We’ve known so many iterations of Miley Cyrus. Starting from her first acting role in Big Fish to her breakout as Hannah Montana (even though it doesn’t take much effort to break out when Dolly is your godmother and Billy Ray is your dad). Maybe that’s part of why she’s been called “the Madonna of her generation.” And one thing Miley still had yet to do that Madonna has many times over is release a live album. But now, she’s finally done it in the form of Attention: Miley Live.
Kicking off with the eponymous track, formerly unreleased until Miley debuted it during the intro to her performance at the Super Bowl Music Fest (a.k.a. where this audio is culled from), it serves as the perfect “energy” to establish the tone of such a raucous live album. Demanding, “Attention! I need attention” (in a manner that reminds one of Madonna screaming, “What do you mean it’s not in the computer?”), Miley proves why she’s such a Veruca Salt-esque millennial icon before leading into the song of 2013’s Bangerz, “We Can’t Stop” (which, lest anyone forgets, Rihanna chose to turn down as a single for herself). But, not wanting anyone to forget that she’s the cover queen of an era, she segues into an unlikely rendition of The Pixies’ classic, “Where Is My Mind?,” at the two-minute, forty-two-second mark. This has been a part of her live set list since the summer of 2021 (along with most of the rest of the songs performed), during which she headlined numerous festivals including Lollapalooza, BottleRock, Summerfest and Austin City Limits Music Festival. And yes, though some might consider it sacrilege, Miley’s natural vocal intonation does suit “Where Is My Mind?” quite well. Certainly better than it does for her still-overrated cover of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” which she includes after a performance of “Plastic Hearts” (from the 2020 album of the same name).
Being that Miley’s honorary hometown is Los Angeles, having moved there full-time for her career around the age of eleven, it’s only right that the live show should be recorded from what is now the “Crypto.com” Arena (formerly Staples Center). Right in the heart of Downtown LA. With certain stills from the show seemingly curated to make her look like Debbie Harry, Miley continues to channel, more than anything, Joan Jett (with whom she collaborated on “Bad Karma,” and performed with at last year’s Super Bowl #TikTok Tailgate—which, no, isn’t exactly “rock n’ roll”).
That’s the vibe she seems to want to imbue “4×4” and “(SMS) Bangerz” with, both of which feature vocals from 00s heavyweights Nelly and Britney Spears, respectively. As for the latter’s vocal presence, we all know Miley has been just as intently watching the outcome of the #FreeBritney movement as the rest of us. With “(SMS) Bangerz” possessing a certain similarity to the interpolation of “Freakshow” (specifically, when Britney says, “Me and my girls ‘bout to get it on/Grab us a couple boys to go”), “4×4” instead has an introductory callout to the same kind of drum rhythm used in the live version of Madonna’s “Holiday” during the Drowned World Tour. With all these subtle nods to the female royalty of rock and pop, Miley sees fit to return to her own unique brand with “Dooo It!” As a song from her “bizarre” (another word for “ahead of its time”) Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz era, it was once deemed “experimental” by Miley standards. Unabashedly opening with, “Yeah I smoke pot/Yeah I love peace/But I don’t give a fuck/I ain’t no hippie,” there’s still no match for the performance of the song that Miley gave at the 2015 VMAs, complete with a trippy wardrobe and a coterie of Drag Race drag queens to accompany her in the choreo.
Perhaps knowing that performance is too legendary to compete with is part of why Miley leads into “23” rather quickly, a song that belongs to Mike Will Made It, and also originally featuring Wiz Khalifa and Juicy J. After all, this song was released in ’13, during the peak of Miley’s Black culture appropriation heyday. Which is why it’s somewhat icky to hear her chant “Chains on my feet” (said like, “Bands make her dance”).
The bright spot at the end of the performance is Miley taking some time to give a little speech to the audience. She jokes, “Thank you to anyone who’s here to see Green Day and showed up a little bit early to see what the fuck I’m doing. Like you, I have no idea. But, uh, if you don’t know me, if you don’t know my music—hey, I like your shirt. I’ll tell you that one thing you probably do know is, I think people when they think about me, they think of someone who, even though that’s been a million different things, likes to be honest about where I am in every moment of my life.” It’s within the context of this speech that Miley also starts to remind one, yet again, of Madonna, who has founded her own career on blunt and brutal honesty in her artistic messaging. Miley continued, “Over the last fifteen-plus years, [I’ve] been a lot of different things. A lotta different identities. And all of those identities that I was trying on and seeing if they fit me, like the skin that I’m in right now, you all stood beside me and grew with me and watched me evolve. And I hope that we get to do that over and over and over again.” In this moment, too, another flash of Madonna comes when she tells her backup singers and dancers during The Girlie Show, “Sometimes you just gotta tell the world how you feel, you know what I’m sayin’? Even when they don’t wanna hear about it. Yeah, sometimes you gotta tell ’em over and over and over.”
Miley goes on to “wax poetic” about the pandemic, remarking, “One thing that I do know is that even though it scares the shit out of me sometimes, this is what I wanna do for the rest of my life.” As the first live album of the post-COVID age, when tours are just vaguely getting started again more fully than they were in the summer of ’21, Miley sees fit to commemorate the moment with her take on the strange situation: “And, over the last two years, having that disconnection, and not being able to experience this moment that we’re all having right now, something that used to feel just like breathing just like, something that felt like it would happen whether I wanted it to or not. I would just somehow end up in these rooms full of twenty thousand people, and they would be singin’ along to my songs and it was just something that happened. And when that came to a screeching halt just like everybody else’s life over the last two years, this is feeling new to me again. Which is fucking exciting, but it’s also terrifying. Something that should feel so natural just doesn’t anymore and I just wanted to be honest about standing up here right now, it doesn’t feel the same as if you woulda come to see me three or four years ago. I’m just finding my feet up on this platform again. And I know that all of us are going through that same experience. We’re just trying to integrate back into a reality. A reality that was moving so fast, so naturally, and now something that should be just like breathing is suddenly difficult and anxiety-inducing and scary.” She then makes the fatal celebrity error of getting a bit Madonna in the bathtub with rose petals as she talks about COVID being the great equalizer, pulling the “we’re in this together” line that launched a thousand memes back in 2020 when celebrities tried to put themselves on the plebes’ level.
Nonetheless, Miley assures, “And I just want you to know that even though I’m up here in front of all of you, I’m just as scared of—as everybody else. About where the world is going, what the future holds. But the good news is: we’re not alone. Even when we were disconnected, we are not alone. We’re all in this together. And so I just wanted to be honest about where I’m at. And when I look out here and see some Green Day t-shirts and sprinkled in some Miley shirts, and I see these shirts all around the arena from all different eras, I can tell how long you all have been with me. I saw a shirt down here, I think I’m fuckin’ thirteen years old on your shirt, I’m twenty-two years old on your shirt, that’s the mullet era… And I wanna thank you guys for your loyalty.” Other t-shirt commentary includes, “Yeah so I’m into men with pussies,” noted at one point of the guys who wear “Miley Made Me Gay” tees to her shows.
With all of this said, her next song is, appropriately, “Never Be Me”—an anthem, essentially, for never compromising one’s self, no matter how much pressure there is to do so (particularly from a Liam Hemsworth type). As one of the best (and few) ballad offerings on Plastic Hearts, it gives the album another moment to shine in the show. Perhaps not wanting to outshine too much the other women in rock she admires, Miley then veers back quickly to her cover gambit with “Maybe,” a classic from Janis Joplin. Miley’s twanging, wailing style is well-suited to the caterwauling signature of Joplin, whose spirit seems to enter the body of Miley during this particular rendition.
Jolting us back to Miley again, Cyrus then serves a major throwback single via “7 Things” from her sophomore record, Breakout. While Taylor might have been inspired to write a number of songs (e.g. “Forever and Always,” “Better Than Revenge” and Mr. Perfectly Fine”) about Joe Jonas, Miley was focused on a different Jonas brother in the same era: Nick. The Jonas bro who serves as inspiration for this decidedly Lindsay Lohan-esque track. One that Miley manages to make come across as something that could just as easily have been plucked from the Plastic Hearts record.
Jarring us with a change of sonic course again, Miley delivers a cover of Nancy Sinatra’s “Bang Bang,” which is actually something one would have expected Lana Del Rey to record by now (not just because it’s in her sonic wheelhouse, but because she was once being branded as a “gangster Nancy Sinatra”). This abruptly leads into “See You Again,” the hyper-sexual single (giving Britney a run for her money) that Miley released when she was fourteen years old to promote her debut album, Meet Miley Cyrus. The addition of this track makes for a truly eclectic mix of singles that showcase the versatility throughout her career, which might not even really exist without Dolly Parton. Ergo, the presence of “Jolene,” which Miley is no stranger to covering at this juncture, having already immortalized it in a 2012 edition of her Backyard Sessions. And while some would see the wide array of songs she’s chosen for the set list as a symbol of the length of time she’s been in this business, Miley instead prefers the audience to interpret the diversity of the songs as follows: “I hope this show is a representation of: you never need to choose who you want to be and you don’t need to fit into any boundaries or into any boxes. You can be anything and everything that you’ve ever wanted to be. All at the same time. Everything that contradicts itself can coexist in harmony and I believe that.” A very Sagittarian sentiment.
Along with the ones in “High,” opening with the lyrics, “Sometimes I get a little too hurt/Got my mind going places it ain’t wanna go/Sometimes I get a little too low/And I can’t see myself through the fire and smoke.” Luckily, Miley has a legion of fans to see her through that fire and smoke, and maybe these are the people she’s really talking about on “You”—a song first previously only performed on her New Year’s Eve special (the one with that now-famous wardrobe malfunction… and Pete Davidson). It’s perhaps also a song that the show of the same name ought to consider making its new theme song.
The Madonna parallels continue to abound as the show begins to wind down. And yes, back in June of ’21, Miley performed a concert special/variety show called Stand By You (in Nashville, for added Dolly-inspired cachet), in honor of Pride Month. So what better time for her to debut a medley of Madonna covers that included “Music,” “Express Yourself” and “Like A Prayer”? The latter of which she chose to include in the set list for this particular live album. Delivering impassioned vocals that country-ify the iconic track, Miley does her best to remain faithful to the original version, complete with choir-y inspired backup vocals. She then interpolates instrumentals from “Express Yourself” toward the end, for added Like A Prayer-era flair.
Keeping the theme of homage going, Miley then leads into “Edge of Midnight (Midnight Sky Remix),” a song that acknowledges what a major influence Stevie Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen” was on “Midnight Sky,” the first single from Plastic Hearts.
Despite her occasional aversions to the Hannah Montana era, Miley still sees the value in including a major single like “The Climb” into her live show to appease fans. Originally from 2009’s Hannah Montana: The Movie, something about its cheeseball nature harkens back to Britney’s “I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman.” A variation on the old platitude, “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey,” Miley croons, “There’s always gonna be another mountain/I’m always gonna wanna make it move/Always gonna be an uphill battle/Sometimes I’m gonna have to lose/Ain’t about how fast I get there/Ain’t about what’s waiting on the other side…” And at one moment, the audience responds to her with the return of the lyrics, “It’s the climb.” Oh Miley, would that that were truly the case. Like Madonna saying, “If it’s bitter at the start, then it’s sweeter in the end” on “Get Together.”
Keeping it truly classic, Miley wouldn’t dare conclude a live show without yet another Liam-inspired single, “Wrecking Ball.” The 2013 hit that launched a thousand-plus memes when such a thing was still rather germinal. At just under the two-minute mark, Miley ties in “Nothing Compares 2 U” into the thematic nature of “Wrecking Ball,” both singles about yearning for someone who will no longer make themselves available to you. While Sinéad O’Connor made Prince’s original version all her own, Miley might be coming up the rear with her earnest version, especially intermixed with the highly emotional lyrics of “Wrecking Ball.”
Still one for crowd-pleasing even if a self-proclaimed rebel, Miley chooses to conclude the show with “Party in the U.S.A.,” though its taint grows with each passing year from the stench of Dr. Luke’s mark on it (which is also present on “Wrecking Ball”). Not to mention the fact that America is, well, a sham… and all revelry trying to mask that is increasingly futile. But even so, Americans try their best to feel at home in this nation, thanks to a banger like this one. Miley even chose to keep in her revamped line, “Free Britney! Let me hear you say Free Britney!” despite the fact that Britney is now, indeed, free. But there’s always the fear that someone could try to oppress her (and women in general) again, so respect to Miley for keeping the proclamation in.
And respect to her for this entire live album, released in the wake of a series of huge festival performances in South America (in countries that included Argentina, Colombia, Brazil and Chile) that led to her getting Covid. But, as Miley stated of the plight, “Definitely worth it.” The question is (especially after Astroworld): will audiences still be able to say the same of concert-going anymore?
