Miley Cyrus claimed that she had no intentions of causing controversy with her 2009 Teen Choice Awards performance when she danced with, what people assumed to be, a “stripper pole.”
“It wasn’t a stripper pole! It was actually just for stability! I had a heel on, guys! What do you want from me?” the singer said in a clip from her “Used To Be Young” docuseries shared on TikTok.
“Was I really gonna do my performance without dancing on top of an ice cream cart?” Cyrus asked rhetorically.
Cyrus famously performed her hit song “Party in the U.S.A.” for the first time at the teen awards show. However, she received backlash for standing on an ice cream cart and dancing while holding onto a tall silver pole.
At one point in the performance, Cyrus — who was still acting in the popular Disney show “Hannah Montana” — held onto the pole while getting low, causing many people to assume she was using the pole in a sensual manner.
The former teen pop star, now 30, faced lots of criticism from her younger audience and she even pulled up an old magazine cover that read, “Is Miley Turning into the Next Britney [Spears]?”
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“Is Miley turning into the next Britney? Hopefully! If God is good which we know she is,” she said during the docuseries clip.
Despite the initial backlash, Cyrus looked back at her first Teen Choice Award performance as “amazing” — minus her pitch being “a little off” and “the hat needed to go.”
The former Disney star sings about how she “used to be crazy” and “wild” during her rowdy teen years and early 20s in her new song, “Used To Be Young.”
Just four years later after the release of “Party In The U.S.A.,” Cyrus turned heads when she released her album “Bangerz,” which included hits like “Wrecking Ball,” “We Can’t Stop,” “F U” and “Love Money Party.”
During that same era, the “Climb” songstress also famously twerked on Robin Thicke at the VMAs, rode a wrecking ball while nude and smoked joints onstage.
Cyrus later admitted to British Vogue in June that she carried “guilt and shame” around that time period because of how her younger audience reacted to her edgier persona.
“I carried some guilt and shame around myself for years because of how much controversy and upset I really caused,” she told the outlet.
“Now that I’m an adult, I realize how harshly I was judged. I was harshly judged as a child by adults and now, as an adult, I realize that I would never harshly judge a child.”
