I had absolutely no intention of reading the Rolling Stone profile of Miley Cyrus, the one in which she appears topless on the cover with her tongue sticking out. I swear I didn’t. But then someone I respect, ESPN’s Wright Thompson, tweeted the following yesterday: “The case for access: when someone famous like @MileyCyrus lets a writer inside, sometimes the world gets to see something real.” Well damn — I just had to read it then.
And so I did, last night, all 5000 or so words of it, and it was pretty great. I second what Wright said about it — Miley doesn’t employ a team of publicists so she’s free to be a normal human being in the company of a reporter. And in the end I came away from it — and I can’t believe I’m about to say this — really liking Miley Cyrus a lot more than I did prior to reading the piece.
In the piece, Miley curses a lot, even more than I would have expected, treats people with kindness and respect, appears to “get it,” and seems to have a pretty good head on her shoulders. Dare I say she even seems a little…enlightened?
Take, for instance, this bit where she’s talking about her infamous VMA performance with Robin Thicke…
Miley admits that her performance with Thicke got a little – her word – “handsy.” But she makes a good point: “No one is talking about the man behind the ass. It was a lot of ‘Miley twerks on Robin Thicke,’ but never, ‘Robin Thicke grinds up on Miley.’ They’re only talking about the one that bent over. So obviously there’s a double standard.” She was especially amused by the criticism from Brooke Shields, who played Miley’s mom on Hannah Montana and called the VMA performance “desperate.” “Brooke Shields was in a movie where she was a prostitute at age 12!” Miley says with a laugh.
Touché! +1 Miley.
And then there’s this, where she discusses the absurdity of America’s moral high ground…
“America is just so weird in what they think is right and wrong,” she continues. “Like, I was watching Breaking Bad the other day, and they were cooking meth. I could literally cook meth because of that show. It’s a how-to. And then they bleeped out the word ‘fuck.’ And I’m like, really? They killed a guy, and disintegrated his body in acid, but you’re not allowed to say ‘fuck’? It’s like when they bleeped ‘molly’ at the VMAs. Look what I’m doing up here right now, and you’re going to bleep out ‘molly’? Whatever.”
Finally, this bit about how Steve Carell, Miley’s neighbor, gives her the frequent stink-eye made me laugh…
The neighborhood isn’t what you’d expect: very suburban, very Valley, very Old Hollywood. Bob Hope lived in the house behind theirs. Miley never met him, but she did meet his widow, who lived there until she passed away in 2011. “Miss Dolores,” Miley says. “She was party-rocking till the end! Sometimes I’d walk by and see all these people in there dressed up like old-time flappers. I was like, ‘Is this real – or are you guys all ghosts?'”
Her neighbors now are a little more contemporary. “Diddy’s baby mama lives right there,” Miley says, pointing over the fence behind her pool. And down the street is Steve Carell, who has two preteen kids and doesn’t sound like the biggest Miley fan. “He always gives me the stank-eye because I drive so fast,” Miley says. “The other day I was trying to reverse and I almost hit a thousand things, and I was getting nervous because I could see him going” – she crosses her arms and lets out a big, annoyed sigh. “I’m like, oh, my God, Dan in Real Life is watching me right now!”
Go read the whole thing when you have time. It’s pretty great.
