[REVIEW] Who’s Afraid Of The Fame Monster?
reviewing Miley Cyrus’ ninth studio album, Something Beautiful, and how its meditations on fame compare against Lady Gaga’s seventh studio album, MAYHEM
This one is for Lyndsey McKenna!
Miley Cyrus has spent her whole life seeking attention. Far from insult, it’s a fact the 32-year-old singer-songwriter herself acknowledges. She most recently copped to this truth in an interview with The New York Times promoting her ninth studio album, Something Beautiful. In conversation with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Cyrus recounted the Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocession (EMDR) therapy session that helped her recover from stage fright-related anxiety she developed in the pandemic:
“What’s the feeling of anxiety that comes up for you when you’re performing?”
I never thought about it before but in my hypnotic place said, “I just want them to love me so bad.”
And [Cyrus’ therapist] said, “When was the first time you felt that way?”
And then suddenly the train stopped moving forward and it started going backwards. I saw myself in the womb of my biological grandmother ... and I heard my mom’s biological parents talking about putting her up for adoption. And I felt myself being inside of her womb, as my mother, hearing them, speaking about giving her away, and my mom thinking: “I just want them to want me. I want them to love me so bad.”
Cyrus’ well-documented need for external validation is a multi-faceted inheritance. Daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus — the one-hit wonder singer behind global crossover hit “Achy Breaky Heart” — and god-daughter of Dolly Parton — ‘nough said — Cyrus had an established benchmark of success before the public met her. As Hannah Montana, Cyrus shouldered the responsibility of teaching impressionable little girls around the world how to carve themselves into two. Her work culminated in a billion-dollar brand that earned Disney an exorbitant amount of cultural wealth, the likes of which they have yet since duplicated. The duality forced upon Cyrus mutated into defiance with 2010’s Can’t Be Tamed, a transitional album that broadcasted a desire to be watched. Suddenly, America’s role model started doing drugs and grinding on stripper poles. Despite the criticism piled on her, Cyrus became paved the way for every child star-turned-pop siren — from Ariana Grande to Sabrina Carpenter — tasked with growing up under the watchful eye of conservative America’s puritan echo chamber.
With 2013’s Bangerz, Cyrus didn’t burn the Disney bridge. She twerked on its remains in a skimpy bikini, bringing trap-pop into suburbia. Two years later, she dropped the acid-drenched fever dream Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, a Flaming Lips collaboration that jettisoned the demands of labels and critics in equal measure. In another two years, she dabbled in trad wife culture on a twangy Younger Now, half-heartedly chasing public clemency and love of then-husband Liam Hemsworth. 2019’s She Is Coming teased a trilogy that never materialized which left 2020’s Plastic Hearts to bear the weight of another version of Cyrus — this time opting for a leather-clad, Joan Jett glam-rocker vibe.
After a decade of missteps and backfires, Cyrus finally won back the masses with 2023’s “Flowers.” She could have coasted off the formulaic pop sound that ended her long-standing Grammys shutout. Instead, she proved why she deserved to win. On Something Beautiful, released May 30, Cyrus synthesizes divergent eras of her highly-publicized career in an intergalactic disco-rock odyssey. It’s high-level performance art from someone who has stopped being performative.
Concise, Cyrus spends nearly an hour making peace with her desire for attention by traipsing through time-tested sounds and using anonymous lovers as stand-ins for fame. On “Walk of Fame,” an alchemic standout track that takes cues from Giorgio Moroder, New Order, and Donna Summer in equal turns, guest star Brittany Howard wails over propulsive synths, “You’ll live forever!” Where other legacy artists typically indulge melancholic laments on fame as a parasitic double-edged sword, Cyrus celebrates an opportunity to constantly reinvent herself. She maps her career onto Something Beautiful as a reckless march through music history. Narratively, Cyrus boards an alien aircraft and, through the prism of its hyperbeam, is refracted across foreign lands in search of purpose. Her splintered being — the state of existing in parallel realities — essentially receives canonization on the percussive-heavy, Madonna-esque ballroom anthem “Every Girl You’ve Ever Loved.” On “Reborn,” a Euro-disco club hit, Cyrus embraces her love for fame and admits that she’s willing to do anything to keep that precious relationship alive.
Throughout the album, Cyrus offers reflections on the addictive nature of her need for fame. With “Easy Lover,” an homage to the ‘70s and Dusty Springfield built on a funky bassline familiar to the melody of Christina Aguilera’s “Come On Over Baby (All I Want Is You),” Cyrus details an emotional attachment to a toxic relationship. “You're a wildfire, and I'm in your path / I've decided I want to keep on dancing in the ashes / And so I call out, ‘Let it burn.’” Even with the promise of destruction, Cyrus doesn’t turn away from the flames. Over soaring strings, she promises, “Tie mе to horses and I still wouldn't leave you!” Cyrus’ addictive tendencies continue with title track, “Something Beautiful,” an intimate slow-burn with explosive guitar and shrieking saxophone. In the quiet, Cyrus gently expresses desires for love as aggression seeps through. Her cravings become inescapable. In the outro, she chants, smoldering and distant, “Eat my heart, break my soul / Take my parts, let me go.” Here, she completely surrenders to demands of partnership, equating falling in love with violently losing her sense of self. This mindset continues on the wailing “More to Love.” Vocally inspired by Faith Hill and Celine Dion, Cyrus belts, “When the ecstasy is far away / And I pray / That it's comin' 'round again / And you say it / But I wish it wasn't true.” This lover is fame: supportive in the early stages of her career, but wishy-washy as she tried to grow out of the shadow Hannah Montana casted.
The inconsistencies of her relationship with fame are highlighted in “Pretend You’re God,” a grungy homage to ‘90s drum swings and glittery synths. Cyrus inhabits the role of the fan, begging, “Hold me in your arms / Pretend that you're God / Recreate the stars for me, one by one / I'll give you what you want / Pretend that you're God all night long.” These lines aren’t unique offerings about the long-mythisized pedestal celebrities find themselves on. However, they do detail the displacement of support; the more fans rely on their parasocial relationships for mental and emotional fulfillment, the faster we speed closer to the complete collapse of genuine connection — not only with ourselves but with our communities. Cyrus affirms she needs her fans’ worship: “Do you still love me? I gotta know / Nevеr mind, just keep it quiet if you don't / Oh, do you still love me? I gotta know / I gotta know.” Celebrity becomes a surrogate for intimacy, fandom a stand-in for care.
“Golden Burning Sun,” a deceptively airy ABBA copy, finds Cyrus searching for permanence in a rapidly declining world, one marked by a dependence on mutating technology. From somewhere underwater, Cyrus croons: “You're the only one under the golden burning sun / Can I have you if I never let you down? / Surrender, surrender, surrender / And I'll never let you down / Surrender.” Outwardly romantic, something ominous lingers in the subtext. The sun is not radiant. It does not gleam or glow. It’s burning. That repetition, paired with the constant call to surrender, works against Cyrus’ idyllic imagery. Scenes of catching fireflies with bare skin and knotted hair recall chilhood’s fragile temporality. Coming from the generation that watched how climate change irrevocably transformed the earth in real time, Cyrus’ urgency to hold on to her lover hides a deep-seated paranoia about the future. Overwhelmingly so, it’s trite for mega-rich celebrities to ask their consumers for compassion, but Cyrus’ bid is earnest. As someone who watched her house burn down in late 2018 amid a series of devastating California fires, Cyrus considers how fame doesn’t acquit her from climate disaster. Desperate, she resigns herself to focusing on the only thing she can conserve: her relationship with her lover.
Cyrus’ apocalyptic nightmares continue with the aptly titled, “End of the World” wherein she hides from the eventuality of a collapsing world in her relationship with fame; as parasitic and toxic as it is, Cyrus thinks it’s healthier than reality. This sentiment begs the question: What do the consequences of late-stage capitalism look like for the rich and famous? Full of high-brow meditations on existentialism versed with low-brow references to streaming and luxury cars, Something Beautiful offers exploration of the privileges that fame affords.
Deftly, Cyrus hides away in different eras and sonic movements. She’s making up for lost time. Having always had the talent to be a “serious musician,” Cyrus spent the beginning of her career shrouded in a foreign skin. Some will consider Something Beautiful inaccessible. That’s purposeful. She’s at Studio 54, heating up the dance floor with the Bee Gees; she’s duckwalking down the runway, French house blowing up the ballroom; she’s dropping a tab of acid before heading on stage with Pink Floyd; she’s twirling in a storm of fabric alongside Stevie Nicks; she’s hand-in-hand with Britney and Paris, barrelling though paparazzi. Cyrus is referring her own discography, highlighting the chameleonic evolution both she and listeners endured to get to this point. She has gathered fragments of the past to create a kaleidoscope of pop music.
This year, it’s considered a familiar approach.
After five years, Lady Gaga is back. That statement feels misleading given she’s remained visible to the public eye since 2020’s Chromatica. After returning to dance music, Gaga padded her acting credits with roles in House of Gucci and Joker: Folie à Deuxas; relaunched Haus Labs; recorded another album with jazz legend Tony Bennet; and went into the studio to soundtrack films. Basically, she’s been busy not being a pop star.
Fulfilling a request from her fiancé Michael Polansky, Gaga released MAYHEM on March 7. She teased the new era in late 2024 with lead single “Disease.” In February, she released follow-up single “Abracadabra,” accompanied a epic visual on par with “Bad Romance,” “Judas,” and “Alejandro.” Gaga splits herself into two. Tucked away in the balcony of an industrial warehouse, her authoritative self — superego rather — issues a demand: “Dance or die.” She’s a ruthless house mother dripping with the blood of victory. Filled with extravagant costumes and precise choreography from Parris Goebel, "Abracadabra” is essentially a battle between Gaga’s superego — the edgy megastar that fans have come to expect — and her id — a starry-eyed girl from New York. It’s a dance battle for control of the ego. Toward the end, when all eyes are on Gaga’s id, she screams before surrendering to the madness. It’s off-kilter, it’s catchy, it’s well-produced. In short, it’s Old Testament Gaga.
In their formative years as musical artists, Cyrus and Gaga held the space of provocateur in mainstream pop. Eventually, as both mellowed out and smoothed their harsh edges — Gaga releasing Joanne in 2016 in response to overwhelming critical panning of 2013’s ARTPOP, Cyrus starting her redemption press tour with Younger Now — each secured a seat in fame’s upper echelon. For Gaga, donning a meat dress and dodging allegations of being a satan-worshipping hermaphrodite was considered high art. Consumers and critics took her artistry seriously from her genesis. Cyrus, adopting several brave faces while struggling to leave Disney’s shadow, had cringe slapped on her musical outputs. Now their paths merge again, resulting in late-stage ‘80s synth-heavy meditations on fame and wish fulfillment.
MAYHEM finds GAGA leaning into “weird pop” again — melding electro‑grunge, industrial dance, ’80s funk, disco, and raw theatricality to offer shrine to her past selves. Despite these stylistic ambitions, it fails to forge a path forward. Pitchfork contributor Rich Juzwiak noted that while the album is passionate and polished, the promise of mayhem-generated randomness never materializes. In his review, he argued that Gaga’s fascination with artifice results in a conformity to “tried and tested pop songwriting.” Juzwiak called the album a “charm offensive,” referring to MAYHEM as “a project designed to remind listeners why they fell in love with her in the first place, before the jazz belting or the traditional singer-songwriter gravitas or movie stardom.”
Putting MAYHEM in conversation with Something Beautiful feels like the tale of the tortoise and the hare. Gaga, the hare, came out the gate sprinting with a clear vision of her pop persona only to steadily relinquish her energy and creative power to celebrity’s demands. In terms of innovation, she has nothing left to prove or offer the pop world. Cyrus, the tortoise, spent nearly two decades perfecting alchemy. Today — as result — we have more interesting offerings from Cyrus’ camp than we do from the woman who revolutionized pop music.
Cyrus articulates the mayhem of fame more generously than Gaga. Where Cyrus slides into its hues, Gaga is clearcut. Gaga traps the listener in a wall of sound to replicate feelings of entrapment and claustrophobia in the public eye. Cyrus holds the listener’s hand and points out hidden crystals lighting their way out of the tunnel. For her, fame is not an antagonist. It’s a part of the wheel of life. It’s a strength that could only come from the woman who brought Hannah Montana into homes. Cyrus has always understood that fame requires split identities and forged herself, and sound, through experimentation. Gaga lost her sense of self in a dalliance with celebrity. That relationship hinges on a depressing, strictly-defined binary, one that shines across MAYHEM. Gaga claims contentment in her relationship with fame but it’s clear she’s no closer to acknowledging her love for the paparazzi than she was on The Fame. “I’m made of plastic like a human doll / You push and pull me, I don’t hurt at all / I talk in circles, ‘cause my brain, it aches / You say, ‘I love you,’ I disintegrate,” she sings on “Perfect Celebrity.”
A grandiose shift in artistic achievement, Something Beautiful is nothing like what Cyrus has delivered before. Gaga is extremely comfortable with the persona she inhabits on MAYHEM. She has neither desire nor need of pushing herself. She’s no longer hungry for fame. And she’s achieved enough to never starve for it again. Fame has long-hoped Cyrus would give it up. But Something Beautiful, proof that Cyrus is able to engorge and engorge on attention, lets us know that’s never going to happen.