Robin Thicke Blames Miley Cyrus For VMAs, We Gag In His General Direction

Ugh. Just... ugh. Ugh. Between the raging rape culture that was once again brought to our attention by the horrific Twitter reactions to American Horror Story: Coven's premiere, and this latest reminder that Robin Thicke still exists and says things, we just... we just need a break, OK? Because Robin Thicke blames Miley Cyrus for VMA performance, and we're just exhausted.

I’m singing my butt off, so I’m sitting there. I’m looking up at this guy, and I’m singing. I’m not really paying attention to all that. That’s on her. I’m like, people ask me, you know, do you twerk? I go, listen, I’m the twerkee. I’m twerked upon. I don’t twerk myself, OK? I’m just twerked upon.

(Emphasis ours.)
Listen. Listen. We saw that performance. With our eyes. The working ones, in our heads. Miley Cyrus may have been the one to bend over and wiggle her booty, but here's the thing: 1) So what? We're still confused as to why people are still upset about that, and 2) Robin Thicke, sir, you were there, too.
Miley Cyrus bent over, and twerked, and generally wiggled, but Thicke must have stumbled oh so conveniently to find himself right up against that very famous derriere. He may not have been twerking, but he was definitely part of the equation, and it's kind of lame to claim otherwise.
Thicke also wrote "Blurred Lines," which happens to be the song they were performing, so it feels kind of disingenuous to push all the blame onto the lady acting out the lyrics to his own song. Don't blame Miley Cyrus for not being as easily "domesticated" as the song claims; she already warned us years ago that she can't be tamed.
We do agree with one thing Thicke said about that VMAs performance and the press attention that followed: “It’s silly.”

Miley Cyrus and the Post-Gender Generation

Solomon was meant to be taken generally, not literally.  And when he says there is nothing new under the sun, we are almost led to believe him entirely – if it hadn't been for automobiles and the internet and America.  About the rest of it he was right.  You can always expect the best and worst out of humanity, because the loves and hates of human nature have always remained the same, which leads us to do the same kinds of things we've always been doing.  And if he was right about anything in particular, it was about the recurring existence of Miley Cyrus.

Some people think that Miley Cyrus is something new, and they think it only because they've forgotten about David Bowie and Johnny Rotten.  We've already had someone who dressed like a transsexual space alien and threw his middle finger at masculinity, and we've already had a movement of people who were completely averse to good manners and taste.  Miley Cyrus isn't for our children, but for our parents.  The difference is that our parents had the better music.

Glam and punk were the expressions of a '70s too intoxicated to remain sensible, and too tired of hippie sermonizing to even pretend morality.  And before them the Indians had their cross-dressers named berdaches, and before them the Canaanites had their gay temple prostitutes whom the Israelites called qedeshim.  Gay marriage disgusted Tacitus when it was performed by Nero, and pederasty was openly performed by the Athenians to the disgust of the Spartans, who confused everyone with their unhusbandly approach to marriage.

The point of the matter is that bucking sexual norms can be novel only to someone unfamiliar with history.  And people are always bucking, because the norms are eternal.  Nearly every great and ancient nation's had a generation of people who were terrible at being men and women – or perhaps too bored with being spiritually great in general.  It usually happens after a period of safety and luxury, before they're conquered by a nation that takes manhood very seriously – who are usually referred to as barbarians.  The major difference between the last time this happened and the present is that today's invading "barbarians" call masculinity machismo, and our deviants are considered by our intelligentsia not as deviants, but as moralists.

And perhaps this is why Miley's so shocking: not because what she's doing is actually anything new, but because she's backed by an army of militant pantsuits who say that what she's doing is right.  The New York Times has gone so far as to call her the avatar of the post-gender generation – as if the overwhelming majority of youngsters these days had already been polled and said they were tired of seeing pretty girls.  Of course, there are some of them who are sick of seeing pretty girls – and they are probably all ugly girls.  They're the minority of our children who've been so terribly cursed with terrible taste and minimal talents that they want to be themselves without anyone left to criticize them.  And they are getting what they want – almost.  They're getting it from the authorities, from their professors, and from the president.  Whom they are not getting it from (if they are straight) is everyone they really want to have sex with, because the people they want to have sex with are having sex with people who are sexually attractive.

The reason that the "post-gender generation" is temporary (and hopefully only a generation) is because the one thing they never should have bucked is the one thing they did, and it happens to be beauty.  There's nothing attractive about Miley Cyrus, nothing that makes you say I want this woman living in my house with me forever.  She's already ruined her looks with androgyny and bad fashion.  She's unsuitable for any pursuit of tranquility (which every single one of us eventually needs), useless for any kind of actual production (which most of us are forced by circumstances into doing), and even worse for the raising of children (which is the biological purpose and statistically unavoidable result of having sex).  And if children aren't ready to begin searching for these qualities intently, they'll feel themselves drawn magically to them by their guts – which are eternal, unlike the tastes of our intelligentsia.

The irony of the post-gender generation is that it claims to be getting a minority out of the closet, while forcing the majority back into another.  It demands that the majority of people celebrate things they don't really feel like celebrating – unless they have to celebrate it for the purpose of fitting in.  And this is because a person who's post-gender or transsexual has never really left his sex.  He's just terrible at being it.  He straddles the infinite chasm between two ideals, and he cheapens both of them while getting neither.  Children instinctively know this, and teachers know that they know it – and we know this because teachers are spending a lot of time telling children to say that they don't know it.

The post-gender movement is against the things all generations of healthy people have recognized as masculine and feminine, which means that in a universal sense, it's profoundly anti-democratic.  It's about pretending the forces of nature never existed, and that all the healthy people in fiction and in history, from the Nephilim to Lord Byron, were wrong about their feelings.  The movement isn't about the minority who wants to wear makeup and still be respected as manly; it's about the people who know he isn't manly and are forced to celebrate him because he isn't.  It asks people whether they would rather be "individuals" or be beautiful – and it not only asks them to pick the option they'd rather not, but chastises them when they refuse to conform to the celebrations of tasteless individuality.  Everyone is beautiful, they say – especially when they're responsible for making themselves ugly.

While it's worth mentioning that almost every valuable sermon is a calling to either fight or employ your instincts usefully, sometimes our most timely sermons are about telling us our sermonizing has gone horribly wrong (which is why Jesus was hated by the Pharisees).  In our case, it has gone wrong because we tried to protect the outcasts and in the process buried our winners.  And now we know that we can be post-gender only by mass indoctrination and thought control and persecution.  We can avoid gender only by keeping children away from romance, and if the men and women of our day aren't good enough to rebel against our intelligentsia as they should and fight them with every ounce of our sexual vitality, we will have to wait – for our children to do it for us.

And their protests will be unlike any protests the left has ever imagined.  They might be made in dirty looks and angry comments at priggish individualists in ugly costumes.  But they will more likely be silent.  They will more likely be accidental.  They'll be a return to good art and good fashion and pictures of beautiful women posted on bedroom walls of adolescent boys.  They'll be an unspoken evasion of all the post-gender possibilities for the beautiful maidens and muscular champions we always wanted.  It's our desire for good lovers that will make us into men and women – and there is nobody in the world who can keep us from doing it.  And this is because romance is bigger than bad social constructions.

My Oh Miley! America's baddest bad girl doesn't care what you think of her.

“She’s cool, she’s scandalous,” Kristal, an apple-cheeked 13-year-old, shouts over the din. “I like her hair,” adds Morgan, a 12-year-old standing next to her. “She’s a slut,” declares Kaylee, a sullen 14-year-old with a fading magenta dye job and a mouthful of bubble gum. “I’m here for Ariana Grande.” For all I know, she’s referring to a Microsoft Word font or a new kind of latte. This is not my scene. I am in the oppressive mayhem at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, packed on this December night for the Jingle Ball, a concert series featuring of-the-moment pop artists. Kristal and Morgan are Smilers, as Miley Cyrus diehards call themselves. Some carry a torch for Hannah Montana, the Disney Channel role that made her a star. Others favor the edgier persona introduced with her 2013 album, Bangerz. But all are fiercely devoted, waiting hours for a glimpse of Cyrus.

Onstage, the lights dim. Red sequins flash through a smoke-machine haze. Cyrus, in a spangled two-piece ensemble hiked high enough to require intensive bikini waxing, steps out. Behind her, a tall black woman sways in a Christmas tree costume that Cyrus will later overturn, pointing at the women’s rear end and impishly wagging her tongue at the audience. Next to her, a little person prances in a silver leotard with conical foam breasts. Cyrus kneels and squeezes them playfully. Eighteen thousand audience members explode into unhinged jubilation. “Oh, my God,” Kristal shrieks, near tears. “I love her!”

“I don’t love kids,” a tired Cyrus tells me the night before the concert, ashing a cigarette. We’re in her living room, sitting in front of a white stone mid-century-modern fireplace. There are three fireplaces in her mansion in the hills overlooking Los Angeles, which is sequestered behind high gates and monitored by countless security cameras. The fire throws shadows across Cyrus’s languorous form, now draped over an uncomfortable-looking Tulip chair. A black and white striped Chanel T-shirt hangs slack on her thin frame. With pageboy bangs falling over her makeup-free face, the performer looks vulnerable, childlike. Only the word bad in bold red on her right middle finger—one of her 21 tattoos at last count—betrays the puckish impresario she will be onstage the next night. She has just turned 21.

I begin to respond, but Cyrus is not listening. “I don’t love them because, I mean, I think I was around too many kids at one point—because I was around a lot of kids.”

A conversation with Cyrus plays more like a breakneck stream-of-consciousness soliloquy. She’s Molly Bloom—the character who closes James Joyce’s Ulysses with a chapter of unpunctuated run-on sentences—for the Instagram set. She rarely draws a breath. Cyrus speaks in the language of her generation: She is a human text message.

Cyrus speaks in the language of her generation: She is a human text message.

“They’re so fucking mean,” she continues. “Sometimes I hear kids with their parents, and I want to go over and, like, smack them myself…Like if they meet me, they’ll be like, ‘Mom, don’t you know how to use an iPhone? Like, can you take the picture?’ I’m like, ‘Dude, if I ever talked to my mom like that when I was a kid, I would have had no phone, no computer, no TV, no anything.’ And so, yeah, kids are just mean.”

Cyrus gets a lot of mean these days. She has 16.7 million followers on Twitter, and every day her feed is deluged with slurs. (Cyrus: “I. Hate. Packing.” Twitter response: “GET CANCER.”) She is the personification of a new generation of fame. She both courts and bears the costs of an ever more intrusive media; of a public ravenous for that intrusiveness; and of a networked world that has placed all of us, celebrity or not, under the microscope. Cyrus lowers her voice conspiratorially and tells me, “I think with, like, Instagram, Twitter, whatever, everyone is a paparazzi now. How scary is that? Like, you’re never safe.” Even ordinary people, Cyrus says, “just think they can, like, talk about you like they know you. Especially because I grew up in it, and like you grew up in it, too, there’s a sense of entitlement.” She’s not wrong about the parallels: both of us raised by performers, both driven to work in the spotlight on our own terms.

See Miley Cyrus’s most memorable Instagram moments here.

Cyrus thrived in that spotlight early, first as the daughter of the famed country singer Billy Ray Cyrus. Destiny Hope, as Miley was christened, was born in 1992, the year Billy Ray’s “Achy Breaky Heart” topped the charts. On a 500-acre farm in Franklin, Tennessee, she and her five siblings spent long summer days outdoors. “We never were inside, and we never wore shoes,” she recalls. “I think it’s why I like wearing no clothes so much and I’m always naked.” Cyrus is close to her mother, Tish, who manages her career. “I never had, like, a nanny that took care of me,” Cyrus recounts. “My mom always fed me breakfast, lunch, and dinner.” But her parents also served as an example of what not to do, starting with trusting too easily. “My dad, like, he’s the most trusting human in the world,” she says. “He trusts everybody, basically, until they fuck him over. And my mom, too, holds no grudges. She’s really like it’s the—you know, shame on—” Cyrus pauses, a rare occurrence. She furrows her brow. “What is it? ‘Shame on me’?…or whatever.”

“Fool me once—?” I offer, but Cyrus is talking again.

“She’ll let someone, like, fuck her over twice, and then she’ll let it go, and then she kind of forgets about it. And I used to be like that. And now I just keep it in the back of my mind.”

Other influences from Cyrus’s pre-fame years include her grandfather Ron Cyrus, a Kentucky state legislator who inspired a counterculture streak (“To be a Democrat in a superconservative state, it can be crazy because people look at you like you’re some type of sinner,” she says) and Dolly Parton, Cyrus’s godmother. (“What I love about Dolly is she says hi to the person that’s doing the catering on set before she goes and says hi to the cast.”)

By age 9, Cyrus had already won a spotlight of her own, appearing in a bit part in her father’s television program, Doc. Three years later, at 12, she landed the TV role that would make her a star: every girl in America’s best friend, Hannah Montana. Lee Shallat Chemel, who cast Cyrus in that role, recalls that the child actor was green but game. “I didn’t see drivenat that point,” she muses. “I did see very open and very willing to go.” And go she did. Cyrus became one of Disney’s most profitable, most merchandized stars. The Hannah Montana franchise earned the company $1 billion over the course of its run from 2006 to 2011.

But fame brought increasingly harsh judgment. In 2008, a 15-year-old Cyrus scandalized her audience by wearing what appeared to be nothing but a sheet in photographs shot by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair. (“I feel so embarrassed,” Cyrus said at the time. “I apologize to my fans, who I care so deeply about.”) The following year, a video of her pole dancing at an awards show prompted a collective clutching of pearls. Not long after, she found herself in the headlines again when a videotape of her taking a hit from a bong made the rounds online.

Public interest in Cyrus’s personal image has never faltered; but for a spell, her ability to capitalize on it did. Her 2010 album with Disney, Can’t Be Tamed,proved her least successful. Fitful attempts to kick-start her acting career sputtered. Then 2013 arrived, and with it, a radically reinvented image—no apologies necessary. Gyrating in a flesh-tone latex bikini for her infamous performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, swinging naked on a wrecking ball in her most popular music video, and providing a drip-feed of intimate selfies via social media, Cyrus laid siege to public consciousness. At the close of the year, she was the most Googled person in America.

Cyrus also reinvented her music. She hired a new music manager, Larry Rudolph, famous for orchestrating Britney Spears’s controversy-laden career. She assembled a powerhouse team of producers, including reliable hitmakers Pharrell Williams and Doctor Luke and up-and-comer Mike WiLL Made It. This, too, paid off. Bangerz topped the Billboard 200, and Cyrus has been earning mounting critical respect. “They did a write-up inRolling Stone—like, the best albums of 2013,” Cyrus says, taking a drag of her cigarette. “And my album was one of them! I printed it out. I give myself things to look at like that.”

Cyrus insists that her provocative image is calculated. In part, she tells me, it’s a response to what she sees as a lack of authenticity in her peer group. “I just don’t get what half the girls are wearing. Everyone to me seems like Vanna White. I’m trying to tell girls, like, ‘Fuck that. You don’t have to wear makeup. You don’t have to have long blonde hair and big titties. That’s not what it’s about. It’s, like, personal style.’ I like that I’m associated with sexuality and the kind of punk-rock shit where we just don’t care. Like Madonna or Blondie or Joan Jett—Jett’s the one that I still get a little shaky around. She did what I did in such a crazier way. I mean, girls then weren’t supposed to wear leather pants and, like, fucking rock out. And she did.”

But Jett didn’t grow up in the age of social media. Cyrus is often under fire, and not all of it is senseless Twitter bullying. Recently, she has weathered more-serious claims that she exploits her minority backup dancers, like the black woman in her Jingle Ball show.

The Guardian called her use of black dancers and the focus on their rear ends “a minstrel show.” A column on the culture website Jezebel.com, viewed more than 746,000 times, accused Cyrus of “accessorizing with black people.” Amazon Ashley, the burlesque performer who is featured in Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop” video and wore the Christmas tree costume, defends the performances. “I say, ‘Bah, humbug’ to that,” she says of critics. “Miley treats me with the utmost respect. Twerking is my act. It’s what I enjoy; it’s who I am.”

Cyrus’s use of little people has stirred even deeper rancor. Hollis Jane, who appeared dressed as a teddy bear in Cyrus’s VMA performance, wrote afterward that “standing on that stage, in that costume was one of the most degrading things—I was being looked at as a prop, as something less than human.” Brittney Guzman, the little person who was hired after Jane’s departure and appeared in Cyrus’s Jingle Ball performance, dismisses Jane’s complaints as a ploy for attention. She says Cyrus’s handling of her body comes from a place of sisterly affection. “When she grabs my boobs, we’re just having fun,” she says. “It’s not degrading.” She tells me the routine mimics their offstage rapport. After shows, “sometimes she’ll touch my boob, and she’ll be like, ‘Oh, yeah, I just wanted to grab it’…Or she’ll be like, ‘Next time I’m going to grab your ass…’cause Brittney has the biggest booty.’ ”

“I’m not Disney, where they have an asian girl, a black girl, and a white girl wearing bright-colored t-shirts.”
When asked about the criticism, Cyrus simply says, “I don’t give a shit. I’m not Disney, where they have, like, an Asian girl, a black girl, and a white girl, to be politically correct, and, like, everyone has bright-colored T-shirts. You know, it’s like, I’m not making any kind of statement. Anyone that hates on you is always below you, because they’re just jealous of what you have.” Cyrus seems to have developed a preternatural ability to tune things out. (“I have a hard time listening,” she concedes.) That goes for both criticism and other people. “I have a lot of people that I could call and hang out with, but I have very few friends, if that makes any sense,” she tells me. “Like, I just don’t tell a lot of people anything. Everyone’s always like, ‘You’re so sketch.’ ”

She admits that her reluctance to trust has made dating fraught since she and the 24-year-old Australian actor Liam Hemsworth ended their one-year engagement last September. “Guys watch too much porn,” she confides, absently prodding a bedazzled iPhone. “Those girls don’t exist. They’re not real girls. And that’s like us watching romance movies. That’s girl porn, because, like, those guys do not exist.” The kind that do exist, she continues, “just try too hard with me, and it’s just like, ‘I don’t need you to impress me. I don’t want you to, like, take me to fancy restaurants.’ I hate sitting down for dinner!” Cyrus’s tone begins to sound accusing, though I’ve taken her to no meals, seated or otherwise. “You don’t have to do that to me! You don’t have to take me on trips! I literally just want to chill here!”

She collects herself: “That’s why I’m, like, not trying to jump into a relationship…I love my music so much, and I love what I’m doing so much that that has become my other half—rather than another person. And so, yeah, I feel like I had to be able to be 100 percent—oh, Hi, Maya.”

A petite Asian woman has shuffled to Cyrus’s side.

“I’m doing a little interview,” Cyrus tells her. “But you can set up right here if you want.”

She turns back to me. “This is Maya. She does my nails.”

“I never leave the house,” Cyrus explains. “Why go to a movie? I’ve got a huge-ass TV. We’ve got a chef here that can make you great food. We don’t need to leave. I would just rather be here where I’m completely locked in.”

I glance around the room. The sun is setting over Los Angeles, the last shafts of light creeping across the dark-stained oak floor. The modern decor is punctuated by the occasional New Age detail, like the giant Buddha head in the driveway fountain. In the garage are Cyrus’s motorcycle, a white Mercedes S class, a Porsche, and a Maserati—but with the paparazzi outside, Cyrus says, exits require planning.

She betrays a note of yearning when I mention I’m about to depart for an assignment in Kenya.

“I want to go to Kenya,” she says.

I tell her to come: “No joke. You could do it.”

“Kenya’s my dream,” she says. “Kenya is my total dream. I wish I wasn’t going to be in Minneapolis next week, I wish I could be in Kenya.”

Her imagination is running riot now. “I want to go to Iceland,” she says.

“Yes!” I agree. “I’ve never been.”

“Let’s do an Iceland trip…and I want to go to Norway…Someone said the light there is just so beautiful…”

If Cyrus makes it to Kenya or Iceland or Norway, it probably won’t be for adventure. And it definitely won’t be soon. This year will be spent crisscrossing America and Europe for her Bangerz tour, which commenced mid-February. “I love being on, like, the road,” she says, brightening. “I just want to make music.”

Music is the one context in which I witness Cyrus listening exquisitely, deeply, wholly. When I tell her that I’ve worked as a singer-songwriter, she asks to hear my collaboration with a musician whose material she has covered. She clutches my phone’s tinny speaker to her ear for three and a half minutes. “This chorus is dope,” she says, her head nodding to the beat. “’Cause the verses are more poppy but cool, and the chorus sounds so old-school…” In a few minutes of music, she asks me more questions than she has in hours of conversation: about lyrics, melody, inspirations.

Cyrus’s own influences stand in stark contrast to the hyperproduced pop of Bangerz. Later, we pore over her vinyl collection, dusting off psychedelic rock courtesy of her favorite band, Pink Floyd, and standards by Dolly Parton, Bobby Vinton, and Irma Thomas. In 2012 Cyrus recorded a series of what she refers to as “backyard sessions” with her band, showcasing powerhouse vocals on standards like Parton’s “Jolene.” At the mention of a recent hit by one prominent pop princess, Cyrus wrinkles up her nose. “Oh, God! That’s the worst. I couldn’t imagine you doing an album that sounds like that.” Even as a child, she had a singular creative confidence. She recalls fighting with a producer from her Disney days because she thought he was “selling out.” I was like, ‘Why the fuck are you doing this?’ ” She reduced both of them to tears, fighting “to a point where I’d be shaking. But I’m just intense like that.”

Part of her power, Cyrus feels, lies in having nothing left to prove. At 21, she’s managed to turn herself into a juggernaut twice over. “You know, I’ve made my money. If no one buys my album, cool. It’s fine. I’ve got a house, and I’ve got dogs that I love. I don’t need anything else,” she says. In her view, that’s a luxury that has carried the legends she most admires. “Maybe they succeed because they don’t have anything to prove. They’re just doing it because they love it. I hope I’m like Dolly—where I’m just still going at 75.”

Beyond music, Cyrus is expanding her interests. After her breakup, she tells me, she asked Diane Martel, the director responsible for Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop” and Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” videos, to “just completely, like, drown me in new movies and books and art. I lived in Nashville, where that shit isn’t accessible.” We flip through a book of photographs by Cindy Sherman. “Check it,” she says as we arrive at Sherman’s Untitled #276, in which the artist poses as a kind of grungy Cinderella. “Lady Gaga completely ripped that off.” Cyrus is finding her taste in movies, too. She tells me she just watched the Tom Cruise 1990 dramaDays of Thunder three nights in a row. She’s also newly enamored with the 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire. “I’m Blanche to a T, complete psycho,” she burbles cheerfully. I stare at her. I literally cannot imagine anyone less like Tennessee Williams’s fragile, lost Blanche DuBois. “Every time I watched her,” she goes on, “I was always like, ‘That’s me!’ ” If Cyrus is a Vivien Leigh performance, it’s Scarlett O’Hara in the early scenes of Gone With the Wind. She’s impetuous, beautiful, smarter than many give her credit for, slow to listen, quick to talk, adept at using her sexuality to her own ends.

As for the world beyond the arts, Cyrus is leery. “The news kind of gives me a little bit of anxiety,” she tells me. “So I’m less political.”

She’s loath even to join in the national conversation about the legalization of marijuana, though pot has become a centerpiece of her image. “I love weed,” she tells me. “I just love getting stoned.” But she’s less interested in policy than in quality control. “I just want it to be back to where it’s, like, organic, good weed.”

Trying to engage her in other current events, I come up empty-handed. When she tells me that at Thanksgiving with the Cyrus clan her brothers “literally got in a fight over, like, aliens,” I ask, “Immigration?”

“Yes. So he’s just—”

“Where did the family land on that?” I ask.

“Well, my older brother is obsessed with all those documentaries that have been banned. My brother’s convinced it’s the government not wanting us to know about aliens because the world would just, like, freak out—”

“Oh,” I say, realizing there’s been a misunderstanding. “Literal aliens.”

“—and so my younger brother is like, ‘That’s completely bogus.’ ”

“Tell your brother I worked for the government and saw no aliens.”

“I’m not so sure,” she says, telling me she once saw suspicious lights in the sky in the Bahamas. “My dad told me it was a satellite. But the way it zipped off was really weird.”

“I think it was a satellite,” I offer.

Despite her professed lack of interest in politics, Cyrus tells me she wants to have an impact onsomething. She runs through ideas in earnest. Animal welfare (“Like, all my dogs have been rescued and are amazing”), bullying (“I really want people not to be scared”), water purification (“I think water’s, like, a really important thing”), the environment (“I’m so scared the sky’s not going to be blue anymore. It’s going to be black from all the shit”). If there’s one thing Cyrus has, it’s time to figure out what she stands for.

I shut off my recorder and head for the heavy green front door. Its solid wood is sectioned off by four narrow panes of glass, now fogged, obscuring the outside world. I peer out and then open it. As I step into the chilly Los Angeles night, Cyrus calls after me. We had talked about favorite books, and now she asks me for a reading list. “Nothing too heavy,” she adds quickly. “Nothing boring.”