Revisiting Miley Cyrus’ Infamous 2013 MTV VMAs Performance: How She Really Feels About It
Miley Cyrus’ performance alongside Robin Thicke at the 2013 MTV Video
Miley Cyrus‘ performance alongside Robin Thicke at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards was legendary, though not for the best of reasons. It was a moment that marked a huge transition in Cyrus’ career. It’s the moment she separated herself from Hannah Montana forever. But how does she feel about it now?
It’s hard to look back to 2013 and remember a time when Cyrus’ had a very different reputation. She was 20 years old and to most of her fans, she was still the sweet and innocent star of Hannah Montana. It’s a far cry from the Cyrus of today. Whether you love her or hate her, very few don’t have some sort of opinion about the singer. “Sweet and innocent” isn’t quite how anyone describes her nowadays.
It was that performance that changed everything for Miley Cyrus and her fans. Viewers called the scintillating performance “over-sexualized” while others deemed it downright dirty. Cyrus had made a clean break from child star to very adult superstar. In the wake of the controversy that followed, Cyrus defended her performance. “I wasn’t trying to be sexy,” she told Rolling Stone a month after the VMAs. “If I was trying to be sexy, I could have been sexy. I can dance a lot better than I was dancing.”
It wasn’t just her on-stage persona she was radically changing. Behind the scenes, Cyrus had fired her manager and hired Britney Spears’ manager. She also signed with a new record company. Her next album, Bangerz, was a total reinvention, music-wise. Her plan was clear and no one can question that it worked, but is she ashamed of it now? She’s addressed the issue a few times in the past couple of years.
Miley Cyrus doesn’t regret the performance, at all, but she has re-evaluated what it meant. In 2017, she told Harper’s Bazaar, “In the beginning, it was kind of like saying, ‘[Screw] you. Girls should be able to have this freedom or whatever.’ But it got to a point where I did feel sexualized.” She also recognized how much of an impact she had on culture, as People reported in 2018. “It inspired me to use my platform for something much bigger,” she told the magazine. “If the world is going to focus on me and what I am doing, then what I am doing should be impactful and it should be great.”
The last few months have been a series of life-changing moments for Miley Cyrus. Over the summer, she split from her husband Liam Hemsworth. She had a whirlwind romance with Kaitlynn Carter. By this fall, she was in a relationship with her longtime friend, Cody Simpson. Is another professional change on the horizon as well?
