On ‘Bangerz,’ Miley Cyrus Shook Culture and Ass. It Took a While to Shake Off the Shame TEN YEARS AGO, Miley Cyrus the artist was largely overshadowed by Miley Cyrus the post-Disney wild child. At 20 years old, she was a specimen unleashed on the world to be examined under various microscopes, with more scrutiny than ever. She summed up her newfound freedom in the opening shot of the “We Can’t Stop” video, where she uses comically large scissors to remove an ankle monitor. Released June 3, 2013, the song introduced Cyrus’ fourth studio album, Bangerz — “It’s our party, we can do what we want to,” she snapped on the single, a preemptive defense to the brewing judgment. “It’s my mouth, I can say what I want to.” She was right, but wholly unprepared for the avalanche of public opinion that fell on the Bangerz era. The drinks and the drugs would flow through her never-ending party, where everything she did and everything she said would become the law of her reckless land. But her actions would largely drown out her words. “The music was driving it, but all those things from that era, especially with Bangerz, the pop-culture moments almost eclipse the music itself,” Cyrus told Rolling Stone in 2020. “I felt that I almost took some blame for the distraction sometimes.” The Bangerz era produced one of the last great flashbulb-memory live performances, when Cyrus took the VMAs stage in August 2013. That night, dressed as a teddy bear, she emerged from a giant teddy bear to join the smaller, twerking teddy bears also onstage. She then proceeded to deliver an uncharacteristically forgettable vocal performance, but a notoriously unforgettable visual one. “We Can’t Stop” was all crotch-grabbing and ass-shaking, which naturally carried over into a medley with “Blurred Lines” and the added chaos of Public Enemy Number 95: Robin Thicke. (Diane Martell directed the music videos for both songs — she had a busy year). The performance highlights, like Cyrus stripping down to a nude latex bikini set and humping a foam finger, resulted in more than 160 FCC complaints and memes of stunned audience members Rihanna and One Direction. “I was creating attention for myself because I was dividing myself from a character I had played,” Cyrus recently recalled to British Vogue. “Anyone, when you’re 20 or 21, you have more to prove.” At the time, she didn’t understand what the big deal was, which is like running around with a blowtorch and being surprised something catches fire. But when she tried to shift the focus — “Wrecking Ball” had dropped the day of the VMAs, with its music video arriving two weeks later — she soon realized that while she had garnered that attention, she had also lost the power to control the narrative she was trying to rewrite. Don’t get her wrong: Cyrus loved her iconic pop-culture moments. It’s just that she thought she could have the best of both worlds, but ultimately found herself wondering, “Did anyone even hear my song?” For a moment, with “Wrecking Ball,” she found the perfect middle ground. It became her first (and only, until “Flowers” this year) Number One on the Billboard Hot 100, ascending from its No. 50 debut in only three weeks. And its video racked up 19.3 million views in the first 24 hours of its release, breaking the same Vevo record that “We Can’t Stop” did.
