Forget the VMAs. Forget the twerking. Forget the tongue. Forget the “Wrecking Ball” video. Forget the nude Terry Richardson photo shoot. Forget the open letters with Sinéad O’Connor.
For one second, let’s focus on the music.
During the past two months, Miley Cyrus has been pop culture. The second the teddy bears started dancing behind her at the VMAs, she grabbed the Internet by the neck and shoved a foam finger repeatedly down its throat until every online think piece shared the words “sexual,” “cultural appropriation” and “twerk.” The media have turned Miley into an Extremely Important Person, and in midst of all the controversy, people have put the person before the music.
Now the music has been packaged in album form: 13 songs pieced together to form one 50-minute work of art that Miley has decided to call Bangerz. The title reflects Miley’s recent fascination with hip-hop culture, specifically trap music, twerking and the consumption of purple drank, molly and blunts. The hip-hop-influenced Bangerz, her fourth album, can be seen as a desperate attempt to distance herself from the content of her first album, Hannah Montana 2: Meet Miley Cyrus, which was released only six years ago. The times they are a-changin’.
With Bangerz, Miley shoots for the edgy. On “SMS (Bangerz),” Miley sings about sipping on purple drank that “Got up in my brain / Had me a little bit dismal.” The album’s first single, the mega-popular “We Can’t Stop,” has a chorus that makes explicit reference to “dancing with molly.” Even in lighter moments, like “#GETITRIGHT”— an ode to anticipating sex —Miley sings lines that would make Hannah Montana blush: “I’m dancing in the mirror / I feel like I got no panties on.” And on the song “4×4,” she sings, in one of the album’s stranger moments, “Driving so fast ’bout to piss on myself.” What the hell? Either Miley has little control of her bladder, she’s snorted massive amounts of cocaine or she’s just clinically insane.
Despite the purported edginess of the album, these are as provocative as the lyrics get. Bangerz is still very much a clean-cut pop album. The inoffensive, unoriginal production is well-polished by Mike WiLL Made It, and Miley addresses themes found in nearly every contemporary pop song: love, partying and occasionally gettin’ money.
What makes Bangerz less than what it could be is Miley’s attempt to balance commercially-successful pop tropes and aspects of grittier hip-hop culture. Because of this aesthetic duality, Bangerz is stuck somewhere between well-executed, radio-friendly pop and wild, hip-hop-influenced dance music.
Despite the massive amount of attention it’s received from the public, “We Can’t Stop” is probably the least interesting ode to partying in the history of recorded music. The beat’s sluggish pace and Miley’s bland, disconnected voice combine to make lines like “Red cups and sweaty bodies everywhere” sound like lyrics to a lost verse of Radiohead’s “How to Disappear Completely.” In the song’s chorus, Miley sings, “So la da di da di / We like to party / Dancing with molly / Doing whatever we want / This is our house / This is our rules.” These lyrics come off like a group of seventh grade girls with little self-awareness at a sleepover trying to emulate what it might be like to party with Juicy J in a trap house.
“Do My Thang” begins with the word “trap” repeated over and over, as if attempting to legitimize the song as a trap banger. However, repetition of the word “trap” does not ensure bonafide trap music, which this song is not. Despite this, the song actually morphs in to something enjoyable. The deep “oh wee oh oh oh” vocals in the chorus are mysterious and not unlike chants of the winged monkeys in “The Wizard of Oz.” As Miley sings, “Every single night and every single day / I’ma do my thang, I’ma do my thang” throughout the chorus, pulsing synth lines and 4/4 drum machine beats fuse beneath her to create a song that feels, in some ways, triumphant.
Trap influences elsewhere falter, however. “Love Money Party” opens with Miley singing, “Money ain’t nothing but money when you get to the money it ain’t nothing but money,” in such a monotonous, garbled delivery that it actually makes me physically sick. When Big Sean comes in and says, “You know those like, um, super model type kinda girls / Yeah, I’m chilling with those kind,” I actually start vomiting blood. And what is a “Love Money Party” anyway? Is it a party where Miley celebrates how much she loves money? Did she just forget to put commas in between those three words? These are mysteries that will never be solved.
Listening to “My Darlin’” is an experience less enjoyable than masturbating with a cheese grater. The song features Atlanta-based rapper Future singing a god-awful rendition of “Stand by Me,” which serves rather unfortunately as the song’s chorus. He sounds like a man with a severe concussion and a speech impediment singing with a handful of grapes in his mouth. Miley’s lyrics add little to redeem the track. She sings, “I ain’t pop no molly but you still got me sweating / What happened to that feeling? We’ll never get it back / I ain’t take no shots but you still got me hot / What happened to that feeling? I wish it wouldn’t stop.” These stilted lyrics are so out of place with the song’s otherwise lighthearted themes that it becomes painfully evident that Miley’s fascination with partying is crippling her otherwise carefree pop sensibilities.
When Miley does relish in more traditional pop music territory, however, she occasionally shines. The album’s opener, “Adore You,” is the finest achievement on the album. It’s ironic for Miley to kick off an album called Bangerz with a slow, Rihanna-like ballad, but once she belts, “When you say you love me / No, I love you more,” during the chorus, it’s easy to understand why she opens with the song. The lyrics aren’t earth-shattering, but Miley sings them with a poised and mature conviction that exposes a raw emotion only seen on the slightly-inferior “Wrecking Ball.”
“#GETITRIGHT”— which for no explicable reason has a hashtag in the title — is a fun little song with whistle-heavy production courtesy of Pharrell Williams. It’s a lighthearted song told from the point of view of a girl lying in bed anxiously awaiting a sexual experience. Miley’s lyrics are naïve but also honest, true emotions: “I feel the thirst pouring out of me / The things that I wanna try …This is the first time I get to see / Things I’ve never seen in my life.” It’s moments like these that remind the listener that Miley is an actual human with actual human emotions.
With the release of another studio album, the controversy will subside and Miley Cyrus’s status as a musician will be reaffirmed. Once the focus is again placed on her creative output, Miley will need to choose where she wants to go, music-wise. Does she want to pursue the ratchet and the turnt? Or does she want to continue making harmless pop music? She’s pussyfooting around the full potential of either musical direction with her current, watered-down versions of what she calls “bangers.” Miley, I love you, but you’re bringing me down.
If Miley wants to make her Yeezus, she needs to say, “Screw the haters,” and do it. She has the potential to be the greatest provocateur of Generation Y. That’s a concept that’s scared a lot of people, in the press and the public. Miley needs to take advice from the great Bob Dylan, a man who once plugged his guitar into an amplifier. On the night of May 17, 1966, Dylan turned his back to the crowd calling him “Judas” and shouted at his band, “PLAY IT FUCKING LOUD!” And music was never the same.
2.5 out of 5 stars
