Miley Cyrus built a brand as a Disney Channel pop star and then spent the rest of her career setting fire to it, contorting through one highly-stylized phase after another in order to announce herself as anyone other than Hannah Montana. Sometimes, it seemed like she was actively trying to confuse her audience. Every album cycle brought something wholly different: She zigzagged through the foam-fingered, twerk-to-tweet pipeline of 2013’s Bangerz, the Flaming Lips acid trip that churns through 2015’s Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz, the country twang of 2017’s Younger Now, and the leather jackets and platinum mullet that ushered in her most recent studio album, 2020’s Plastic Hearts.
The longer this has gone on, the more she’s defined herself by her ability to transform. Like Taylor Swift perching on a pile of her past selves, Miley likes to wink at the caricatures she’s created over the years. She commemorated the tenth anniversary of the leaked TMZ video that lost her a Walmart deal by posting, “Happy 10-year anniversary to the groundbreaking video of a teenager smoking a bong & saying dumb shit to their friends,” on her Instagram. A decade after she had to issue an “apology” for posing for a Vanity Fair cover that showed her bare back, she tweeted a New York Post headline from the time that read MILEY’S SHAME. “IM NOT SORRY,” she wrote in all caps. “Fuck YOU.” These slot easily into the wave of maligned female artists reclaiming their media narrative, and with every new declaration, she seems intent on articulating her legacy.
Midway through Attention, her first live album outside of the Hannah Montana concert recordings, Cyrus bellows to the crowd, “People, when they think about me, they think of someone…that’s been a million different things… A lot of different identities.” Over the 80-minute set, she toggles between poses, seemingly arguing that all these shards of Cyrus can coalesce into a cohesive musical identity—that she can compel a crowd not in spite of, but because, this disjointedness.
Attention captures parts of Cyrus’ November 2021 set from the Super Bowl Music Fest, where she opened for Green Day at what is now called the Crypto.com arena. Fans allegedly curated the live album setlist, and only two of the 20 tracks here are new, including the abrasive title track where she repeats the word “attention” over blares of faux-metal guitar before the layers of distorted shouting—“You’ve got questions? I NEED ANSWERS!”—kick in. It’s play-acted performance art, confused and unironic—and by the fourth time you’ve heard Cyrus screech “WRONG ANSWERS ONLY!” you wonder who this is for, or what it’s supposed to signify.