This era yielded more iconic moments than some pop stars manage in a career. A trippy party album with a pronounced hip-hop influence, its ferocious promo campaign made Cyrus the most discussed artist on the planet. “ They try to change me, but they realise they can’t.” Then, after she said goodbye to Hannah Montana for good in 2011 with the show’s final episode, she bolted through the door that “Can’t Be Tamed” had prised open, with 2013’s game-changing Bangerz. “ I go through guys like money flying out the hands,” she sang over a stomping electro beat. On the relatively edgy title track of her 2010 album, Can’t Be Tamed, Cyrus served the notice that she was definitely no teen-pop puppet. At 16-years-old, Cyrus was already such a big deal that she could take a line-dancing bop called “ Hoedown Throwdown” into the upper reaches of the Billboard Hot 100. From 2006 to 2011, she starred in the wholesome Disney Channel sitcom, Hannah Montana – as ordinary teenager Miley Stewart and her pop star alter ego – while racking up hits with bright and shiny pop songs like “See You Again” and “ Party in the U.S.A”. The Tennessee-born daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus – a successful country singer who’d go on to collaborate with Lil Nas X – was incredibly prolific as a teenager. She’s wrongfooted us enough times now that we know to expect the unexpected. Cyrus has got to a place where she can duet with Dua Lipa and Joan Jett on the same album because she’s already ripped up the rulebook. The 28-year-old former Hannah Montana star has become pop’s biggest maverick by refusing to let herself be pigeonholed by an industry that likes artists – especially big-selling ones – to evolve cautiously and avoid frightening the fanbase. So Miley wants Plastic Hearts to include a Dua Lipa feature (on the sinewy new single, “ Prisoner”) as well as collaborations with 80s rock legends Joan Jett (“Bad Karma”) and Billy Idol (“Night Crawling”)? Oh, she’s just being Miley.īut at the same time, “she’s just being Miley” feels too trite to summarise Cyrus’ fiercely individual approach to her career, and the agency she’s shown over it.
13 years later, as Cyrus prepares to drop her seventh album, Plastic Hearts, that same line could almost double as a motto for her career. When Miley Cyrus quoted her best friend Lesley on 2007’s dance-pop banger, “ See You Again” – “ Oh, she’s just being Miley” goes the classic line – she was remembering a time when she clammed up in front of someone she fancied.
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