No Net, No Bra

I remember when Miley was the baseline transgressive pop star—the one who’d twerk on Robin Thicke at the VMAs like she was trying to start a religion, who posed with her cunt out and a strap-on in some legendary photoshoot, who announced she was pansexual like she’d solved something the rest of us were still confused about. For a minute there, she was the thing that made parents lose their minds and gave the internet an actual reason to care about celebrity news.

Then she was gone, or seemed to be. Some years of being less crazy, of announcing she was growing up, of becoming whatever it was she was supposed to become. But it didn’t stick. When she came back, it was like she’d never left at all. She was talking about her boyfriend’s dick on interviews, posting her ass in the Nothing Breaks Like a Heart video like it was just a casual Friday. And that’s what brought her to SNL with Mark Ronson to perform the same song, wearing a jacket that was barely a jacket. No net underneath it. No bra. Just a piece of fabric and the live broadcast hovering above it.

The whole room was holding its breath. The censors had their fingers on the button, waiting for one of her famous nipples to break free on national television. The risk was the entire point. Not the song, not Mark Ronson, not the music at all—just the possibility that it would all fall apart on camera. And Miley was completely aware of it. She rode that edge exactly as far as she could go, professional enough to stay in control but reckless enough to make it actually matter. By the end of the performance, nothing had spilled out, but everyone had been gripping their seats anyway. That was the whole fucking point.