Miley Cyrus is looking to do the hardest thing for any teenage star, break out of that comfort zone and launch an entirely new career as an adult.
As she enters her twenties she’s trying to remove herself from the part of her life that was spent in the House of Mouse and become an entirely new creative entity, but is the whole exercise doomed from the start, or can Miley pull of a sea change like Michael Jackson and Justin Timberlake have done before her?
Any conversation about Cyrus though has to begin with how she rose to fame, as the clean cut country girl who entered the homes of millions of Americans each week on TV.
For years, she was Disney’s golden girl, a face slapped on lunchboxes and notebooks in her alter ego of Hannah Montana and with a pop career that gave her an army of young fans. With a movie spin off of the aforementioned TV show and even a Nicolas Sparks film centred on her, she became the idol for many a tween.
To many, she’ll always be Hannah Montana, the fresh faced girl gurning her hardest to make the broad strokes of Disney comedy passable and not annoying enough that will cause, as Charlie Brooker puts it, “Any sane viewer over the age of nine will despise them with the white hot burning intensity of an imploding star”.
Miley in her previous guiseSince her time with Disney though, Miley’s had much more column inches dedicated to her growing collection of tattoos, her decision to radically change hairstyles and relationship with actor Liam Hemsworth than it has anything that she’s put her creative mind to.
Perhaps we should have been paying more attention though, as her latest work could actually be rather interesting. Her collaboration with Snoop Lion that came out today shows that she might actually have some promise.
We know she’s been hitting the studio with some artists that we never thought we’d see collaborating with Miley Cyrus, with her posting images online of her working with Pharrell and Tyler The Creator and publically saying that she’s been working with producing duo Da Internz.
Pharrell’s not being too coy either about his work with Miley, comparing the experiences he’s having with her similar to those he had with Justin Timberlake and telling HypeBeast in an in interview that “She is an old soul that was trapped in a younger situation who just bursted at the scenes and I was just happy to be there during that transformation.”
Her last full album release showed that Cyrus was itching to break free, with the tracks being slightly edgier even if they were still solidly chart friendly pop tracks that had the Disney fingerprint all over them, despite Cyrus’s best efforts at rebellion.
With that yolk freed from around her neck, Miley might actually be able to spread her wings somewhat and mature in the same way that Justin Timberlake has since he left *NSYNC and became one of the most progressive and interesting pop singers around.
If Miley’s truly to escape her past though, she will have to become something truly musically special. That she became so big at such a young age in more than just the musical world makes the task all the more difficult for her to accomplish.
She’s working with the right people though, as not only is Pharrell still one of the biggest producing names out there, he was directly responsible for the rebirth of Justin Timberlake and helped make Connor Maynard into something more than just a British Bieber. He’s going to be a big factor in this transformation, and this might be his biggest success story yet if it all goes right for the pair of them.
We wish you luck Miss Cyrus, you might just need every bit of it.
Tagged in Miley Cyrus Hannah Montana Pharrell Williams