How Miley Cyrus went from sensational to predictable
Her NBC concert special lacked all the strange, compelling energy of her VMA performance
FILE - In this Saturday, April 5, 2014 file photo, singer Miley Cyrus performs at the Barclays Center in New York. Cyrus has obtained a temporary restraining order against an Arizona man who was recently detained by police for trying to meet the singer-actress. A Los Angeles judge granted Cyrus a temporary restraining order against 24-year-old Devon Meek on Friday, May 23, 2014. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, file)(Credit: Evan Agostini/invision/ap)
No one represents the current state of event television better than Miley Cyrus, whose NBC special last night, too, illustrated the limits of spectacle.
Cyrus has, in less than a year, risen to megastardom with a carefully groomed image of someone who just doesn’t care about propriety. In a time when only live spectacle seems to draw audiences consistently, the young Cyrus did MTV a favor last summer by providing the only real energy at a Video Music Awards ceremony packed with much bigger stars. Cyrus had seemed like a surprising choice even to perform at the ceremony, but had become the evening’s breakout star by the end of her performance.
Cyrus’s routine — dancing aimlessly when not twerking in a racially charged manner, cavorting with dancers in fuzzy mascot costumes, being sexually charged in every direction with no real object — was totally unlike anything else in the fairly staid pop scene of mid-2013; major stars like Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, and Justin Timberlake had far more to lose and seemed, by comparison, boring.
But, having sat through two hours of Cyrus last night, I’d rather have watched any of those three do a two-hour concert special. I am basically a fan of Miley Cyrus, but the NBC show made a horrible case both for her fame and for the existence of the concert special in general. The camera jittered around, unsure of where to stop, and so one was always aware that a lot was happening onstage but not able to see it all. I’ve seen YouTube videos of Cyrus’s tour, for instance, that conveyed the strange animation sequence that opened the concert far better than the NBC special did, which kept cutting from Cyrus to her dancers to fans in the crowd.
It’s hard to blame anyone involved in the editing room, though, for not knowing when enough was enough; the entire concert seemed to overwhelm Cyrus, a very skilled singer who by the end was resorting to basically grunting through her lower register. She’d been, after all, running around, climbing different set elements, and changing costumes for hours. (To her credit, she’s canned what had been the most disturbing aspects of her VMA act, like slapping black women.) Cyrus combines an insouciant attitude toward pop-world norms with a clear desire to entertain, but a little less stimulation would have actually made her show a lot better, at least on TV. And she needs to learn something about tone, as when she concludes her deeply sad break-up song “Someone Else” by riding a giant synthetic hot dog off the stage.
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