http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/miley-cyruss-creepy-return-to-wholesomeness

As Zeba Blay pointed out on the Huffington Post, Cyrus’s casual trying-on and discarding of black culture is a function of extraordinary privilege. That she has essentially scrubbed her music and image of any hints of the hip-hop and R. & B. she once lauded and imitated makes her previous embrace of those genres feel disingenuous, if not sinister.

The whole good-girl routine would feel like a sendup—a comment on the pliability of persona, or on pop costuming, both literal and figurative, or on our racially polarized political climate—if that kind of commentary were Cyrus’s thing. But it’s not—when I spoke to her in 2014 (back then, she and Hemsworth were done, she was dating a woman, and had taken to sticking her tongue out all the time), I was struck by how earnest she seemed about everything. She pulls from a seemingly bottomless font of sincerity; on the telephone, she would periodically get so riled up I’d have to ask her to stop pressing the phone to her face because all I could hear was beeping from the buttons.