Those who look on Miley Cyrus with disdain are too far removed from their first real heartbreak to remember the helplessness that envelopes every facet of that life experience.
That first taste of abandonment is painted in catchy, pop glory over 50 minutes of heart-rendering lyrics on Cyrus’s latest album “Bangerz.”
The album begins with “Adore You,” a synthesized ballad proclaiming, “When you say you love me, know I love you more …. boy I adore you … We were meant to be in holy matrimony. God knew what he was doing when led me to you.”
The song offers a vulnerability often absent from Cyrus’s post-Hannah Montana days. This vulnerability is quite literally smashed by the star’s radio sensation “Wrecking Ball.”
Wrecking Ball is evidently written for Cyrus’s ex-beau Liam Hemsworth. The listener witnesses Cyrus’s broken-hearted angst as she belts, “I came in like a wrecking ball/I never hit so hard in love /All I wanted was to break your walls / All you ever did was wreck me.”
In the song “4×4,” featuring Nelly, Cyrus dips her combat boots into her country roots with the catchy number, which boasts a pop-country tune. The song contains a melody that leaves the listener at the mercy of their iPod’s repeat button.
Listeners can chalk Miley up as just another child star gone off her rocker, or they can look beyond her antics and let the lyrics speak for themselves. Miley Cyrus does not ask listeners to agree with her. In fact in her first single from Bangerz, “We Can’t Stop,” she proclaims to her fans, “It’s my mouth, I can say what I want to.”
Cyrus lets her heart fall for the public. Behind the twerking, obscenely platinum blonde sheared locks and illicit interviews, the young woman from “The Backyard Session” still sings the same tunes, just with angst brought on by a broken heart and illuminated with jaded emotions the transition from adolescent to adult brings. Let’s all just be glad she does not belt “I’m not a girl, not yet a women.”
Her album ends with “Someone Else.” The song poignantly begins with, “If you’re looking for love/ know love don’t live here anymore / he left with my heart / they both walked through that door without me.”
In an interview with “Harper’s Bazaar,” Cyrus said she is fully aware of the course her career takes and that she engineers all these moves herself.
“I told my label: ‘This is the first time I’m showing you what I’m bringing to the table as an artist. If this goes wrong, you never have to trust me again. I’ll be your little puppet. But if I’m right, then you know I’m on to something,’” she said.
Listeners can call Miley another Britney Spears, or we can acknowledge the artist’s every calculated move. Miley is not Britney. She may border on crazy, but it is a conscious crazy, a crazy she’s in control of. It is a crazy akin to the likes of Lady Gaga or early Madonna. It’s an insanity of her own creation, and Miley is behind the wheel of the creative force that led “Wrecking Ball” to garner 183-million YouTube views. “Bangerz” is an album 50 percent talent and 50 percent shock value.
In a society that values shock above talent, it seems Miley Cyrus gives her audience exactly what it wants and all the while puts her heart on the line.
