Twenty years as Miley's Stan taught me how to listen to music A very long, almost involuntary, musical education

Earlier this month, Miley Cyrus announced her tenth studio album to be released on September 18, Bass Persuades, an album that falls into the twentieth year of the career of the artist we all know, also thanks to the success achieved when she was a child. Since I was born in 1997, I belong to that generation that experienced the premiere of Disney Channel in the period before the complete transition to streaming and digital devices.

Miley Cyrus today, from Disney Channel to Bass Persuades

Like many kids at the time, having Miley Cyrus on screen was a constant part of my evenings. For about twenty years, therefore, I have been following Miley's every change firsthand and with her I have learned to notice changes in the way she wears clothes, how she combs her hair, how she looks and presents herself, but also how she listens to music. It is one of the collateral consequences of being a fan of someone practically from the beginning of their career: each new era comes with a waiting phase in which clues are collected, images are interpreted, references are recognized and predictions are made more or less based on what the upcoming album will be like.

The visual identity of Bass Persuades era and the differences with previous albums

The first clues about Bass Persuades arrived very quickly, a short distance from each other, starting from a very specific communication choice: it will be the first album that the artist releases simply like Miley, without Cyrus. The artistic universe created together with Mert Alas and Alastair McKimm seems to be already a long way from the visual richness of the previous Something Beautiful, released just over a year ago. Black or white skin, dark lights, moving bodies, something dirtier and sharper. Along with the announcement, just two weeks after the release of the album itself, the tracklist has already arrived and, studying it, I noticed that the second song — Different Religion — contains a featuring Model/Actress, an American rock-band that I had met a few years ago just following Miley closely. Realizing this fact, I began to think about how many of the artists I listen to today have come into my life passing, in one way or another, through the Miley Cyrus filter. Twenty years ago I was nine years old and I made the decision to make Miley my idol. Without realizing it, this decision subsequently introduced me to a musical education of which, now, I am extremely proud.

Hannah Montana and the introduction to the history of music

Perhaps few will know that the writers of Hannah Montana inserted constant musical references into the screenplay of the series, starting with the titles (in English) of the episodes. Among my favorites are: Money for Nothing, Guilt for Free (reference to Dire Straits); Don't Go Breaking My Tooth (to Elton John); Jake... Another Little Piece of My Heart (Janis Joplin); Welcome to the Bungle (Guns N' Roses); and of course the iconic Good Golly, Miss Dolly and I Will Always Loathe You, through which we children were introduced to Aunt Dolly (Parton), whom I believe few Italian children knew at era. I was one of those very pretentious girls who bragged about watching the episodes in English to be able to hear Miley's real voice and, although those references went almost completely unnoticed by my eyes, I realized years later that a part of the musical culture that I thought I had acquired in an orderly and conscious way had come to me much earlier, on my TV.

Thanks to the series, I then started following Miley the person, not the character, especially in her first albums, Meet Miley Cyrus, Breakout and Can't Be Tamed. With them came the first live shows (unfortunately always followed by the couch), in which 16-year-old Miley alternated her songs with those of her own idols, introducing us, for example, to Joan Jett with I Love Rock 'n Roll and Bad Reputation, to Cyndi Lauper with Girls Just Want to Have Fun, or even to Poison, with Every Rose Has Its Thorn.

The Backyard Sessions by Miley Cyrus

In 2012, however, a definitive moment arrived in the memory of every fan, namely the first edition of the famous Backyard Sessions, a series launched on her YouTube channel where Miley and the band recorded songs outdoors, from Miley's own backyard. With this first edition come the covers of Lilac Wine (Jeff Buckley), Look What They've Done to My Song (Melanie Safka) and finally of Jolene (Dolly Parton), a song that Miley can now make extremely her own and that makes it known to a wider and more mature audience, which manages to overcome the Disney period from which she, now in her twenties, was trying to detach herself. I remember the moment when I heard the cover of Jolene for the first time, feeling a sense of pride in being a fan of such a deep and, in my mind, respected artist. At the same time, however, in that year I myself was going through a phase of profound change and personal definition: I was fifteen and I had made the conscious decision that indie rock would be “my genre” for adolescence.

Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz

The following year, in 2015, I followed from the hotel room to a summer retreat with my fencing buddies the VMAs that Miley hosted, and which ended with the announcement of the album Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz produced together with the Flaming Lips. I remember running home at the end of the retreat and looking for the album online — it had been released for free on SoundCloud — and starting to read the story of the Lips until I fell in love with them.

At this point Miley is at the peak of her creative expression, and she never fails to alternate her songs with new covers and tributes, including live and additional Backyard Sessions, also giving me my favorite cover of all time, 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover by Paul Simon. Since 2019, Nine Inch Nails have arrived thanks to her performance in Black Mirror, but also the Hole, Mazzy Star, The Cardigans, Cocteau Twins, Pixies, Chris Cornell's Temple of the Dog, all names that growing up I didn't necessarily discover thanks to her, but that with her I reviewed and understood more. In 2021, his album Plastic Hearts (also my favorite actually) includes covers of Heart of Glass by Blondie and Zombie by The Cranberries, which become among his most clicked and acclaimed performances by the general public. For those interested, there is a playlist (All of Miley's Covers on Spotify) that collects all the songs that Miley has performed over the years. In case you're missing a few ideas.

Does Miley really change every era?

It's a common narrative to compare Miley to a chameleon, an artist who loves to change her skin every era, never knowing what to expect from her. However, as a fan, I almost always had the opposite feeling, not because each album is predictable (on the contrary), but because if you follow everything that happens between one record and another, the transformations that oscillate between R&B, psychedelic rock, pop, country, glam, pop rock, dance music seem much less sudden. Miley, in fact, lives and communicates music all the time. He does it not only with covers or collaborations, but also in interviews, in posts on social networks, in the t-shirts he wears.

Bass Persuades is here, also live!

A hope that remains constant in every era, despite the changes, is that Miley will announce the possibility of seeing her in concert, which I have been waiting for since I started following her. So far, only two concerts have been announced in Los Angeles, on October 16 and 18 at the historic Hollywood Bowl, dates that have sold out in a few minutes with more than 3 million total people (between two pre-sales and general sales) in the Ticketmaster queue. Many people immediately started studying flight and hotel combinations to reach LA in those days, since a Miley concert seems to be an increasingly rare event in recent years (her last world tour dates back to 2014 and her last festival tour to 2022, only in America). Since then he has lost his passion for performing in front of large numbers of people).

Unfortunately, I haven't even tried to access the sale, also because right between those two dates I'll be in Bologna to see the Strokes. This coincidence of days made me remember having consciously listened to them for the first time in 2011, when they were announced as musical guests of an episode of Saturday Night Live hosted by Miley. Of course, I still hope for some more accessible future European date, but I like to think that Miley would rather think of me jumping to a Strokes concert than spending my savings to be able to fight for a very rare piece of her live. The day I see her in concert, however, I will finally be able to thank her for these twenty years of education and musical culture.