Before Post Malone, there was Miley Cyrus
Revisiting Miley's messy Bangerz era and our understanding of cultural appropriation.
Recently, Post Malone revealed he’s shed some white boy tears over the criticism he’s faced from fans. He said in an interview that people accusing him — credibly, to a textbook degree — of being a “culture vulture” drove him to drink because it made him sad. Lord, please grant me the delusional confidence of a white man, to say this in an interview and believe it to be an earnest revelation and not a pitiful statement lacking self-awareness. Post used Black culture for shock, to gain attention as an easy bid to fame, then pivoted to whiteness as soon as he’d acquired notoriety. As Eminem once said, “I am the worst thing since Elvis Presley / To do Black music so selfishly / And use it to get myself wealthy.”1
Years before “White Iverson” donned his braids, there was a white woman who imitated bantu knots and gyrated on stages with Black dancers. She’s far removed from it now, but the North remembers what Miley Cyrus was doing a decade ago.
In 2013, desperate to further cement herself as a Grown Woman after her album Can’t Be Tamed, Miley released Bangerz, a hybrid album of pop, hip hop, and ballads. The lead single was “We Can’t Stop,” produced (like many other songs on the album) by hip hop producer Mike Will Made It. The accompanying video saw a 20-year-old Miley sporting grillz, writhing in skintight white pants, and doing what people would begin to call “twerking.” The quotations evoked because what Miss Miley was doing back then was…..something! Not twerking tho! Nevertheless, the word “twerk” was added to the dictionary in 2013 because of the term’s association with Miley, especially after her infamous VMAs performance.
I must admit my soft affinity for the music and aesthetics of this era; this album came out during my sophomore year of college, and was the soundtrack to many a college party. Miley is also only a year older than me, so I can look back at the video for “We Can’t Stop” and viscerally understand the chaotic party energy at the core of it. It was juvenile in an early 20s way, absurd and vulgar for the sake of newfound freedom.
With her new persona, 2013 Miley (and the following year, Iggy Azalea and Macklemore) was the guinea pig for a new term hitting the sociological lexicon: cultural appropriation. This term could be defined as the theft of a culture that is not your own and creating a persona that is an approximation of what you believe that culture to be. Obviously, as an outsider of the stolen culture, the person appropriating does not do the origin culture justice, and typically creates a flat, caricatured version of it.
This was the essence of the Bangerz era — Miley’s goal was to assert herself as edgy, dangerous even, and she used Black culture to reach this goal. The rap features on the album are insane — she nabbed Nelly, Ludacris, Future, and Big Sean! Past, present, and future of rap cosigns! For better or worse, her pivot succeeded. The public embraced her as the trainwreck “bad girl,” America’s favorite teen turned weed-smoking, ass-shaking twentysomething. She positioned herself next to the Wiz Khalifas of the world, persistently made the grrr face to show off the bling in her mouth, and used Black women and their asses as props to “legitimize” her deviant sexuality.
Looking at clips and photos from this time are — I have to say it — cringe, because you could tell Miley was being such a try-hard. She was so over-the-top and aggressive about her new persona that it was immediately grating. It’s no wonder she spurred the cultural appropriation conversation. The music, however, I have more grace for. If you ignore the media circus Miley created around the album, the music is fine! It is a perfectly sound pop album that reflected the growing trap-tinged pop sound of the 2010s. My favorites include “We Can’t Stop” of course, “FU,” “SMS (Bangerz),” and the iconic “Wrecking Ball.” The strength of the album’s best songs is what makes this time in Miley’s career somewhat forgivable.
Once the shock value of her appropriation wore off, Miley followed the formula we’ve become all too familiar with — she dumped Black culture and went back to her “roots,” i.e. whiteness. Who says you can’t go back from Black? Certainly not white musicians! She was quoted in 2017 as saying about rap, “I can’t listen to that anymore. That’s what pushed me out of the hip-hop scene a little. It was too much ‘Lamborghini, got my Rolex, got a girl on my c—.” Artists like Post Malone and Billie Eillish have also tried to distance themselves from the hip hop they very clearly took inspiration from to get their careers of the ground, following in Miley’s footsteps.
But, I’ve yet to see any former culture vultures take any degree of accountability for the space they occupied in Black culture like Miley has. Two years after the aforementioned comments, she responded on her personal YouTube account to a Black female creator who called her out for the “racially insensitive” criticism. She stated, “I want to start with saying I am sorry. I own the fact that saying … “this pushed me out of the hip hop scene a little” was insensitive as it is a privilege to have the ability to dip in and out of ‘the scene.’”
Although this apology is strictly for the comments she made rather than appropriating to begin with, it at least shows an awareness as to why her, given her history, making those comments was disrespectful. Not only this, but this apology wasn’t sent through PR; commenting on a random YouTube video after time has passed comes across as way more genuine than a reactive Notes app apology. In the years since Bangerz, Miley has matured as an artist, finding her sound in the pop genre with touches of rock, folk, blues, and dance. She left the Black culture lane after Bangerz and has stayed in her own. She even joked as recently as a couple of weeks ago that she “malfunctioned” between the years of 2013 and 2016 during her Disney Legends acceptance speech.
On principle, I don’t think I’ll ever entirely forgive Miley for her antics in the mid-2010s. As she mentioned, it is a privilege to be able to simply decide when you want proximity to Blackness. It is tiring and predictable as a Black person to see white people drink from our well over and over as they make backhanded comments about the water quality. It is annoying that Miley is one in a long list of white celebs who saw Black culture as a “rebel” phase to move on from once maturity was gained. Yet, committing so hard in the other direction — and doing it very well! — while recognizing the hypocrisy of past actions takes away some of the sting.
Post Malone could take notes.
I have many thoughts about Eminem and the era of white rappers/cultural appropriators he inspired. OLD Eminem remains one of my favorite artists of all time, and yet I hate that his icon status ushered in an army of white pretenders in the rap genre after him. What his successors could not fake, and why none of them have dared to touch Em’s legacy IMO, is the self-awareness of their place in Black and white culture that Em displayed in this one bar. Having a foot in both worlds was an issue he grappled with often throughout his music, but one his successors seemed to lack the intellectual curiosity to ponder in their music.