Miley Cyrus has spent a lot of time trying to shed her Disney past, but she has never seemed younger than she did hosting the VMAs on Sunday night.
In interviews, Cyrus has come across as not insightful, exactly, but interesting — someone trying to figure out her art and her sexuality. (Her unfailingly terrible handling of race is another matter.) But all of that was lost at the VMAs. There is nothing so tame and boring as someone hungrily shoving their edginess in our faces, and Cyrus, with her loud, repeated mentions of her drug use, her ever-wispier costumes, and her repeated, clanking use of the word “mammy,” seemed desperate to shock. How MTV’s target audience of 16-year-olds responded to it is not something I can hope to know, but it wasn’t a good look.
Really, though, Cyrus’ flailing was in keeping with the entire night. The whole affair had never felt so pre-packaged, so much like an executive’s idea of what a scandalous evening should look like. (Tellingly, nearly every portion of the program appeared to have been auctioned off to one advertiser or another; nary a second was allowed to elapse without a corporate shoutout.)