Member Since: 8/1/2012
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Miley Cyrus: Rapunzel with a Mohawk
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As she tentatively plays us tracks from her new album, she anxiously sneaks looks at our faces: do we like it? But by all modern fame indices, she is already a confirmed global superstar: she has 11 million Twitter followers, 25 million Facebook likes, nearly 325 million views on her YouTube channel and is worth a reported $120 million.
Miley is that most modern of phenomena, a living, breathing superbrand. She commands more marketing power b tapping 140 characters into her iPhone than a global corporation can generate in a multimillion-dollar TV ad campaign. A whole generation of girl-women who loved her sweet but spirited Disney alter-ego Hannah, the high-school kid with strong family values and a secret life as a pop star, hang on her every tweet.
Such power, but is she using it wisely? The tween fans that grew up with Hannah are finding their feet in a highly sexualised culture, in which the aesthetics of internet **** have leeched into mainstream fashion and music. On MTV, female artists not out yet of their teens performig in lingerie and leathers, their movies aping of a pole dancer’s XX-rated bump and grind. There message to girls is ‘forget talent – what counts is being hot and available’.. No wonder they are sexting topless pictures, pouting on Facebook, feeling pressure to service boys’ needs too young.
After she left Disney’s wholesome embrace, Miley Cyrus was no exception. Not yet 18 in the video for Who Owns My Heart, she writhes on a rumbled double bed in her underwear and in Can’t Be Tamed she’s a bondage-clag blackbird. Little surprise perhaps that she was voted in a 2011 AOL poll as the worst role model for teenage girls.
But then Miley was still growing up. Like any teenager, she was testing boundaries, trying on new identities for size. And her youthful misdemeanours – smoking a bong of the legal high salvia, a jokey lap-dance, aged 16, for a film producer, snogging her boyfriend in public, pole-dancing at the Teen Choice Awards – are captured forever online.
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So when I meet Miley Cyrus, I want to congratulate her. Bravo, kid, for surviving so far! All around is the smoking rubble of fellow child stars: Britney the ex-Mouseketeer, in and out of rehab, and drunk-driving Lindsay Lohan. Justin Bieber, a year younger than Miley Cyrus, is struggling with coming of age in the pitiless glare of hyperfame. Then there are Disney contemporaries Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens, casting off princess pink to jiggle their boobs in neon bikinis in the movie Spring Breakers.
Meanwhile, what’s Miley up to? She’s doing exactly what she has done since age 13: working damn hard; rushing into the studio at night and emerging in the Los Angeles dawn. She’s recording songs with producer Pharrell Williams, who calls her ‘an old soul’. These tracks, she says, a mix of hip-hop tunes with sweet pop lyrics, have ‘dug deep’ into her emotions, ‘going through things that have hurt so bad in the past year or two. It’s like therapy’.
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She is also wearing The Ring. And what a ring – a 3.5 carat Art Deco bauble that she says is too big but can’t be adjusted, so she wears it flanked by two heavy circles of diamonds. I wonder her slender finger doesn’t ache. In answer to the ring watchers, she sometimes doesn’t wear it in dodgier parts of LA or on stage – her fans might snatch it off her hand, as they have with other jewellery.
So all is well with the Lord of this Ring? An uncertain look momentarily passes over Miley’s face then she drawls, ‘Everything’s awwwwwl good.’ Liam is promoting a movie in the Philippines and visiting his native Australia. ‘He’s allowed to go back. He doesn’t get to see his parents ever. I visit my relatives in Nashville – I would love to go more but it’s so far…’ Do they text? ‘I’ll call him at 6am and he’ll call me at 2am. We never know the timing.’
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We keep our relationship low-key and don’t talk about it anymore.’
Because it only fuels speculation? ‘Exactly. We were too nice to the world and gave them too much insight – into my life and my puppies and my house – and I just don’t feel they get that privilege any more. Like on my Twitter, I’m much more… not conservative, but you don’t see a picture of my family every day now, or of my dogs. You don’t get that personal stuff any more.’
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I ask Miley what advice she’d give to the next 13-year-old TV sweetheart. She seems to draw a blank. ‘I don’t know how I got to be so strong,’ she says. ‘I just am. So I don’t know what to tell anyone about steering clear of being a mess-up, or why I can take all that hate that I do and not back down. It’s just something in my body.’
But sitting next to Justin Bieber at his 3D movie premiere, she did give him some advice. ‘I noticed he was taking all these photos of people and doing a lot of s***, and I just grabbed him and said, “Just take a snapshot in your brain of this moment, so you don’t forget.” I don’t remember my Hannah Montana movie premiere – and my 3D movie trumped everyone’s at the box office – I don’t remember being there. All I remember from that night is that I stopped and got a strawberry milkshake beforehand. That’s all. It’s crazy. You think you’re in the present but you’re not.’
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Most music is sexist. I want my music to be like, “Me and my girls are going to get drunk and have a good time.” Not the guys going, “We’re going out to bang a bunch of chicks"
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Back home in Nashville, her classmates always popped her showbiz bubble. ‘I’m happy that I got my head put in the toilet when I was 11. I was crying when they did it, but I don’t cry too much about people bullying me now.’ Those mean girls were an excellent preparation, she says, for the online nastiness, the blogs about her adolescent skin with every dimple ringed, the random ‘you fat ****’ cruelty of strangers that she blanks out.
Growing up in a normal town makes her scathing about LA, its temptations and phoniness. ‘This is not reality,’ she says. ‘This isn’t like any other place. Everything is meant to be attractive, from the people on the sidewalks to the f***king gold fire hydrants in Beverly Hills.’ The paparazzi make ordinary life difficult. ‘I feel like Rapunzel,’ she says. ‘Rapunzel with a mohawk!’ So she fills her golden prison with her four rescue dogs, her boyfriend, a home-movie theatre, her siblings, whom she adores: Braison, a model and film-school student, her little sister, Noah who is crazy about horses.
She picks her friends with care. Katy Perry is ‘such a fun person’. And Kelly Osbourne is ‘the best one to have on your side if anything goes down in LA, she knows where I’m not going to get bothered. You never go to Kelly’s and she has whack friends that you’re like, “Who are these people?”‘
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Miley Cyrus, worth $120 million, lets out her sassy broad’s laugh and you suspect, whatever happens in her fickle business, she’ll be just fine.
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Full Interview: http://www.mileycyrus.bz/2013/05/01/...s-for-elle-uk/
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