MILEY CYRUS (with Shaad D'Souza)
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Music critic Shaad D\\u2019Souza joins DJ Louie to talk about one of modern pop\\u2019s most captivating, divisive and perplexing figures, Miley Cyrus. Louie and Shaad open with a break down of Miley\\u2019s emergence on the smash Disney show, Hannah Montana, how the character\\u2019s own double life as a pop star and a \\u201cnormal girl\\u201d mirrored Miley\\u2019s own, and the chaste image and anodyne pop-rock empowerment anthems on which Miley-as-Hannah made her name and, later in career, had to torch. They next dive into Miley\\u2019s various, often bold but almost always awkward attempts to break out of the Hannah Montana box, first with her calculated pivot towards sexed-up dance pop on 2010\\u2019s nonstarter Can\\u2019t Be Tamed and much more effectively on 2013\\u2019s Bangerz, a fascinating, garish record that repositioned the former Disney kid as a freewheeling, hip hop-obsessed party monster, a brazen and un-self-aware culture vulture and, for the first and perhaps only time in her a career, a trendsetting pop star. Louie and Shaad debate the record\\u2019s prescient centering of trap in mainstream pop, as well its table-setting fusion of rap and country, how we view Miley\\u2019s egregious cultural appropriation through a contemporary lens, and whether the album\\u2019s whirlwind of controversy obscured some of the record\\u2019s delicate, honest songwriting and virtuoso vocal performances. Later, they discuss how Miley squandered a lot of remaining good will with her next two projects, 2015\\u2019s utterly bizarre Wayne Coyne-collabo Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz and 2017\\u2019s middle-of-the-road country-pop-leaning Younger Now, and if Miley has effectively repositioned herself in recent years with a series of well-received live performances and covers and a turn towards rock homage on her 2020 album Plastic Hearts. Finally, Louie and Shaad rank Miley Cyrus in the official Pop Pantheon.
Read Shaad\'s review of Plastic Hearts in Pitchfork
Check out Louie\'s Miley Cyrus Essentials Playlist on Spotify
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