THE NEW YORK TIMES, WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2020 N C5ON HER 2010don’t-call-me-Hannah-Mon-
tana album “Can’t Be Tamed,” Miley Cyrus
covered Poison’s 1988 power ballad “Every
Rose Has Its Thorn.” The rendition is a
mess: a “Guitar Hero”-on-medium-diffi-
culty solo, indiscriminate sprays of aural
glitter, drums so compressed they sound
like lasers. And yet, in such unholy ground,
an auspicious seed was planted: Maybe Mi-
ley would sound good singing ’80s arena
rock.
A decade and many, many stylistic de-
tours later, Cyrus’s seventh album, “Plastic
Hearts,” arrives at the same wise conclu-
sion. Take one of its highlights: the stomp-
ing, wistful, acoustic-guitar-driven ballad
“High,” which finds Cyrus sounding — in
the very best way — like a hung-over hair-
metal frontman suddenly unearthing a
tender side. “Sometimes I stay up all night,”
she sings, tapping into a rich vein of melan-
choly, “because you don’t ever talk to me in
my dreams.”
Cyrus loves to embrace new genres, and
she rarely announces these aesthetic pivots
with subtlety. The Dolly Parton cameo and
leather Nudie suit she sported on the cover
made it known that “Younger Now” was her
country album; the hip-hop influenced
“Bangerz” showcased a cypher’s worth of
rappers and Cyrus’s infamous grills; the
Flaming Lips-assisted psychedelia of “Mi-
ley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz” began with the
lyric, “Yeah, I smoke pot/Yeah, I like
peace.” And so here comes “Plastic Hearts”
with its cover shot by Mick Rock, the pho-
tographer known for his portraits of David
Bowie, Iggy Pop and the Ramones. Mullet-
ted and sneering out from her own high-
contrast photo, the 28-year-old Cyrus all but
screams, “Are you ready to rock?!”
But this is hardly just cosplay. (Though
the greats know that rock stardom always
involves at least a littlecosplay.) “Plastic
Hearts” is not a trendy rebranding of Cyrus
so much as a convincing argument that
she’s always been something of an old soul.
Aside from her contemporary Dua Lipa,
who shares the sleek and fun duet “Pris-
oner,” the elder guest stars on “Plastic
Hearts” make up an evocative ’80s-rock
mood board: Joan Jett, Billy Idol and Stevie
Nicks — plus Cyrus’s grizzled wail, which at
times sounds like an amalgamation of all
three of them.
Cyrus’s voice has always been a unique
instrument: husky, a little froggy and —
when a song calls for belting, like her great
power ballad “Wrecking Ball” — surpris-
ingly brawny. Even at 14, when she was cast
on the Disney Channel series “Hannah
Montana,” her voice seemed to carry a pa-
thos beyond her years. As Cyrus has grown
older and more comfortable experimenting
with her gender presentation, she has
seemed to revel in the inherent, freeing an-
drogyny of her vocals. The buzzing low-end
of “Plastic Hearts” allows her to play
around with its guttural depths, and the in-
dustrial churn of “Gimme What I Want”
provides the song her “Black Mirror” alter
ego Ashley O dreamed of singing.
For all their power posing, though, these
songs (all with writing credits for Cyrus)
aren’t afraid of getting vulnerable. Written
in the wake of her much-publicized 2019split from her now ex-husband, Liam
Hemsworth, Cyrus occasionally indulges in
winking, tabloid-baiting provocations
(“Maybe gettin’ married just to cause a dis-
traction,” she sings on the opener.) But
more often these songs are self-accepting
declarations of imperfections (“But if
you’re looking for stable, that’ll never be
me/If you’re looking for faithful, that’ll
never be me”). Or, as she puts it on “Bad
Karma,” a snaking and absorbing duet with
Joan Jett, “I’ve always picked a giver ’cause
I’ve always been the taker.”
Two live covers that recently made the
rounds online — and are affixed to the end
of the album’s digital edition — reveal both
the limitations and the startling power of
Cyrus’s voice. Her muscular take on Blond-
ie’s “Heart of Glass” unfortunately blows
out the song’s nuance: Gone is the shrug-
ging charm of Debbie Harry’s blasé falsetto,
in favor of an all-caps, karaoke-esque as-
sertion that Cyrus can really sing. Much bet-
ter is her quaking, near-note-perfect per-
formance of the Cranberries’ “Zombie,”
which expresses such a reverent under-
standing of the song’s melodic leaps and
emotional pull that one doesn’t even ques-
tion what the former Hannah Montana is
doing singing a ’90s alternative-rock classic
about post-traumatic stress and decades of
conflict in Northern Ireland.
But that probably hasn’t been a fair ques-
tion for a while now. In those “Can’t Be
Tamed” days when her post-Avril, transfor-
matively wigged alter ego still grinned out
from plastic lunchboxes, the last guardians
of rock music’s supposed authenticity prob-
ably couldn’t think of a more obvious enemy
than Cyrus. But as she knowingly puts it on
the album’s closer, a song that is far more
thoughtful and understated than its title,
“Golden G String,” suggests, “the old boys
hold all the cards and they ain’t playin’ gin.”
After years of restless reinventions, it
sounds as if Cyrus has found a fitting con-
text, and as a bonus, rock music has found
its most earnest and high-profile millennial
ambassador. Maybe rock’s not dead — it’s
just in the capable hands of Miley Cyrus.LINDSAY ZOLADZ ALBUM REVIEWMiley Cyrus Finally Embraces Her Rock ’n’ Roll Heart
On her seventh album, the
pop star bends the glorious
excess of the ’80s to her whims.
Miley Cyrus has a surprisingly brawny voice, well suited for throwback rock.VIJAT MOHINDRAMiley Cyrus
“Plastic Hearts”
(RCA Records)lime songs by a band of brothers, which sort
of relates to the movie. Then I made another
scene, just in order to do a trilogy out of it”
with “Powerman,” he added.
In a video call from his home studio in the
Highgate area of North London, Davies
spoke with his usual wry candor. He has
been living there since the pandemic began
— though “living is a loose term,” Davies
said. “It’s more like being in prison.”
But he acknowledged that the lockdown
has given him time to assemble the boxed
set and begin writing a new play based on
the Powerman characters, a work that
could serve as a half-century-removed
“Part Two” to the original.
The creation of “Lola Versus Powerman”
came at an especially fraught time in the
history of the Kinks. They hadn’t had a ma-
jor hit in four years, a situation exacerbated
by the band being barred from touring
America. Davies cites their refusal to sign
papers to satisfy the unions as one reason.
Another had to do with an incident on the
TV show “Hullabaloo.”
After the camera cut away to a few other
guests, it arrived on the Kinks, revealing
the drummer Mick Avory and Davies danc-
ing cheek-to-cheek. “Everything we could
do to annoy people, we did at the time,” Da-vies said with a laugh. “Nowadays that
would be acceptable. Not then.”
Despite the consequence to the band’s ca-
reer, “the highest accolade is to be banned
from America,” he added.
The band’s break from touring the United
States gave Davies the chance to soar cre-
atively, leading to his first concept albums,
“The Kinks Are the Village Green Preserva-
tion Society” and “Arthur (Or the Decline
and Fall of the British Empire).” But with
“Lola” he aimed squarely at the charts. For
a fresh sound, Davies sought an instrument
that would stand out on the radio. He found
it in a National resonator guitar, a brand of
dobro that has the hard, tinny sound of a
banjo. “My dad was a banjo player,” Davies
said. “He said, ‘If you want a hit record, you
have to get a banjo on it.’ The National gui-
tar was the next best thing.”
Next, he searched for an irresistible
chorus hook, then road-tested it at home. “I
had a 1-year-old child at the time,” Davies
said. “She was crawling around singing ‘la
la, la la Lola.’ I thought, ‘If she can join in and
sing, Kinks fans can do it.’ ”
As for the song’s bold subject matter,
many stories have been told about its inspi-
ration. Davies said it came from an encoun-
ter at the Castille Club, a Paris nightspot the
group frequented: “One of our crew at thetime met this beautiful blonde and he took
her back to the hotel. In the morning, he saw
the stubble growing on her chin. So, he got a
surprise!”
Davies said his empathy for Lola
stemmed from growing up with six older
sisters. “We used to dress up and have par-
ties at home,” he said. “Men dressed as
women. My dad, who is the most macho
man you could imagine, used to put on a wig
occasionally and dance around and make a
fool of himself, which I encouraged. It’s part
of the musical hall culture we have over
here. It’s more accepted in London.”
Davies’s portrayal of Lola, he said, re-
flects his general approach to character.
“When I write songs, I put myself in the
part,” he said. “In ‘Sunny Afternoon’ I
wanted to know who this broken-down aris-
tocrat was, and I became him. In Lola’s jour-
ney, I did a bit of research with drag
queens.” He added, “I admire anyone who
can get up and be what they want to be.”
He believes the lyrics to the song passed
among less open listeners because “people
only hear a third of the lyrics when they’re
playing a song before they make up their
mind they like it,” he said. “They’ll just lis-
ten to the catchy parts.”
The subject matter also sailed over the
heads of the BBC censors, who only balkedat the lyrical mention of Coca-Cola, which
violated its rule about commercial inser-
tions. In reaction, Davies subbed in “cherry
cola” on an alternate version.
While gay references had cropped up in
pop songs before, “ ‘Lola’ was the first big
hit with an L.G.B.T. theme,” said JD Doyle, a
music historian who ran the authoritative
radio show “Queer Music Heritage.” “ ‘Lola’
made history.”
According to Davies, “Lola” encouraged
other songwriters to explore related terri-
tory. “Before he passed away, Lou Reed told
me that ‘Lola’ was a big influence on him,”
he said. “It was reassuring to him when he
did ‘Walk on the Wild Side.’”Later in the ’70s, Davies wrote “Out of the
Wardrobe,” about a straight man who likes
to cross dress, which first upsets his wife be-
fore she comes to enjoy it. Likewise, the nar-
rator in the Kinks’ “On the Outside” encour-
ages the lead character to accept their iden-
tity, which Davies now describes as trans-
gender. “It’s somebody going through a
tremendous emotional trauma about hav-
ing to be somebody they know they’re not,”
he said.
Lola was one of the few likable characters
on “Powerman.” Much of the rest of the al-
bum — which also features two striking
songs penned by Davies’s brother, Dave —
was inspired by an onerous record deal that
made it difficult for the Kinks to earn
money. “It’s an old story of artists getting
signed to impossible contracts,” Davies
said. “I took it personally.”
Ironically, the success of the single and al-
bum propelled the Kinks to a new contract
and a fresh future. But one song they re-
corded for the album, “Anytime,” was left off
because Davies felt it was “too commercial
for its own good.” (The song has a sound
and sentiment similar to the Beatles’ “Hey
Jude.”)
The boxed set features a new version of
the track, expanded by a fresh monologue
delivered by a mysterious female character
addressing a world of isolation and loneli-
ness that reflects life during the pandemic.
It’s a subject that has hit Davies particu-
larly hard since one of his older sisters died
of the coronavirus earlier this year. “We
weren’t able to go to the funeral,” he said.
For the boxed set, he conducted a series
of interviews with his brother, Dave, with a
broader purpose in mind: to spark a re-
union of the Kinks, who haven’t been to-
gether for 23 years. “I’d like to work with
Dave again — if he’ll work with me,” Davies
said. “Hopefully this will inspire him to trust
me more.”
For now, there’s the new play he’s creat-
ing that pushes the “Lola Versus Power-
man” story forward. “The continuity of my
work, and the Kinks’ work, is very impor-
tant to me,” Davies said. “I write everything
with the big picture in mind.”‘Lola’: Still Inspiring at 50
CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1The Kinks, during the
1960s, from left: Mick
Avory, Ray Davies, Dave
Davies and Pete Quaife.RAY MORETON/GETTY IMAGES‘I didn’t think the song
would be so ahead of its
time. But time has
proven it so.’
RAY DAVIES,
SPEAKING OF ‘LOLA’