show out of context—the little person, or the barely-there outfits, or even the back-to-basics semi-acoustic second-stage set—it's easy to knee-jerk it into oblivion. But taken together, it builds to an impressive whole. Like, the day before I went to this show I saw Lady Gaga at Roseland Ballroom in Manhattan, and, for all of Gaga's supposed ADD zaniness, it felt dull and retro in comparison. Gaga is seven years older than Miley, but based on these two gigs this week, it seemed like a huge generational gulf stood between them; Miley is riding those purple tides Jordan mentioned, and Gaga is just trying not to crash under them at this point.
JS:Ryan, you mention her award show performances, and I think what turned people off (generally speaking) is that she looked… unnatural imitating rap videos, and not only because of her skin color or upbringing. The VMA performance or even the "We Can't Stop" video were sort of like if someone dumped a bucket of roaches onto the ground just to watch them run off in 50 different directions. But what made the show so good last night is that it felt very natural, like there's so much going on inside Miley's brain that we need almost two hours to fully connect with it. The show wasn't just about twerking or whatever (though there was a lot of twerking)— twerking was merely one part of this bizarre cartoon world she has created. The one part of the show that I didn't like was "23," which had the same "look, I'm a teen pop star doing rap!" residue that made those early visuals seem very put-on.
LZ: Speaking of people being turned off, can we talk for a minute about the complete and total “Game of Thrones”-style lack of men at last night's show? It reminded me of the way Jody Rosen described a Taylor Swift show in New York magazine last year ("To push through the turnstiles of a Taylor Swift concert is to enter, as the saying goes, a women’s space. Swift has the power to turn a hockey arena into a room of one’s own.") and confirmed a theory I've had about Miley for a long time now—which is that she's one of the first female pop stars in a while to be openly sexual without worrying about being "sexy", or at least not in this conventional (/boring), male-gaze-approved way. I think Miley is much bolder and more radical than she gets credit for.
When I was the age of most of last night's audience (under 21; I'll just say that the beer line at the Izod Center was mercifully short), the big female pop stars were Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. And even as both of those artists went through their (ugh ugh ugh) "lost innocence" phases, they were always telegraphing this message that being "sexually liberated" really just meant "looking hot in a way that men will approve of." And I have realized in the years since that—although there were elements of their personas that were fun and empowering—that was a very confusing and even damaging message to be sent as a young girl. [affects Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie voice] I personally think that one of the most fucked up things about American pop culture is the way it instills in young women (as opposed to young men) this idea that sexuality is something to be performed, rather than felt. But this is not what #Bangerz is about.
I got that sense last night in the way her fans were dressed—which was more “goofy outrageous” than “sexy outrageous.” (I repeat: TEEN GIRL DRESSED AS A SLICE OF PIZZA.) Sure, I'm sure their parents didn't approve of some of what they were wearing, but I mostly saw large groups of girls who were (like Miley's bestie-core opening act, Icona Pop) dressing for each other. Young women are constantly scrutinized and evaluated based on they way they look, so it’s super important for them to have cultural spaces like this, where they can have the freedom to figure out what makes them feel good and powerful and confident. Because ultimately that’s Miley’s definition of sexiness: Don’t worry too much if other people don't get it, just do your thang, even if that thang happens to involve dressing like a Gremlin at a rave.
JS: It's sort of a very basic message of individuality, but she doesn't say that explicitly, and therefore it doesn't come off as pablum. To circle back to Gaga, Miley is sort of the anti-Born This Way: They're making the same point, but Miley doesn't brand it. It's just this mess of humanity, and in there somewhere you find yourself. And in that context, I think her attraction to people on the margins (like someone who is abnormally short or tall) is the opposite of otherizing, which is how it has come off in award show performances. Miley was born rich and is conventionally pretty, but I think she sees herself as not fitting in, which is why she embraces (often physically) someone like Amazon Ashley, and makes her a focal point of her show. And, frankly, the way in which a lot of critics have responded to Miley sort of makes her point for her.
But really how can you hate on someone who rides a "scream-activated" hot dog through the heavens.
RD: Or sings a trap cabaret kiss-off to Puff the Magic Dragon's deadbeat son.
LZ: Or sobs in front of 20,000 people while clutching the leg of a giant inflatable replica of her recently deceased pet.
JS: This post is dedicated to the memory of Floyd Cyrus.
RD: Amen.