Miley Cyrus acts like she has nothing to hide. Or maybe she actually does have nothing to hide. Either way, she puts herself out there, constantly, a loud call for potential judgement and ridicule coming out of her mouth at every moment, and people take her up on it, though I wonder if it’s quite as satisfying to make fun of someone once they’ve invited you to do it.
Miley started performing when she was 13, one of many in a lineage of teenage girls trotted out for public consumption and derision. We know how most of them end up: they go in the spotlight and then come apart. I haven’t watched the new documentary about Britney Spears, mostly because I feel like I don’t need to know every single sordid detail of how people treated her — I remember plenty and have spent enough time being a woman in the world to fill in the gaps as needed — but I imagine, if it’s as well-done as everyone says, that it must deal with the central problem of how Britney was looked at, over and over, by everyone, and how she fell apart under that gaze.
I guess I could be talking about the male gaze here. Insofar as our society is patriarchal, all of our gazes are, on some level, male. I am not really interested in the gender or gendered-ness of it, as much as I am in the fact of it. We’re all looking, all the time.
Not long ago, Miley performed a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” on SNL. She’s sitting outside, next to a fire, close to someone accompanying her on a guitar, looking straight and forlornly into the camera. She’s wearing a jacket or a blanket pulled off her shoulders, occasionally using her gloved hands to pull it ever-so-slightly lower. She can see the gaze coming through the other side of the camera, and she’s not only inviting it, but meeting it head-on. She’s looking right back. She knows exactly what she’s doing; it’s all perfectly constructed by her. She’s righteous; she’s angry; she’s channeling the spirit of the song. It’s a spot-on performance.
In recent years, Miley’s developed a solid repertoire of covers, mostly of classics everyone knows, like Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” or Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide.” It’s not surprising that she has the vocal range to sing songs like these, or that they sound good when she sings them. These songs are great to begin with, and she’s a trained performer, clearly naturally talented, and has been doing this her whole life. Of course they sound great. They better; she’s a professional singer.
But the covers are more than songs; they are dares to look at her. And while it’s not surprising that she can sing them, it is indeed shocking just how well she pulls them off. These are songs everyone knows, and she has the confidence not to perform them as though they are her own — that would be arrogance — but to let them pass through her, to relate to some kernel of emotion that already exists within them and bring it out, to help us hear these songs in ways we haven’t before.
There’s a deep vulnerability in that exercise. You have to open yourself up to relate to a feeling written and put to music by someone else, and then open yourself up again to perform that in front of an audience, and then even further to make sure they’re relating to the feeling, too. The performance is the affirmation of the feeling. You can’t project confidence in something you don’t intimately know.
There is one moment in the cover of “Wish You Were Here” when, after she’s dug into the line “did you exchange / a walk-on part in the war” with an aggressive, raging bite, the anger slips the top of her voice, which then breaks into sadness as she sings the rest of the verse: “for a lead role in a cage.” I wonder, for a second, if she’s sincere or not, if the sadness is just spectacle. But she’s so convicted, so fully in it, that listening to her deliver that line, in a song I don’t much care for, by a band that mostly elicits eye-rolls from me, made me realize what a brilliant lyric it is.
When her cover of the Cranberries’ “Zombie” came out last year, I spent an entire day listening to it, over and over, and head-banging and jumping and thrashing about my apartment. I moved around so much and so aggressively that the next day my entire body, and especially my arms and shoulders, were very sore. Also, at some point, my glasses flew off my face and almost broke. It felt amazing. I was having a very angry few days, and here was Miley, also angry, also intense, also unleashed, just putting it all out there for me to pick up and relate to. Thank God.
Sometimes I joke that in everything I do, I aim for my stage presence to be 60% Miley Cyrus (intense, unashamed, funny, irreverent) and 40% Laura Marling (intense, unashamed, sober, restrained). Miley gets 60% because she can get people feeling as intensely as she does on stage, and because she seems more comfortable with being looked at. It’s incredible. It also seems to me like a matter of survival. You spend that much of your life in the public eye, and you either get really good at being looked at, or you spend the rest of forever anguished that people are looking at all. I don’t know if Miley is glad she’s being looked at. But she’s excellent at it.