Miley Cyrus has made a 'pop opera' film to accompany her 9th album, Something Beautiful
Miley Cyrus has one of the best voices in contemporary pop. And in 2023, she showed it off with signature, inescapable hit 'Flowers', a break-up survival anthem perfectly suited to her voice's lived-in smokiness.
What: Miley Cyrus's "pop opera" visual album for her excellent ninth release.
Starring: Miley Cyrus
Directed by: Miley Cyrus, Jacob Bixenham, Brendan Walter
Where: In cinemas June 27, one night only
Likely to make you feel: Like the term "pop opera" is a stretch
But the reason for that wonderful texture and grit is also why the former Disney star isn't taking a victory lap tour of her 9th album, Something Beautiful, released this June to some of the most glowing reviews of her career.
The 32-year-old has Reinke's edema, a swelling of her vocal cords that has given her a large polyp, producing the gritty texture to her voice. Surgery could ruin her voice entirely.
As she recently told Apple Music interviewer Zane Lowe, the condition most affects performing, making it "like running a marathon with ankle weights on", which is why her last global tour was more than a decade ago.
Instead of touring, Cyrus has created a cinema-exclusive (for now) "pop opera" and visual album for Something Beautiful, screening for one night only across Australia this Friday.
She describes the hour-long film as a conceptual album about healing, telling Harper's Bazaar it was like Pink Floyd's The Wall "but with a better wardrobe and more glamorous, and filled with pop culture".
A large-scale statement like a visual album offers an interesting artistic opportunity for Cyrus, a fascinating figure who hasn't necessarily found a creative through line to match her natural charisma, perhaps more concerned with wrestling off her Disney star beginnings as Hannah Montana.
Fifteen years on from hanging up Hannah's golden wig, Cyrus has certainly created distance, most pointedly with the boisterous, hyper-sexual R&B rebellion of 2013's Bangerz, which generated plenty of controversy.
In recent years, she's largely settled on a series of more mature pop albums tinged with different genres, including country (2017's Younger Now), glam rock (2020's Plastic Hearts) and light synth-pop (2023's Endless Summer Vacation).
Sonically, Something Beautiful is a coalescence of those recent albums — a mixture of prog-rock, soul, jazz, disco and R&B united by a grand air and a timeless feel, with lots of belting and big, cinematic sounds.
It's everything a pop album should offer, with break-up ballads ('More To Lose'), love songs ('End of the World'), empowerment anthems ('Walk of Fame') and campy disco diva moments ('Every Girl You've Ever Loved', featuring spoken word from Naomi Campbell).
The healing concept doesn't exactly come through the music, though — unlike Lady Gaga's similarly themed 2020 album Chromatica, there's no clear lyrical through line or leitmotifs. This has led fans — and critics — to assume that the visuals, arriving weeks after the album, would tie things together.
Unfortunately, there's next to no narrative to Something Beautiful, an hour-long set of music videos that neither hone nor expand the album's world in the way that "visual album" has come to signify after Beyoncé changed the game with that digital drop.
Directed by Cyrus with longtime collaborators Jacob Bixenman and Brendan Walter, the film starts strong but sidesteps much depth.
Running through the album in order, it opens with a series of ethereal shots set to Prelude, where Cyrus approximates Laurie Anderson's spoken word ("Arching to be seen/Aching to become real") over glitching synths.
We see a flower twisting, shadows and smoke, close-ups of Cyrus's body enclosed in crystal strands like a spider web as she wears the archival Thierry Mugler look from the album cover. Eerie, creepy, interesting.
It leads into the title track music video already available online, where Cyrus performs with a band on a smoky sound stage while in a custom feathery green snood by Mugler. Any sense of old-school, jazzy glamour is disrupted by the dual explosion of set lights and prog-rock in its chorus.
The premise of pristine beauty is muddied in favour of something grittier, more dangerous by these videos — an idea quickly abandoned. Instead, for most of Something Beautiful, we see Cyrus strut, lip-sync and play showgirl on various sound stages, donning extravagant archival looks by Mugler, as well as Bob Mackie and Jean Paul Gaultier.
Halfway-point track 'Easy Lover' sees Cyrus walk through the Paramount lot between sets in a tracking shot, highlighting the artificiality of what we see as she moves from make-up to an elaborate set with dancers, always performing for us.
There's a charm to sitting with these songs and letting them wash over us, but Something Beautiful lacks the imagination to add much beyond pretty visuals, seeming more like the interstitial videos between numbers at a concert than a stand-in for a concert itself.
While that might be expecting too much, the film debuted at Tribeca and is being touted as a cinematic event, but the closest Something Beautiful gets to The Wall is a creative block.
It's a missed opportunity, whether limited by budget constraints or a lack of imagination.
Compare it to Jennifer Lopez's completely over-the-top visual album from last year, This Is Me: Now… A Love Story, which was self-funded for $US20 million. A meta-narrative about Lopez and Ben Affleck's tumultuous love affair, it's also a convoluted sci-fi narrative featuring endless celebrity cameos and a steampunk heart factory at risk of explosion.
Cyrus didn't need to go full Lopez (nor should she), but at least This Is Me was ambitious, guided by a frenetic sense that Lopez needed to express whatever that film was.
Without that drive, Something Beautiful lacks energy: even if it is visually beautiful, anyone but devout fans will find themselves wishing for something more.
Miley Cyrus: Something Beautiful is in cinemas for one night only on Friday June 27.
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So they both speak those languages, but they didn't speak that at home. They spoke Mandarin and they also spoke English. I think Mum spoke a lot of English to us, and then dad would speak Mandarin, but mostly I would say it's like an English speaking household when we Stefan were growing up, did you learn Mandarin and other Pey Chi We went to me and my sister and my brother would go to Chinese school every Saturday in Box Hill. It was awful. Why was it awful? Why would you want to be Chinese in White Australia? I just wanted to watch home. In a way. I wanted to be a white girl with blonde hair. I did not want to be at Chinese school writing like one word like 100 times. Stefan Is it the kind of experience where you look back on it now and you're glad you went through that? Or do you still like, oh man, Chinese school? Pey Chi No, I well, wish that. I actually. I feel like if I grew up in an environment, Pey Chi I was taught to love my heritage, then maybe I would have appreciated at the time, but at the time, I just didn't want to be there. Stefan How did you feel about the restaurant when you were a kid? Pey Chi It was just there. It wasn't like, I didn't think about it because I, I tried working here when I was in, like, primary school, yeah, but I mean, I would always get takeaway, yep. So I always call up, can I have honey chicken? That's my order. Yeah, honey chicken, Stefan Did your art practice engage with your heritage at all? Pey Chi I think I started off just looking at cute stuff. I think I was really cautious of Orientalizing myself, because I felt like I only enjoyed being Asian later in life. I would say, like, when I like, five years ago, yeah. So really quite fresh. Stefan Does you the artist, communicate differently than you the restaurant tour? Pey Chi Yes, I'm more conservative. Yeah, I feel it was. 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Whereas here it's, it's not, I don't switch it on at all. It's just about meeting people where they're at, no matter what party, whoever they want to vote for conservative, whether they're white, old, Asian, young, disabled, whatever like. It's just meeting people where they're at, giving them, trying to be friendly, giving them, hopefully, really good service. That's my goal, making people feel comfortable so it's different. Stefan Do you feel more connected to your heritage? 100,000% Pey Chi I think like I only really started expressing my Asian culture when I started working here, I feel like I had to what's the phrase, like, own my chops or something, phrase that's like a biking phrase. That's definitely a thing people say, Okay, I don't know where it comes from. I feel like I have ownership over my heritage more so now I feel like I understand the bigger picture in terms of, like, the Malaysian Chinese diaspora, because my language gets tested all the time here, it also gets questioned a lot. Like aunties and uncles will be like, Why don't you know Hakka? Why don't you know Hopkin? Why don't you know Cantonese? I'm like, mate, I was born here. Like, they don't understand the struggle, right? Of like not wanting to be Asian, so I feel like I sort of have had to prove myself and learn language to understand everything better. Stefan It sounds like you're describing an experience where more regularly speaking that language and understanding the words that people are using connects you more deeply to that heritage. Pey Chi Yeah, yes. It's like, really empowering to like, like, I have this, I've got regulars, and it's really empowering to be like, to code switch and to be like, I don't think I can do it. I can't. It doesn't feel natural to fake it, but obviously it happens, right? We all code switch. My dad code switches. If he came out right now to say hello to you guys, he would be like, Hey mate. How do you know? But he does not talk like that. Yeah, I feel like I just, can you connect better? Because then, like, they see you, like, Code switching is like, sort of a means of, like, okay, like, you're a safe person. For me, I think that's how I perceive it when I use it, when I do code switch, when I do put on my Malaysian Chinese accent, it's saying, like, Oh, I see you. We're both from the same place. I think that's really special, that I get to, like, be in the same place with aunties and uncles and, like, young Asian people who also have Malaysian accents and that like, we get to, like, I get to meet them here and give them food and, like, see them every week or every two weeks. Rune As I was sitting there and eating my delicious food, listening to Stefan and Pei chi having a conversation, it was very clear to me that there is a lot of stuff happening for people navigating different languages and cultures at home andor at work. And when we dive into the language bits of that, it can get a little bit confusing. So before we go on, here is Stefan de ladovic in a bubble bath to explain, Stefan Basically translation, interpretation and language brokering are not the same thing, but most people lump them together like leftover dip at a party. So translation is written. You see it on websites, in contracts, manuals, when you see words jumping from one language to another on paper or screen. That's translation, interpretation, that's spoken, conferences, courtrooms, emergency rooms, it's live. It's real time, and if you mess up, someone might end up in the wrong jail cell or with the wrong medication. Both require accuracy and a code of ethics. It requires the person doing it to be impartial. And neutral. Less formally, we have code switching, like when you drop into a different tone of voice when your boss enters the room, and language brokering, Oh, baby, that's when maybe a kid translates for their parents at the bank, the doctor's office, or in the middle of a tense parent teacher meeting. It's messy, it's beautiful. It's not trained or certified, but it happens every single day. So whenever you hear translation, think text interpretation, think speech code switching. Think Superman changing in the phone booth and language brokering. Think life raw, unfiltered, unpaid and often underappreciated. Got it good. Now get out Rune Chapter two, the language expert train. Translating and Interpreting are obviously difficult and demanding jobs that you study for years to be able to do. I wonder what it's like for a kid to be doing that. I wanted to talk to an interpreter or translator to find out more. Jim I'm Jim Hlavac and I'm an interpreter and translator. Oh, convenient. What skills are children using to be good language brokers, Jim Mediation skills, how to interact, how to be the intermediary between people. That's what mediators do in in court, for example, in tribunal, hearings, etc, per hearing, they're working between two parties. The the interests that they're protecting are their parents, typically, and their own children have a sense of what they're doing, how they're doing it and and that what they do does not endanger or jeopardize their relationship with others. So they're developing really high level soft skills to interact with people. Yes, they're also developing their linguistic skills, because just because you're bilingual does not make you an automatic interpreter and translator. You actually have to practice and learn and perfect the skill of moving seamlessly from language, from one language into another without any thinking time. Virtually, they're also acquiring world knowledge, so they're actually exposed to interactions in scenarios which are typically only reserved for adults, and this can include, let's say, medical results. This can include discussions with a lawyer about if there's been a car accident or there's an insurance claim, etc. So you know, children, before their time, become exposed and have to be protagonists. They're speaking. They're interacting in these interactions in a way which lot of other children are spared. So it doesn't happen to other children who grow up, perhaps monolingually, that they're that they find themselves in these situations which are otherwise reserved for adults. Rune What kind of psychological or emotional effect can that have on on a child that younger or adult being the voice of their parents, Jim it varies on the child. There are lots of children who who do this easily. They don't think anything about it. They don't for them. It's no big deal if I have to do it, okay, whatever, and we'll get it over and done with. This is all part of me, being a member of the family. And so there are children who talk about they're actually feeling empowered. And they are empowered in that they occupy a role that children in monolingual families typically don't occupy. They become the go to person in the family for so many things. On the other hand, there are some children who don't like it, who feel uncomfortable, who don't like the emotional stress, who feel overwhelmed and like they don't know they honestly, they often don't know what to do. In some situations, when it's a jam, let's say there's a criminal charge against the father and there's a summons which arrives in the mail. They have to read it. They find out something which they probably didn't want to find out. They then have to side translate this to the parents or to whoever, and then they they might that might precipitate conversations between them and the parent about what happened, what's what's going to happen when if they approach a lawyer, what have you? So does put children in a situation where sometimes they don't feel so comfortable, and some people, some children also talk about, I simply don't have the linguistic skills to fully render this this complex, let's say insurance jargon. I'm. I just can't do this, so I'll just pick and choose certain certain points that I can convey, and that's all that I pass on, but that can have obviously dangerous consequences for for the parents, so it's a risky business as well. Rune Are there any sort of advice or guidelines for parents that who rely on children to do this, this interpretation to help keep the relationship and arrangement healthy Jim in the first place, they should be told that there are for lots of interactions. There are professional interpreters available, and they should be using those services if they go to hospital. Now it's hospital policy to not allow family members to broker, and instead, a professional interpreter is needed for many reasons, firstly, to make sure that there's accuracy. Brokers are not obliged to be accurate. As I said, they often don't. They don't do it. It's not that they intentionally want to be inaccurate, but they simply can't, or don't feel that they should convey what is being said by one person entirely to the other. They change things, they leave things out, what have you. Secondly, they can be in situations, particularly medical ones, when they're exposed to things that they should not be. If it's an intimate medical issue that one of their parents has. Then, is it their place to be there? That's the one piece of advice. The other thing is, though, these these linguistic skills, which brokers do display, qualify them well to well, we should encourage them to continue their acquisition of the what we call here in Australia, their heritage language fairly soon after starting school, English becomes their dominant language, and the other language doesn't develop at the same level, compared to, let's say, homeland speakers. So they need to be provided with encouragement, resources and to attend formal instruction in the language where that is possible because they have they're already developing a great set of linguistic skills. These need to be cultivated because they can actually have a profession that they could walk into later on after engaging in training and and so forth. So we squander our linguistic resources in this country by not enabling young children to take the acquisition and learning of their parents heritage language further, and not enabling them to become language teachers, translators, interpreters, and we perform so badly. Rune in this respect, internationally, Australian businesses, companies go overseas and don't even think of taking interpreters, translators with them. They don't even think of translating the taxation laws, the company licensing laws, etc. Rune Why do you think that is why do we squander those skills in Australia? Is it an attitude thing? Is it a funding thing? Jim English is the unquestioned number one language in the world. There are a lot of people in this country who think people should just speak English and everything will be easier. Look, all migrants to Australia know that they it's in their advantage, to their advantage, to acquire English, but speaking another language is an asset in many ways, cognitively, in terms of career options, where the proficiency in another language is an asset, which can be the difference between you getting a job mobility and also having points of reference to compare, let's say, English speaking Australian culture, with something else. If you have a point of reference, you're actually richer and more insightful human, human being, typically, because you've grown up with these, these two different ways of looking at things, of expressing things. Rune I'm already sensing now that my my Danish, is getting old. Oh, it's it's stuck in time in a weird way. And I haven't been out for that long. Could you speak to that topic? Because I know it's also a thing in Australia that you have people coming from one country, and then they carry over a language, and then you have new migrants arriving, and the languages are different, Jim that's right. So to give a case which has been well studied, there are lots of migrants from Italy who left in the 1950s and they might have only spoke spoken a dialect, or spoken a regional variety of Italian, and they've been here for 60 years, and there might be newcomers from that area, from Italy, who speak quite differently. They're more likely to speak a more standard variety of Italian. The dialect might. Dialects also change as well. They're not just fossilized, things that stay in the same way forever. They're also dynamic. There are lots of manners as. Lots of metaphors, lots of references to popular culture, TV shows, stars, music, etc, which you index, which you talk about all the time, because it's, it's, it's what your recollections from from that period were, and they're totally different from these more recent groups, as opposed to the the older ones. So that's it will get if you like rusty. But what that means, and I'm encouraging you to consider passing Danish onto your son, is the challenge is, is to keep up with media, with language resources for kids in Danish, or whichever language it is that the parents wish to, wish to, to pass on to their children, because it's important that the children receive a model of the language, which is not just an immigrant who departed 2030, years ago, but the language that they speak has a whole society where people speak it and what they're doing, and there's other people out there who speak this language, other than my parents, so that the parent the child can see that this has broader horizons than my my child parent relationship. So that's that's a challenge, though. It's not easy, particularly because Australia is geographically so far away from other places, it's not that easy to travel. But media has done, you know, electronic media has enabled us to to access television and videos and lots of all sorts of things, you know, kind of from overseas. So there are fewer obstacles now for you to keep up contemporary Danish. Rune Yeah. I Okay, yeah. Point taken. Chapter Three, the communicator. After talking to Jim about how language can get stuck in time, I wanted to hear from someone who's lived the experience. So I met up with Danny Tran an ABC investigative reporter who communicates for a living, but also grew up in Australia, navigating two worlds and two languages. Danny I, you know, as an adult, I've shown a little bit more interest in learning about Vietnamese. So it was at my, my wife's suggestion, that we get a tutor from Vietnam. She started at first her Vietnamese has become quite good, and mine is, mine isn't still not fantastic. But we got a tutor from Hanoi, and just having a chat to her, you realize how much language has developed over time. 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And the difference, you know, normal young Vietnamese people in Vietnam would not call their parents this. And when my wife mentioned it to this tutor in Hanoi. She was just like, what word she use? She said it again. She was like, that word has was used by extremely wealthy families in literally, the 40s and the 50s. Like that word is not used even the word for like Asia, right? So the word for Asia that we've always used growing up here was agile, and it turns out that in the time since my parents got to Australia, decades ago, the word has been flipped around Vietnam. It's now Jo a I wouldn't have had any clue at all when you know the last time I visited Vietnam, I would have sounded insane, like an old timey monopoly man trying to get by the city being like, Excuse me, sir. Rune Yeah, I was thinking that before. When you said it like, paternalistic father. Danny I literally think it's kind of like, Papa, hello, Papa. That's fun. See, I mostly speak to people here, and I don't often. Can speak to someone with modern day Vietnamese other than this teacher. And she's very, she's very kind of, very gentle that I think she knows that the people who are seeking her out are speaking time capsule Vietnamese. So she's like, Oh, the word we actually use is this, or this is the modern word. And it's always so enlightening, because I'm like, Oh, so you flip these words around, or that this word doesn't exist anymore, or this word is now a slur. Rune Danny Yeah, you do. You do want to know that, and you don't realise also. The other thing is that when language is stuck, the ideas from that time are dragged forward, right? You 50s, when it was happening, it was completely fine to refer to that, and that's why you gotta really be careful, because there are all these political sensitivities the language has developed. So is the political situation, and so is the definitions of what's appropriate and what isn't appropriate, and when you're stuck unknowingly, and you go to another country and you try to use that language, that becomes really complex. Thankfully, I did not find to set myself in a position, and I try not to use slurs, but wow, okay, I wish I knew, and it's hard, because in when you're speaking your first language and you're fluent, there's really no excuse for that, right? Because culturally, you should understand the problems or the issues or the situation, and you're also fluent in that language, and there's nothing stopping you from researching library cards free, right? The internet is right. There you can go and work out exactly what you're saying, the means are which and the implications that you're making, but in when it's a second language, and you may not be attuned to that, you might be learning by yourself, or you might be relying on somebody else's interpretation, and culturally, you're not 100% there, but you're trying your best. That is a little bit more complex. I'm not saying it's an excuse, but it's certainly something that you should be aware of, what the words you're saying are actually meaning, because you are a language learner at the end of the day. Rune So growing up in Melbourne and being a child of immigrant parents, did you ever have to help your parents navigate the English speaking system? Danny My parents were both professionals, so less so, but my grandparents, yes, yeah. So my grandmother didn't speak English, but my grandfather did English lessons. When he came to Australia, he actually learned English by watching the ABC, and I still remember watching some of these shows with him, where he practiced. And I'm pretty sure that I also learned by watching the ABC as well. So it's a very nice full circle moment. But you know, sometimes it'd be difficult, because you'd be at school and he'd pick you up and they'd want to say something, you'd have to act as the go between. It was a lot of pressure for a kid, especially now in hindsight, when I realized my Vietnamese wasn't that good, and I can't really express what a translator would express, right? Because when it comes to translation, you have to be on the ball, right. You have to be really careful about how you convey meaning. And I suspect that I was my Vietnamese, and what the meanings that I were conveying were probably like 80 to 90% correct, but not fully. I suspect that I did because I wanted the interaction to be over, because I was embarrassed about being Vietnamese and being different. You want to speed it up, you want to get it over with? Rune Yeah, okay, because, okay, let's, let's not, let's not be different. Danny Yeah, let's not be different. Whereas I feel like these days it's less so, you know, they it's just the fact of the matter that you know a lot of people you know didn't grow up speaking English, and it's not that big of a deal. Whereas back then it was like, do I have to do this again? It didn't happen too often, but the times that it had happened, I can't remember the instances, but I remember the feeling that rose up with me, which was, Rune okay, yeah, could you expand on that? Like, what were you? Were you thinking and what we would you feel? Danny I think going back, do you sort of feel? You just feel incredibly self conscious about having to act as a go between having to act as a broker. Now, in hindsight, I realised that part of what I was feeling was also trepidation and not having the level correct level of Vietnamese. My English was fine at that point in time, but my Vietnamese had already started deteriorating, and not having the right thing, right level of Vietnamese being able to express that probably caused me, you know, a frustration that I couldn't articulate at the time, and also you were just conscious of being looked at. You know, this is, this is around the time that you know the phrase stop the Asian invasion was happening, and you know, you're a child, but you become conscious of that, Rune of course, so you're standing out on the street, right? Danny Like it would often be in some kind of semi public situations where you would have to to do this kind of other school on the street, or something like that. Or if it happened, if people count the door and it was just, it was just too much for a kid to handle, Rune What would you what would you say to someone, someone like yourself that's in a similar situation now that has to do this kind of brokering. Danny Everyone's trying their best, and so are you, and that's the most important thing here. You may not have the perfect level of language. You may not be able to say exactly what you want to say, but what you're doing is probably acting out of love, acting out of kindness, and just try your best. There's nothing to be embarrassed about that's just that. That's something don't let, don't let what happen. To me, be dragged into where you are at the moment. I know it feels that way, but you shouldn't be embarrassed about who you are. Your culture that does horrible damage to you. Rune How humans talk is produced and written by Rune Pedersen from Onomato People, and Stefan Delatovic. Post Production and Sound Design was done by Dom Evans and James Custer at Earsay. The SBS team is Joel supple, Max Gosford and Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn, and our artwork is by Wendy Tang. Follow and review us wherever you find your podcasts.
