In a different reality, a crazy music video with Madonna, Nelly, and other celebrities doing wheelies and fighting in the mud would have completed Miley Cyrus’ legendary Bangerz era. Sadly, that is not the universe in which we live.
The “Flowers” singer stated in an interview on the Every Single Album podcast, which was broadcast Thursday, June 5, that she had been determined to get a star-studded group of pals together to film a wild music video for the song “4×4” from her 2013 smash hit album, which never became a single. Cyrus remarked, “I had everyone lined up already.” “Nelly… Miranda Cosgrove, Madonna was willing to do the video.
She added, chuckling, “This was before Taylor Swift had a lot of famous people in her crew.” “I initially had friends who were well-known. That’s what I wanted to do. My squad was really, really awesome, and I had a f–king squad.
She joked that RCA, her label at the time, blocked the idea because they didn’t want her “talking about a pit bull [and] piss” in a song they were pushing. Madonna and Miranda Kerr were mud wrestlers, the Grammy winner recalled nostalgically. “I thought, ‘I’m going to get all these girls, all these supermodels, all these Victoria’s Secret models, and all these pop icons to come to my dad’s farm, get in the back of 4x4s, and we’re going to do doughnuts and mud wrestling.'”
Even without a “4×4” video, Cyrus’s “Bangerz” album is still one of his best-selling ones to date. Her first-ever No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100, “Wrecking Ball,” followed quickly by “We Can’t Stop” at No. 2, was the result of the album, which debuted at the top of the Billboard 200.
After signing with RCA for a three-album run, the “Party in the U.S.A.” singer released Younger Now in 2017 and Plastic Hearts in 2020 on the Sony Music label. She signed a new contract with Columbia Records in 2021, and on May 30th, her new album, Something Beautiful, was published.
Cyrus mentioned another instance in which she and her previous label weren’t quite in agreement later in the podcast episode. She claims that she never would have included a particular pop celebrity on the tune “Prisoner,” which is from Plastic Hearts. Cyrus stated bluntly, “I don’t mean to disparage Dua Lipa, but it just doesn’t fit with the album.”
The singer went on to say of Dua Lipa, “She would have been much better on something like [2023 LP] Endless Summer Vacation.” “You can imagine how amazing she would have been on ‘River,’ but she would have been fantastic on ‘Wildcard,’ too.”
In order to give the LP some commercial energy, Cyrus explained, her team from RCA brought in some “medicinal Dua” because they weren’t totally sure how Plastic Hearts would fare. “They essentially said, ‘Oh, great, let’s spray a little Dua Lipa on this piece of s–t album she gave us,'” Cyrus said.