MILEY CYRUS (with Shaad D'Souza)
Pop Pantheon
DJ Louie XIV
4.7 • 630 Ratings
🗓️ 18 August 2022
⏱️ 106 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Music critic Shaad D’Souza joins DJ Louie to talk about one of modern pop’s most captivating, divisive and perplexing figures, Miley Cyrus. Louie and Shaad open with a break down of Miley’s emergence on the smash Disney show, Hannah Montana, how the character’s own double life as a pop star and a “normal girl” mirrored Miley’s 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’s 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’s nonstarter Can’t Be Tamed and much more effectively on 2013’s 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’s prescient centering of trap in mainstream pop, as well its table-setting fusion of rap and country, how we view Miley’s egregious cultural appropriation through a contemporary lens, and whether the album’s whirlwind of controversy obscured some of the record’s 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’s utterly bizarre Wayne Coyne-collabo Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz and 2017’s 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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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Pop Pantheon, the podcast where we completely overanalyze all of your favorite pop stars and then rank them in the official Pop Pantheon. |
| 0:17.6 | This is your host, DJ Louis X. Louis X. and I'm so glad to have you guys back for another |
| 0:21.9 | episode. Before we get into everything today, just some housekeeping. First off, thank you so, |
| 0:27.3 | so much to all of the amazing Pop Pantheon listeners that came out to Gorgeous, gorgeous last |
| 0:31.7 | weekend. It was incredible to meet a whole fucking bunch of you. It was so cool. I loved it. |
| 0:37.4 | Thank you for coming up to me. |
| 0:38.5 | Thanks for saying hi. I hope to see you guys back at future ones. And if you didn't get to make it |
| 0:42.5 | out this time, the next date will be coming for September very, very soon. I want to go back to |
| 0:49.2 | something we were doing before the Beyonce episodes and just quickly read off a couple of my favorite recent reviews |
| 0:55.7 | on Apple Podcasts. The first is from Nikolai 89 who says, love this podcast. You had me at Diana |
| 1:00.7 | Ross. You sold me at having two Diana Ross episodes. Would love to see Barbara Streisand, |
| 1:05.4 | her influence on pop standards and really leading the way for the LGBTQ plus icons. Agree. I want |
| 1:10.5 | to do that one too. |
| 1:11.5 | Whitney and her bridge of pop and R&B. |
| 1:13.2 | Dolly Parton for bridging the link between country and pop and releasing Here You Come |
| 1:16.6 | Again, the first true country pop hit. |
| 1:19.2 | Love these suggestions. |
| 1:20.3 | Definitely want to get to all of these people. |
| 1:22.6 | Another from TS RedocT22, who said Brandy episode, question mark. Love this podcast. Find myself returning to it, looking for new episodes to dive into once I finish listening. Can we please have a Brandy episode? I'm a massive Taylor, Brittany, and Janet fan. Ditto, which I know their episodes will be coming in due time, but please give us Brandy and put some respect on aphrodisiac and faux moon. Yes. Thank you guys. So thank you for that. And then finally, a double review from somebody that amended their review. This is Miley Fan 3064, ironically enough, given this episode who first gave us five stars and said, redo. Redo Gaga, she needs multi-part, love you much. Then wrote five days later, one star. |
| 2:01.6 | Redug Gaga, she needs multi-part. |
| 2:03.4 | This guy just worships Beyonce cringe. |
| 2:08.6 | Okay. |
... |
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