Miley Cyrus

Miley Cyrus: Nine Lives of a Disney Escapee

She was thirteen and auditioning for the best friend. Disney told her she was too small and too young. They cast her as the lead anyway, on the strength of what the network described as her singing and her goofy acting — and within three years she was the youngest artist in history with four number-one albums on the Billboard 200. The hard part was everything after: getting out of the costume without the career going with it.

Franklin, Tennessee

Destiny Hope Cyrus was born on November 23, 1992, in Franklin, Tennessee, to the country singer Billy Ray Cyrus and Leticia "Tish" Cyrus, who had married in secret the previous December over the objections of his record label. Her parents called her "Smiley" because she grinned as an infant; it shortened to Miley. She was born with supraventricular tachycardia, an arrhythmia. The house was crowded with future performers — Trace of Metro Station, Brandi, Braison, and Noah — and Dolly Parton stood as her godmother.

She was raised Southern Baptist and wore a purity ring. At eight, watching *Mamma Mia!* in Toronto, she turned to her father: "This is what I want to do, daddy. I want to be an actress." Formal schooling was Heritage Elementary in Tennessee, then Options for Youth charter schools in Los Angeles and a private tutor working between takes on a soundstage.

Both Worlds

*Hannah Montana* premiered in March 2006 to the largest audience any Disney Channel program had drawn. The premise — ordinary girl, secret pop star — turned out to be a business model. Cyrus became the first act in the Walt Disney Company's history to hold simultaneous deals across television, film, consumer products and music. The soundtrack topped the Billboard 200 and sold three million copies; *Hannah Montana 2: Meet Miley Cyrus* sold three million more.

The Best of Both Worlds Tour in 2007–08 produced demand Ticketmaster compared to the Beatles and Elvis. The 3-D concert film beat every projection. "The Climb," from the 2009 movie, crossed into adult radio; "Party in the U.S.A." became one of the best-selling singles of her life. She was, at sixteen, the most efficiently monetized teenager in America.

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The Exit Wounds

The dismantling was public and ugly. In April 2008 hackers took photographs from her Gmail. Annie Leibovitz shot her for *Vanity Fair* in a bed sheet; the *New York Times* had to publish a clarification that she was not topless. In December 2010 a video circulated of an eighteen-year-old Cyrus smoking salvia from a bong. *Can't Be Tamed*, that year, was her first studio album not to reach number one, and the controversy over its lyrics outran the sales. On film, *The Last Song* did business and took a critical beating.

She cut her hair into a blonde pixie and said she had never felt more herself in her life. In 2013 she hired Larry Rudolph — Britney Spears's manager — and signed with RCA.

Bangerz and the Foam Finger

The reinvention was engineered with Pharrell Williams and Mike Will Made It, and it worked commercially before anyone decided how they felt about it. "We Can't Stop" set a Vevo record for views in a day. Then, on August 25, 2013, came the MTV Video Music Awards: the routine with Robin Thicke and the foam finger, called disturbing and cringe-worthy by critics who had not previously agreed on anything. Tom Breihan of Stereogum later wrote that it put her at the centre of the cultural conversation in a way she had never managed before.

"Wrecking Ball" was released the same day. The Terry Richardson video drew nineteen million views in twenty-four hours; Sinéad O'Connor published an open letter accusing the industry of pimping her. It became her first Hot 100 number one and stayed three weeks. *Bangerz* entered at number one with 270,000 copies, and MTV named her Artist of the Year.

The Long Middle

What followed was a decade of deliberate un-commercialism. *Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz* (2015) was given away free — psychedelic, sprawling, unbothered. She coached two seasons of *The Voice*, the youngest coach the format had used, and played a radical for Woody Allen in *Crisis in Six Scenes*. *Younger Now* (2017) came and went: one top-ten single in "Malibu," then no further singles and no tour.

*Plastic Hearts* (2020), recorded after her separation from Liam Hemsworth, went in the other direction — rock, with covers of Blondie and the Cranberries and a Dua Lipa duet — and set a record for the most US top-five albums by a woman this century. She founded the Happy Hippie Foundation in 2014 for LGBTQ youth and youth homelessness, and has kept it running since.

Flowers

In January 2023, on Columbia, she released "Flowers." It entered the Hot 100 at number one — her second chart-topper, ten years after the first — and led charts in thirty-seven countries. On Spotify it became the fastest song ever to a hundred million plays, then to a billion. It spent fifty-seven weeks atop Billboard's Adult Contemporary chart, the longest run any song has managed on any Billboard airplay chart. At the 2024 Grammys it won Record of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance, her first wins after eighteen years in public. A third followed for "II Most Wanted" with Beyoncé. *Something Beautiful* (2025), a progressive-pop record she also turned into a musical film premiered at Tribeca, drew the best reviews of her career: Rob Sheffield called it Cyrus "aiming higher than ever," NME's Nick Levine "a fully realized artistic statement."

Why Miley Is Called a Genius

The critical record does not use the word, and the honest version of the claim is about an instrument and a nerve rather than an intellect. Breihan's description of the voice — "raw and husky and communicative" — and his comparison to Pat Benatar identify the actual asset: an unusually large, grainy, immediately identifiable rock instrument attached to a pop machine. Emily Swingle of *Clash* put it as versatility, a voice that "seamlessly fits whatever genre she chooses to tackle," and the catalogue bears that out across country, hip-hop, psychedelia and glam rock.

The subtler skill is interpretive. Cyrus did not write "Wrecking Ball" — MoZella, Stephan Moccio and Sacha Skarbek did, with Dr. Luke and Cirkut producing — and Breihan's point is that she owns it anyway. That is a specific craft: taking authored material and making the listener believe it is testimony.

Against all this: the Disney apparatus gave her a launch almost nobody gets, *Can't Be Tamed* and *Younger Now* underperformed on their own terms, the *Bangerz* reinvention drew sustained and reasonable charges of borrowing Black musical culture as costume, and her single most successful record is not her own composition. She is a superb singer and a fearless self-reinventor with a genuine ear for collaborators. Genius is the wrong word; durability under maximum scrutiny is the right one.

Legacy

Three Grammys, a Brit, five Billboard Music Awards, eight Guinness World Records, a Walk of Fame star, and — with a straight face — the title of Disney Legend for the show she spent a decade escaping. Billboard now ranks her among the greatest pop stars of the century. The more interesting record is structural: she is the rare child performer who neither collapsed nor calcified, and who kept the audience through every version of herself she tried on.