Miley Cyrus slid down a giant tongue and into a sassy, salacious pop freak show Saturday night.
In a sold-out Palace of Auburn Hills festooned with balloons and ringing with giddy female shrieks, the 21-year-old pop star lit into “SMS (Bangerz),” kicking off a show heavy on material from her “Bangerz” album.
It’s been nearly a year since the culture became fascinated by the grown-up, rebooted Cyrus, making her the subject of countless think pieces and public reprimands while sending her album to the top of the charts.
Saturday brought a full blast of the new Miley, who took the stage in a variety of edgy outfits, from her opening red-checkered bikini to her marijuana-leafed bodysuit. She took to the hood of a gold-rimmed prop car, splaying her legs and romping in cash-shaped confetti.
It was a far cry from the Disney-groomed pop princess who made her Palace premiere in late 2007. Many of Saturday's fans had been on hand that night, and now they were back, six years older and hitting the arena in short-shorts and bared midriffs, armed with smartphones to chronicle it all.
Cyrus is perhaps the most divisive showbiz figure of the day. But at the Palace she was among 15,000 faithful young believers, overwhelmingly female, many of them sporting the double-knot hair horns made iconic by Cyrus’s MTV performance last summer.
"There can never be too much tongue at one of my shows,” Cyrus said by way of introducing “Adore You,” urging heavy make-out sessions among audience members, to be beamed on the big stage screen. Many enthusiastically took up the call when the camera came their way.
What was notable about Saturday night wasn’t the celebration of immodesty and the empowerment it’s supposed to suggest. That’s just routine shock-value stuff at this point, and all told, the night came off more like disposable decadence than the sort of liberating social statement that may be envisioned by Cyrus and company. What stood out, rather, was the way the show captured the spirit of our Internet world: With its fast-moving barrage of color and animal-costumed dancers and random absurdity, it was a night fashioned after this tweeting, selfie-snapping, meme-sharing age.
There were hard-driving party songs (“Do My Thang”), candy-coated bedroom romps (“Get it Right”) and psychedelic imagery that sometimes felt like Sesame Street-meets-“The Wall” (“FU”).
“I had one of the best summers of my … life here in Detroit,” she told the crowd early on, alluding to her 2010 shoot for the film “LOL” and noting that she had friends in the crowd. Elsewhere she has described that summer as the season when she “grew up,” getting a tattoo and hitting Detroit-area clubs.
Outside a mid-show acoustic stretch — with its Dylan and Coldplay covers — the action was fast and the imagery eye-popping, from her vividly attired dance crew (and an animated chicken) linking up for the dosey-doe steps of “4X4” to the towering replica of her recently deceased dog, Floyd, on “Can’t Be Tamed.”
Busy video interludes kept things moving during costume changes, and by the time “We Can’t Stop” kicked off the encore — her dancers dressed as larger-than-life lighters, foam fingers and a joint — the spectacle dial was cranked to 11.
This was the kind of night where the props and spectacle threatened to overwhelm the songs, and some of the show’s stronger musical moments came when Cyrus was alone with her band and her voice. The huskiness that grew into her vocals during the later “Hannah Montana” years has become a full-bodied delivery that Cyrus tapped when she needed to: “My Darlin’,” “Maybe You’re Right,” “Drive” and the potent encore number “Wrecking Ball.”
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