From the start of Miley Cyrus’s “Bangerz” show at the Barclays Center, on Saturday night (when she arrived onstage by sliding down a giant replica of her omnipresent tongue), to the finish (when she mimed fellatio on someone dressed as Abraham Lincoln, during the “Party in the U.S.A.” finale, while the Statue of Liberty, crowned with a marijuana leaf, looked on benignly), common decency was earnestly and cheerfully assaulted at every turn. The net effect was that of a two-hour-long naughty nursery rhyme. Sky Ferreira—who opened for Miley, along with Icona Pop—seemed far more capable of doing something truly dangerous. The only really transgressive part of the show was that by being so insistently gross—grabbing her crotch constantly, spread-eagling on the hood of a car, and twerking with a steatopygic midget—Miley seems determined to avoid seeming remotely sexy. That’s one way to bridge the perilous gorge that lies between child and adult stardom.
In any case, her teen-age fans, with their hair bunched in twin Bambi hair horns (they’re called bangerz—duh) were too busy snapping selfies to be shocked (popping one shoulder forward for that skinny-arm look). As for the parental chaperones (my fifteen-year-old son, mortified at the prospect of watching Miley’s lewd antics beside his father, refused to go, so my twenty-three-year-old niece agreed to beard me), at least one was bedevilled by the question of whether Miley herself, or the middle-aged men who guide her career, was responsible for these provocations. The night before, at Roseland, Lady Gaga was fairly foulmouthed; a dad, with his six-year-old on his shoulders, answered his mystified daughter’s question about the meaning of a particularly filthy remark by saying, “It’s French, sweetheart.” But no one doubts that Gaga is the author of her own outrages. She is as close as it gets to a real artist in today’s pop world, and if the distance between her and her cohort is so great that she has to identify with Marina Abramović, rather than with any of her contemporaries in pop, that’s between her and her fans. (The anemic sales of “Artpop” may be an indication of how her fans feel about her high-art aspirations.)
Inane indecencies aside, Cyrus’s show is artfully staged by Diane Martel, who is the late Joe Papp’s niece. She seamlessly blends hip-hop, Surrealism, and “Sesame Street”—twerkers mingle with dancers in colorful animal costumes, and an enormous orange bird manipulated by two puppeteers. Cyrus presides over it all like a veteran Broadway trouper, with Bob Fosse-style dance moves and Carol Channing’s stage presence.
But the real eyeopener in the “Bangerz” show is just how well Cyrus can sing. Especially in the lower register, her voice is a clear and powerful instrument (unaided by a backing vocal track) that easily filled the sold-out arena. There were a few signs of her power early in the show, notably in the song “FU,” but vocally she realized a high point during the acoustic portion of the evening, during which she sang covers from the floor. After some hillbilly crooning to Dylan’s “You’re Going to Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” she did her terrific version of “Summertime Sadness,” which even the unicorn head she wore at the end couldn’t diminish, followed by an even better take on Coldplay’s “The Scientist,” which was dedicated to her dog, Floyd, who, as the whole world knows by now, died last week. This part of the show ended with her thigh-slapping “Jolene,” which would have pleased Miley’s godmother, Dolly Parton, even if the long-sleeved metallic pantsuit she performed it in might not have.
There was a lot of lamentation for her dog, and it was where the matter of the “real” Miley versus her manufactured stage presence became hardest to parse. On one level, here was a twenty-one-year-old woman who had just lost the one creature on earth she was certain was not trying to cash in on her talent. The poignancy of her isolation was only underscored when, after announcing the canine’s demise, she said to the audience, “I could not be more thankful for better friends—I don’t think I realized how much you loved me until now.” But on another level, the whole thing seemed like a Twitter ploy.
After ninety minutes of energetic belting and hoofing, Cyrus spied her chariot, in the form of a giant saddled hot dog, awaiting her, and, with a couple of lame wiener jokes, she departed the stage—her rhinestone cowgirl boots kicking her steed’s sleek flanks. She returned to perform knockout versions of her two best songs, “We Can’t Stop” and “Wrecking Ball,” and then, after a few last outrages in the show’s finale, she was gone. All that was left was the memory of Miley’s smile, which mercifully blotted out her adventure with Honest Abe.
Photograph: Jamie McCarthy/Getty