Miley Cyrus is Rolling Stone”s current cover girl, and unlike the last two covers, which featured close-ups of Macklemore”s (of Macklemore & Ryan Lewis) and Michael J. Fox”s faces, Cyrus, is, of course shown nude with her tongue sticking out. (Adele and Taylor Swift are the only female Rolling cover subjects that we can remember in recent years who weren”t in some state of undress, but that”s a different topic).
Here are the seven most interesting things revealed in the Cyrus interview:
1. She gets Rolling Stone tattooed on the soles of her feet during the interview. It is her ninth tattoo. She also has a quotation from Teddy Roosevelt. Go figure.
2. She lives in Touluca Lake, in the San Fernando Valley. Her neighbors include “Diddy”s baby mama,” Steve Carrell, who often gives her disapproving looks for her reckless driving; and her parents, who live down the block.
3. Miley is shocked, SHOCKED, she says, by the reaction to her VMA performance of “We Can”t Stop/Blurred Lines.” Miley thought there was a chance the network might pull the plug on her mid-performance, but she didn’t expect so much shock and vitriol. “Honestly, that was our MTV version,” she says. “We could have even gone further, but we didn’t. I thought that’s what the VMAs were all about! It’s not the Grammys or the Oscars. You’re not supposed to show up in a gown, Vanna White-style” – a little dig at Taylor Swift. “It’s supposed to be fun!”
4. She admits that she says “Molly” in the “We Can”t Stop” lyrics, instead of “Miley,” which she coyly pretended she sang when the song first came out. She does it in a backhanded way, as she”s questioning why “Breaking Bad” can show how to cook meth, yet she gets bleeped. “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.”
5. Kanye West helped quell her nerves for the VMA performance: Kanye West had seen her rehearsals and wanted to talk to her before she went onstage. “He came in and goes, ‘There are not a lot of artists I believe in more than you right now.” Those kind words led to the two heading to the studio to record a remix of “Black Skinhead.”
6. Cyrus is not a racist just because she twerked or because she had black back-up singers: “I don’t keep my producers or dancers around ’cause it makes me look cool,” she says. “Those aren’t my ‘accessories.’ They’re my homies.” Meanwhile, she argues, the idea that she’s somehow playing black is absurd. “I’m from one of the wealthiest counties in America,” she says. “I know what I am. But I also know what I like to listen to. Look at any 20-year-old white girl right now – that’s what they’re listening to at the club. It’s 2013. The gays are getting married, we’re all collaborating. I would never think about the color of my dancers, like, ‘Ooh, that might be controversial.’ What do you mean?” she says with a laugh. “Times are changing. I think there’s a generation or two left, and then it’s gonna be a whole new world.”
7. She sees herself as Justin Bieber”s mentor: I’m not much older than him, so I never want it to feel like I’m mentoring him. But I do mentor him in a way. Because I’ve been doing this shit for a long time, and I already transitioned, and I don’t think he’s quite done it yet. “He’s trying really hard,” she adds. “People don’t take him seriously, but he really can play the drums, he really can play guitar, he really can sing. I just don’t want to see him fuck that up, to where people think he’s Vanilla Ice.
A director’s cut of Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” has also been released and it is one long cut of Cyrus’s face, completely redolent of Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” which we’ve also embedded below, and, which came out before Cyrus was even born.