Miley Cyrus Didn’t ‘Make a Dime’ on Bangerz Tour: ‘I Paid For It All to Make It Exactly What I Thought I and The Fans Deserved’
Miley Cyrus learned early on that if you’re going to invest, invest in yourself. As part of her ongoing “Used to Be Young” TikTok series, Miley dove into the money-losing 2014 Bangerz Tour, the surreal 78-date celebration of her hip-hop inspired album of the same name featuring the hits “We Can’t Stop” and “Wrecking Ball.”
“The Bangerz tour was an investment in myself. A lot of these ideas were kind of so outlandish that no one really wanted to support me in making these pieces,” Cyrus said of the wild show that opened with her sliding down a giant slide in the shape of her own tongue and also included a parade of furries, a life-sized puppet of Big Sean and a giant flying hot dog, among other amusements.
“So I had big puppets, oversized beds, I came out of my own face on my tongue,” Miley recalled. The trippy fantasia was cooked up by Cyrus and creative director Diane Martel, with the latter asking Miley how she wanted to end the concert each night and getting an answer she likely didn’t expect.
“[Martel] goes, ‘How would you want to end this concert?’ Like, ‘The show is so big, how do you want to end it?’ And I wanted to end it in a Truman Show reference,” the singer said of the beloved 1998 Jim Carrey movie about a mild-mannered insurance salesman who slowly begins to realize his whole live has taken place inside a reality TV series.
“So I flew out on a giant hot dog, obviously, and I left through all the clouds and the exit sign, the way Jim Carrey does, because I felt like The Truman Show was really a reflection of my life.” The singer, who, like Truman Burbank, has spent her entire life in front of the cameras, was savvy enough at that age (21) to realize that the best money she could spend to promote her passion project was on her own, admittedly quirky, vision.
“‘Why are you doing this? You’re going to do like 100 shows and not going to make any money,'” Cyrus recalled being told. “I said there’s no one I would rather invest in than myself. So I paid for it all to make it exactly what I thought I and the fans deserved.”
Watch Miley talk Bangerz tour below.
Gil Kaufman
Billboard
