The reputation of Miley Cyrus is anything but routine, evidenced in a surprise announcement at the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday that she is releasing a follow-up to her 2013 platinum-selling album “Bangerz.”
Surrounded by 30 queens from RuPaul’s Drag Race, the 22-year-old VMA host performed the album’s starting tune “Dooo It!,” to close out the show, featuring numerous hair flips and choreographed physical innuendo.
The newly-released 23 song “Miley Cyrus & her Dead Petz” is now streaming for free online, in what may be an evolution in the lifestyle and sound of the ex-Disney star.
In an interview with the New York Times Cyrus seems to have grown up from her days as just a teenage pop-star.
“I can just do what I want to do, and make the music I want to make,” said Cyrus, embellishing a different, noncommercial attitude that her listeners will all appreciate.
Recorded and produced at Technicolor studios in Studio City, the album contains notes of pop and psychedelia, revealing an experimental testament to Cyrus’ growth as a proud spokeswoman of youth-culture and the angels and demons of drugs, sex and society.
“I created my surroundings, my own world,” she said. “What seems like fantasy or trip, it’s not to me. It’s my actual reality. Self control is not something I’m working on.”
This reinvention presents Cyrus as a more conscientious and collected female, as she has taken hold of her celebrity status to transmit a manicured, yet coarse dominatrix in the vast sea of pop artists in the industry.
Cyrus said that the album costs added up to about $50,000, although her label, RCA Records, did not contribute to her budget.
In a recent statement for People magazine the label said: “Miley Cyrus continues to be a groundbreaking artist. She has a strong point of view regarding her art and expressed her desire to share this body of work with her fans directly. RCA Records is pleased to support Miley’s unique musical vision.”
The personal evolution was prompted by the passing in April 2014 of her dog, Floyd, who was killed by coyotes while the singer was on an eight-month world tour promoting “Bangerz.” It was only soon thereafter that she was hospitalized for more than a week in Kansas with a severe allergic reaction to antibiotics, where the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne, 54, visited to spur up a new collaboration that would eventually birth "Dead Petz," since their redux cover of The Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” a few months prior.
“I really think, in a way, [Floyd]’s energy went into Wayne’s energy,” said Cyrus. “What he was to me, Wayne has become.”
Clyne says that Cyrus’ life is “art.”
“If she wants to look this way and say these things, she does it.”
On the future of her music career, Cyrus said that it’s hard to imagine what it’d be like to fit back into a mainstream mold.
“I don’t think I’ll grow that way,” she said. “It seems like it would be backwards. This music was not to be a rebellion; it was meant to be a gift.”
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