Noah
I first heard about Noah Cyrus because she voiced Ponyo, which made her interesting immediately—not because of the last name she can’t escape, but because she’d been given a real role in something that mattered. You don’t get that kind of work handed to you unless your parents are famous, which automatically makes you suspicious. But she treated it seriously, talked about the environmental message in Miyazaki’s film the way someone who actually paid attention would.
That was her entry point into all this. Before that, she’d grown up with her father teaching her about music—the actual thing, not the industry. You can tell the difference when someone talks about their work. There’s no manufactured enthusiasm, no media training visible yet.
And then there’s Miley, which everyone wants to know about. They want to know if Noah’s bothered by the nude photos, the wrecking ball, the gleeful fuck-you to the Disney machine that made her sister famous. Her answer is the one that actually matters: she’s proud of her. Not defensive, not pretending she didn’t see anything. She’s proud because Miley did it with conviction, with real self-assurance. You can tell she means it. They’re different people, so they’ll make different choices, but there’s no distance between them. Just clarity.
By sixteen she was already everywhere—Instagram, Snapchat, another kid growing up with a phone instead of a childhood. But she’s deliberate about it. She talks about having complete control over what she shows, what she keeps. She even turned off comments on Instagram to shut out the people who just want to tear things down. That’s not naivety; that’s a boundary. She understands the stakes.
The music was real work. Make Me (Cry)
with Labrinth was charting. She wanted to keep making it, touring, having an actual career. Her role models were Lady Gaga and Rihanna—artists who’d actually done something meaningful. When I asked what she’d do if she became president of the world, she answered without hesitation: animal rights. Ban zoos. Ban circuses. That kind of clarity about what matters is rare at any age.
What stayed with me was how unselfconscious she was about everything. No rehearsed answers, no performance. When I asked if she was addicted to her phone like every kid her age is, she just said yeah, I’m addicted. So what. She’d give up pizza before her phone. Television didn’t matter to her—no cable in the house. But love or her phone for a hundred years? Her phone, she laughed. The hypothetical spiraled out of control.
She wasn’t trying to be cool. She just was. There’s a difference.