1/1/2024 0 Comments Miley cyrus unplugged reveiwIn the decade-plus that we’ve been searching for a successor to Madonna’s particular role as a palatable pop star who is primarily guided by her own sometimes oddball instincts, Cyrus may be the best candidate yet. It makes sense that Madonna would see a kindred spirit in Cyrus. She even got the stamp of approval from Madonna last night, a performer who knows a thing or two about treading the line between coquettish provocation and serious artistry. So when she says usually eye-rolly things about how music is her real passion, you actually kind of believe it. Unlike a lot of manufactured singing kids, who have little sense of how to use the instruments they’ve got, Cyrus seems to have thought about it, put the intellectual work in. Her voice is alternately hoarse, breathy, belting, and sweet, and she’s got a keen sense of when to switch modes. She’s not the best singer in the world, but she uses what she’s got pretty effectively. I still don’t get the sense that Cyrus has entirely grown up-she’s only 21, after all-but watching Unplugged last night gave me reason to hope that she would be one of the few who miraculously makes it through, guided in no small part by genuine talent. Sure, that may have been a somewhat embarrassing sentence to read, let alone type, but it’s true! Miley Cyrus has displayed, over the past few months but especially in last night’s concert, a sureness with her public image that few stars her age have, particularly those with origin stories as scrutinized and once carefully groomed as hers. The Miley idea of cool actually did feel almost cool, in the way that watching someone having fun doing what they love to do, and doing it well, tends to be cool. It’s not that she wasn’t putting on a show-she was, just in a purer sense than it maybe seemed like she was interested in doing during the VMA’s hoopla. She put on a silly twang and seemed entirely comfortable letting the sexy-sleazy Angeleno shtick drop for a few minutes so she could perform a song from a completely different genre just because she likes it.Ī lot of the hour felt like that: relaxed, unapologetic even. Rather than seeming out of place or, worse, like a cheap attempt to prove some deeper knowledge of music, it was genuine and fun. She gamely invited the enthusiastic audience to sing along, on both new hits like “Wrecking Ball” and old covers like “Jolene.” She’s done “Jolene” before, but here in the context of her new adult self, a confident party girl with a playful pop-art streak, it worked in a way it hasn’t before. She kept the theatrics to a minimum (there was a horse costume at the beginning) and gave concise, even humble introductions to each song. Her set, made up mostly of songs from Bangerz, was clean and efficient. So now comes Unplugged, a small but certainly respectable medium through which to communicate, mostly ungarbled, the new Miley Cyrus. But it didn’t get the attention it really deserved-and Cyrus didn’t get enough praise for maturing as a musician-lost as it was in a sea of finger-wagging and lame Halloween costumes. Plenty of people recognized Bangerz for what it was, a competently and surprisingly thoughtfully put together pop album. It was a case of too much too quickly, everyone suffering from near-immediate Miley and twerking fatigue, so much so that the actual merits of the music she was making went sort of ignored. The latter half of 2013 was a busy time for Cyrus, with a “grownup” new album putting her in competition with club-thumping, gay-approved mega acts like Katy Perry and Lady Gaga-and, of course, her monocle-shattering performance at the MTV Video Music Awards nearly burning the Internet to the ground. And, rather satisfyingly, Miley Cyrus more than rose to the challenge. These days it’s mostly a decent opportunity for someone to hold our attention a bit longer than they would with a performance on an awards show or Saturday Night Live. Unplugged is, after all, the long-running special series that helped solidify Nirvana’s legacy, that provided the stage for Mariah Carey to record her instantly ubiquitous cover of “I’ll Be There,” that brought Bob Dylan to a new generation of youngsters. Last night, MTV aired an hour-long Miley Cyrus Unplugged special, an occasion for Cyrus to peddle her album Bangerz but also, more importantly, to assert some artistic cred.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |