about heartbreak, sex, race politics, and being a rock for her fans.
I was eight years old when Miley Cyrus made her debut on Disney Channel's Hannah Montana and beginning my senior year of high school when she delivered the VMAs performance that single-handedly butchered the teddy-bear industry. Since then, a flurry of think pieces and open letters have declared Miley to be either the blind victim of puppeteering managers or a maniacal genius of publicity. All seem to agree that her recent reincarnation is just ex-child-star protocol, à la Britney Spears or Justin Bieber, and/or the sign of a mental breakdown. The concern at the heart of it all was for young women my age who grew up with Miley and probably would be brainwashed into a massive army of hypersexual copycats.
I flew to Phoenix in February for an interview with Cyrus and a night of her Bangerz tour. She spoke a mile a minute, eager to impress and to set the record straight, though not with-out claiming repeatedly that she does not give a fuck. She wore a silk John Galliano robe printed with newspaper headlines and did not break eye contact once.
Cyrus is neither a lost train wreck nor completely sure of her place in the world. She's just searching for it on an extreme scale, and, actually, in a much more unique, unprecedented way than her critics might think. She didn't become a sex kitten or a bombshell but instead a stoner with an androgynous haircut and a proudly boyish frame. She didn't follow in the footsteps of young female stars who play sexy for the benefit of the audience but have no sex life of their own (at least not that they'd admit to); instead, her performance of sex is goofy and inaccessible, intended only for her own pleasure and fun (Terry Richardson collaborations aside). She is more self-possessed than skeptics think she is, but maybe not as self-possessed as she thinks she is. Not in any dangerous, downward-spiraling way, though. She just carries the same conviction that I and every one else in our age group share, that as recent survivors of adolescence, we know what is really important to us.
The Bangerz show—one of 60 concerts over four months—is a parade of innuendo-infused graphics and Chuck E. Cheese furries. At one point, Cyrus sat on a giant bed with her dancers, everyone feeling each other up as a giant neon flower bloomed behind them. For the encore, she rode out on a humongous hot dog through a door in the middle of a sky-printed Jumbotron, resembling the ending of The Truman Show. I danced during "Party in the U.S.A." with a stranger my age, because I am a human person with feelings, and because, like me, this girl had come alone. When I asked her what she liked about Cyrus, she passionately replied: "Everything she stands for. Self-expression, being true to you, growing, and finding yourself." My diva cup runneth over.
Tavi Gevinson: This is a huge tour, with more than 50 shows. How do you make sure you can always access that emotional, creative zone to give a strong performance every night?
Miley Cyrus: Sometimes when I'm in the studio I feel so much but don't know how to express it. You're just in like a cave—life goes on without you. I started my album, and then when I ended my album everything in my life was different. I lost a lot of friends, 'cause my friends didn't understand why I was so 24-7 and only knew how to say what I wanted to say through music. I'm not a good communicator. I get it from my dad. On tour, I'm obsessed, because it's such an investment. Honestly, like, I'm not making any money on this tour—I put all the money into the tour. My managers all think I'm bat-shit crazy, but I think it's good for me in the long run. It's a really weird life, because you're working, but nothing that I'm doing I have to; usually it's 'cause I want to. Most of my fans are young; they pay for their own tickets and work really hard to be able to come, and so I want to give all of them the best show—the same show in Mississippi as I do in L.A.
TG: Do you struggle with coming down from the high of performing? On a much smaller scale, I always need time to adjust when I go back to school after working and being in control.
MC: People treat you almost like you're an adult, and then you go back and it's hard to connect. Like at night I have to go on vocal rest, which for me is the hardest thing ever. 'Cause I'm 21, I want to be out there drinking and hanging out, but I can't. And being on tour is totally like a drug—you're really high off the energy and then you just crash—you go from 20,000 people screaming like, "I love you, I love you!" and then you're just in your hotel room by yourself, quiet.
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TG: The show displays a kind of self-awareness about what you've come to mean as a public persona. You enter on a slide that's supposed to be the tongue from a giant graphic of your face. Where did that idea come from?
MC: People have made me seem like a character. So now I'm just enjoying playing a character of myself. People's mouths drop when I dance, but my friends are like, "You dance like that in the kitchen!" I'm always pretty much joking. In the show, I do this really horrible wave, like the Queen. It's so dumb, because everyone waves back at me like that! It's almost like abusing the fact that I'm a little bit of a trendsetter. People ask me how I stay happy and sane: I never google myself.
TG: It's the kiss of death.
MC: I mean, journalism, what it's become—people literally write whatever they want, and it's not real. They don't ever talk about the fact that I put so much money into this tour. I don't understand how most pop stars live this life being told what to do, what to wear, all the time. Maybe money does mean more to some people.
TG: Did you feel that limitation under Disney?
MC: You know, I'm really thankful that I started on Disney. I got the most intense training. There's times where I wish I could have just started as a new artist, but the world has kind of allowed me to do that. I feel really lucky—a lot of kid stars get all crazy or stuck in what they were, so they can't actually become what they're meant to be. When I went through a really intense breakup—you know, I was engaged—and when I was with him or when I was on Disney, the thing that gave me the most anxiety was not knowing what to do with myself when Disney wasn't there to carry me anymore or if I didn't have him. And now I'm free of both of those things, and I'm fine. Like, I lay in bed at night by myself and I'm totally okay, and that's so much stronger than the person three years ago, who would have thought they would have died if they didn't have a boyfriend.
TG: Many people assume, though, that you just went from Disney telling you what to do to other guys in suits telling you what to do.
MC: I always tell [my managers]: "The reason that I have you guys is because I need to be protected so that for the rest of my life I'm not only not making any money." Sometimes my managers say, "Why do you ask us questions if when we start to answer it...." And I'm like, "I hear what you say and I'm gonna do the opposite of it. Because you're old and you're a man, and I'm young and I'm a girl and I know that's right." I've just got to make sure that I'm the voice of my generation. I think that I'm allowing girls to be really free with their sexuality. When I was [on tour] in Vancouver and in Washington, it almost made me feel like I was the Beatles. Girls were throwing bras and underwear at me, and, like, totally turned out. And it's funny because some people act like I'm pushing my fans away by what I do, but—
MC: They're going through it, yeah. When I do things that would get someone old to shake their head, my fans go ape shit. Like when we bend over or take our shirts off, we're giving them that freedom. And that's what rock 'n' roll always was. Like, people snuck out to go see Joan Jett, and their mothers would be pissed. And I'm honored to be that girl that gets people out of their comfort zone. I tell a lot of people this, but I don't give a fuck. I think most people would've done the VMAs and then been like, "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to piss everyone off." No, I'm not sorry—I made a conscious decision to do that. There were so many things I have had to say sorry for that I wasn't sorry about.
TG: Like the Annie Leibovitz photo of you wearing a sheet that ran in Vanity Fair from when you were 15.
MC: When I was a kid, yeah! I didn't think I was being sexy, but the person's mind went to that—like, who's the perverted one? I definitely wasn't sorry about that, but someone had to write something that said I was. I don't want to do that anymore.
TG: I wonder, though, if that kind of sexual freedom isn't extended to your backup dancers. Your VMAs performance—
MC: Somehow a lot of people thought I was exploiting black culture. The reason why I hired those girls for the VMAs is because they're not white, skinny girls—they're healthy-looking girls. Like, moms—usually they hate me—but they come up and they're like, "Thank you so much for having girls that look like my daughter dancing for you." Those girls have danced together since they were six years old—I could never be like, "Hey, I've got to break you up 'cause it's politically correct to throw a white bitch in here." I was on the Disney Channel, where you need to make sure there's, like, an Asian girl and a black girl and a Puerto Rican girl in every scene. And that isn't life!
TG: Critic Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote that your performance reminded her of being hit on by drunk white people "ironically"—the joke being that, as a black woman with a stereotypically thick body, she wasn't actually sexy.
MC: I'm definitely not making a joke of it. Those are literally my friends. And by the way, you can ask me anything—I'll never be offended. A lot of people who have made those comments are older—they were living in a world that was more defined by color. Now that isn't black culture—that's just culture in general. That's pop culture; that's the way we dance. These pissed-off moms on the Internet—they don't understand that when you go to a club now it's not about being black or white or heavy or thick. I'm shaking my ass because I want to shake my ass, not 'cause "I'm dancing like a black girl!" Even in the fashion industry people are accepting bodies, and I think Kim Kardashian's done that for a lot of girls. It's kind of why I was excited for you to be interviewing me—I sit with a lot of old people that try to get me to explain culture. I'm like, "I don't know how—you're just not living in the same world I'm living in."
TG: What about people who feel you're appropriating "ratchet" culture to look cool without acknowledging the race and class implications? Do you really think they just give you a hard time because they're old, and not because these are their lived experiences?
MC: We actually stepped away from "ratchetness" for that reason. For us, it was meant to describe an aesthetic, like ratchet nails or ratchet whatever. I'm not, like, making fun of a culture. You just do it 'cause that's just a weird title, it's like selfie. That was just a word that was popular last year. I don't even love it when girls call each other slut, like, "Hey, slut" or whatever, but it's your intention and the way you say it [that matter]. I call it the Selfie Generation, what I'm in—you too. I just think old people—I feel bad that I call them old, 'cause they're probably in their thirties or forties—but they just don't understand it.
TG: Everything you're experimenting with is normal for people our age, but what does it mean to do it for the world to see?
MC: A lot of people like a year or two ago, when I started this transition in my life, encouraged me to be very free. But when I started to free myself, they very quickly wanted to put me back in my cage again. They were like, "Okay, well, fly—but don't fly too far; don't get too high." I had to finally make a choice, and my fans helped me. I use myself as, like, a sacrifice for my fans, to be like, "Look, I am like you!" My life has been recorded so much that I never think about it too much. The only thing I ever really think about is with relationships, because you're getting to know someone and it gets thrown off. It becomes this thing—it becomes really embarrassing. Like, if you're trying to have a normal date and then you're getting flashed and [in the tabloids] it's like "Mystery Man." So it kind of turned me into a hermit, which my dad is—like, borderline socially unacceptable—and I never want to become like that. I grew up on a farm where we had no neighbors because my dad didn't want to deal with people. And as a kid, I'd be totally pissed, like, "I want to go to the movies! Why won't he take us?" But now I understand. I've gotten good about not letting it affect me, but it gets weird with dudes sometimes.
TG: What do you mean to your fans now that there's no middleman like Disney?
MC: I have guys and girls that come out, and they're like, "The only reason I'm able to admit that I'm gay is because you've made me feel like that's okay." That is so intense, because that is a part of this generation—it wasn't always accepted—and I feel like I am a big part of that change. Or they know that I've struggled with depression, and that helped them get over theirs. That gives me a big purpose—a reason to wake up in the morning that's bigger than to put on my fucking feathers and my little outfits.
TG: I didn't know you'd dealt with depression.
MC: It's more of an issue than people really want to talk about. Because people don't know how to talk about being depressed—that it's totally okay to feel sad. I went through a time where I was really depressed. Like, I locked myself in my room and my dad had to break my door down. It was a lot to do with, like, I had really bad skin, and I felt really bullied because of that. But I never was depressed because of the way someone else made me feel, I just was depressed.
TG: It's a chemical thing.
MC: And every person can benefit from talking to somebody. I'm the most antimedication person, but some people need medicine, and there was a time where I needed some too. So many people look at [my depression] as me being ungrateful, but that is not it—I can't help it. There's not much that I'm closed off about, and the universe gave me all that so I could help people feel like they don't have to be something they're not or feel like they have to fake happy. There's nothing worse than being fake happy.
TG: Seeing the show put a lot of the album in context for me. How much of pop music do you think is more about performance than sound?
MC: Me flying away on the hot dog matters equally as the way that I sound. Even my band, they really take pride in the fact that there's no fucking tracks. If I fuck up, I fucked up. Some artists, it's more about them being entertainers. But I grew up as a singer first. I'll just write a verse and chorus, just to get me through the day. Sometimes pop artists, it's all about clothes and pyro. My thing is about my band. And [on this tour] I have people that have worked on The Wall and so many intense tours. I try really hard to impress those dudes. I don't want them to think I'm some dumb pop bitch.
TG: Your dad told GQ in 2011 that he wished Hannah Montana had never happened. How did it feel to hear him say that?
MC: You know, that was a really hard year. I think for a minute he let the show get the best of him. Like, would you really have been happier if you were sitting on a farm in Nashville, completely isolated? I remember reading that and being super pissed off, like, I tried to make my family's life better, to get everyone out of Nashville. You get to a point where you just want people to listen—that was maybe my dad's way of wanting us to feel that pain.
TG: This year's Country Music Awards were sprinkled with jokes about you abandoning that community. What did that feel like?
MC: I didn't watch it, but country music never accepted me or my dad because we didn't fit the standard. My dad wouldn't wear a cowboy hat and boots; my dad wore cutoff T-shirts and Reeboks. So it's funny now to hear them act like I turned my back on them—like, you guys never embraced me at all, because I wouldn't wear cowboy boots and a skirt to here and, like, twirl around and just be happy about everything.
TG: When you go through these changes, is it tempting to throw away the past altogether? How do you know which pieces of your former self to hold onto?
MC: It's hard. I didn't even watch my show when I was on my show, so I don't really know that person. When I look at "Party in the U.S.A.," that was really who I was then, so I don't think you can be too ashamed of anything as long as you were being yourself. I think why people feel, um, so entitled over me is that they've watched me grow up. But that's a blessing and a curse.
TG: They act like you owe them something.
MC: I worked more when I was a kid than I'd ever allow myself to do now. What is it from The Sixth Sense [sic], where he's like, "All work and no play makes Jack a very dull boy"? That was totally me. I have a lot of energy and that sometimes got masked as a kid. Like, why was I wearing more makeup when I was 16 than I do now? When I was younger I didn't have the balls to be like, "Yo, I'm a kid. I need this day off." Now, I kind of demand that people respect the fact that I'm a kid. I almost feel like I'm living out my rebellious teenage whatever now because I couldn't when I was younger.
TG: And then instead of becoming a sexy bombshell like Britney or Christina, you became a stoner with a short haircut. What's shaped your new style and ideas about sexuality?
MC: Oh, yeah, I'm not really trying to be sexy. I try to explain to girls that you don't have to have long blond hair and big boobs. It's sexual—it is. But in a different way.
TG: I read that you consider yourself a feminist. What does that mean to you?
MC: I'm just about equality, period. It's not like, I'm a woman, women should be in charge! I just want there to be equality for everybody.
TG: Right! And that's what feminism is.
MC: I still don't think we're there 100 percent. I mean, guy rappers grab their crotch all fucking day and have hos around them, but no one talks about it. But if I grab my crotch and I have hot model bitches around me, I'm degrading women? I'm a woman—I should be able to have girls around me! But I'm part of the evolution of that. I hope.
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