Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | August 25, 2025
Some images in pop culture history are just seared into your mind, whether you like it or not. One needn’t be pleasant or coherent to be iconic. 12 years ago, while performing at the MTV Video Music Awards, Miley Cyrus wanted to ensure that we would never forget her. And she made it happen, with a little help from some teddy bears, flesh-coloured latex panties, and a skeezy R&B singer dressed as Beetlejuice.
In one of the first performances of the night, Cyrus sang her song ‘We Can’t Stop’, the debut single from her latest album Bangerz. There were giant teddies and Miley was dressed in a Chuck E Cheese-esque one-piece. She stuck out her tongue as far as it would go. Then Robin Thicke came out, styled like a formal Foot Locker manager, to sing ‘Blurred Lines.’ Miley stripped to a latex bra and panties, waved around a foam finger, and twerked against the middle-aged man. It was… well, a lot.
The Hollywood Reporter called it ‘crass.’ Rolling Stone said, ‘For lack of a better term, it was a hot mess.’ That was the general tone of reviews and social media responses. It was a trainwreck, a cringe disaster, a total misjudgement from both Cyrus and Thicke. Was Thicke even in on it? How much of it was planned? Would it kill their careers? The whole thing was a display of attention-grabbing showmanship from two of the most divisive musicians of 2013. 12 years later, however, only one of them has withstood the test of time.
Now aged 21, the former Hannah Montana was thoroughly in her ‘I’m a sexy adult’ era with this R&B-pop record. Cyrus, who had been famous for most of her life and under a Disney contract, had begun to feel disconnected from that clean teen image and wanted something she felt totally in control of. So, she intended to produce a “very adult and sexy and believable” that could incorporate dirty South hip-hop and electro-pop with lots of cheeky humour.
The album was a hit but not without some criticisms. A lot of the music and the ways it was promoted were straight-up appropriation, and the endless twerking often felt like a mean joke against Black women. Many felt the raunch was try-hard, especially once the song ‘Wrecking Ball’ came out and had Miley licking a sledgehammer for Terry Richardson. For the VMAs, she decided to combine sex with camp, and accompanying her was a performer who probably wasn’t in on the joke.
Robin Thicke was an R&B mainstay long before ‘Blurred Lines’ became a chart-topper. He had written songs for the likes of Usher and Christina Aguilera, and had production credits on albums by Brandy and Pink. He sang at the Soul Train Awards, toured with Alicia Keys, and featured on Lil Wayne records. Thicke was a sex jams kind of guy whose image was that of a great lover for one woman only, his wife Paula Patton. He was seductive, not skeezy. But for his sixth studio album, he turned to Pharrell Williams to make something a little racier.
It’s impossible not to have a strong opinion on ‘Blurred Lines.’ It’s an absolute earworm of a song that also reeks of sleaze. Bolstered by a memorable and highly meme-able video, starring Emily Ratajkowski, audiences were hooked. Was it sexist? Yeah, it was pretty gross and leering. Is the song rapey? That’s tough to dismiss. Other songs have played around with similar themes and made it seem frivolous or equal opportunity shameless. But Thicke singing ‘you the hottest b*tch in this place’ made more people shudder than moan. But it was the Summer of 2013 and ‘Blurred Lines’, while the subject of much discourse, was still the biggest song on the charts. Why not pair the ’70s sleaze with millennial pseudo-ironic raunch?
The contrast was what got people. ‘Blurred Lines’ is supposed to be in on its own joke but Thicke never sang it like that and people didn’t take it as such. Its video has a lot in common with Cyrus’s image at the time (probably because they shared a director, Diane Martel.) They were meant to be irreverent, fizzy, messy, maybe even addictive. But irony wasn’t part of Thicke’s appeal. He wrote hot love songs for the ladies. He wasn’t Tyler The Creator. So, when he was dressed like that and Miley was playing the part of a wacky party girl four lines in, it felt awkward as hell. He didn’t seem to be enjoying it, nor did it work as a contrast of styles.
In hindsight, I don’t think Cyrus wanted the VMAs performance to be truly sexy. If she had, she wouldn’t have dressed as a bear. I’m not sure Cyrus has ever necessarily been for the straight male gaze anyway. Even the ‘Wrecking Ball’ video was ridiculous, although the irony of it is hard to place when you know about the accused rapist behind the camera. Watching her twerk against Thicke got attention. It was the most tweeted-about performance of the night. Certainly, it killed off any remaining shreds of Cyrus as a tween star who purity ring-fetishising ‘concerned parents’ could claim as one of their own.
In 2017, Cyrus would admit that she felt trapped by the expectations that performance put on her career. As she told Harper’s Bazaar, ‘It became something that was expected of me. I didn’t want to show up to photo shoots and be the girl who would get my [breasts] out and stick out my tongue.’ The decision to reclaim her own image after years of a corporation deciding it for her as a kid eventually felt like another noose around her neck. ‘It should be more shocking that when I was 11 or 12, I was put in full hair and make-up, a wig, and told what to wear by a group of mostly older men’, she said. The use of twerking probably didn’t help, not because of the sexualised elements but because it felt like Black woman cosplay from a performer looking for what she saw would be ‘shocking.’
In retrospect, the VMAs might have been the absolute zenith of the Thicke moment. At an after-party for the event, Thicke was caught on-camera grabbing a fan’s behind. The following year, after 21 years together, Thicke and Patton split. Thicke decided to publicly neg his now-ex with Paula, an album he rushed out to beg for her forgiveness. It was a nightmarish fail that did nothing to quash the growing image that Thicke was a creep who wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer.’ Patton had also accused Thicke of domestic violence and drug and alcohol abuse during their custody battle. The final nail in the coffin for ‘Blurred Lines’ came when Marvin Gaye’s estate sued for copyright infringement and won. Nowadays, he’s married to someone else and is a judge on The Masked Singer.
Cyrus has only grown more popular and respected by the pop establishment. She’s a Grammy winner now and had one of the biggest hits of her career with 2023’s ‘Flowers.’ This May, she released her ninth studio album, Something Beautiful, another change in style and ambition that shows how she’s become a star who can and will do whatever she wants. Cyrus has more people in her corner these days, thanks to her candour and self-awareness. She’s been called an inspiration by artists like Chappell Roan and Lil Nas X. It’s weird to think of a 32-year-old as an elder statesperson of pop, but she’s certainly pop in the work to make it happen. Cyrus could go the distance and be a music mainstay, well beyond anything Robin Thicke ever achieved. Just stay away from the twerking, Miley.
