Miley Cyrus @ “I Am The Highway” Chris Cornell Tribute Concert – January 16th, 2019

Last night, January 16th, at The Forum in Los Angeles, California, a concert was hosted to pay homage to Soundgarden/Audioslave/Temple of the Dog frontman Chris Cornell.  Musical guests from Ziggy Marley to Metallica, Adam Levine to Perry Farrell, Gary Clark Jr. to the Melvins all graced the stage with their talents in a shared memorial for a fallen comrade and long-time industry icon.
Being a child of the 90’s as I am, I grew up with Soundgarden’s Superunknown album on constant rotation in my home.  In my teen years, I dug deeper and became intimately familiar with more Soundgarden records (Badmotorfinger and Down on the Upside most notably) as well as the stand-alone eponymous album from Soundgarden/Pearl Jam mashup, Temple of the Dog.
Let’s just say that chances are, if you’re reading this, I’m older than you, and in my time, I’ve doggedly defended my penchant for early 90s Alternative Heavy Rock (Grunge, as it would be colloquially designated) to an almost territorial degree.  I barricaded myself in my bong water-soaked bedroom with my CDs, Playstation original and did my level best to keep out or otherwise tear apart any music that smacked of mainstreamery.  Anything with a Disney label attached to it, for instance, was doomed to the hellfires of mediocrity in my opinionated glare.
So when I saw that Miley Cyrus was listed as one of the performers, my interest was piqued. Not in any derogatory or spiteful manner, mind you.  I’ve long since abandoned such one-sided viewpoints and had the painful pleasure of realizing that my beloved early 90s music scene was just as much a marketable commodity as any child actor or singer birthed from under the corporate umbrella which bears the name of a certain long-dead anti-Semite. I was genuinely interested to see how she did.
Her reputation for being a world-shaker in the Millennial sphere of influence has not escaped my attention.  It’s been everywhere. And while I have to say that some of her antics I’ve found well.. gross, how much of a hypocrite would I have to be to insist that a pop-darling-turned-sexually-open-drug-experimentalist doesn’t speak to my own notions of what it is to be “rock n’ roll”?  I’m not ready to be that old man yet.
However, there is a very playful conflict of interest inherent in the players involved, at least from an artistic standpoint.  I remember Billy Ray Cyrus. The ghost of his mullet and sideburns haunt the cobwebbed back alleys of Generation X’s collective memory.  And he was nothing less than the “Achy, breaky” Antichrist in the hearts and minds of throngs of mopey adolescents from 25-30 years ago. To have his daughter on stage aping the bodily affectations of Layne Stayley and Andy Wood in front of a crowd of thousands… I’m not sure if that would have read more as a defeat or a victory if they had known it was going to happen back in ‘92.
Either way, her performance last night was fantastic.  Putting aside my own microscopic knowledge of the vocal inflections and ad-libs (oohs and ahhs, as they are) of the song in question, “Say Hello 2 Heaven” from Temple of the Dog’s self-titled 1991 record, I have to say that she made the performance her own.  Possibly one of the most vocally demanding displays from a musical juggernaut like the late Cornell, this is not an easy song to sing.. for anybody. Any attempts to tackle Chris’s higher-range vocals were only succeeded by female performers during the concert, and even still at the limits of their own ability.
And for this, I must applaud Mrs. Hemsworth  further. Even if I initially found myself offended by a facsimile of the “Seattle look” when she first took the stage, when it came time to hit the high notes (and I mean the high, Chris Cornell high notes) she reared back and she. fucking. screamed, channeling a fair amount of Janis Joplin in the process – not the kind of behavior I would have suspected as even possible from a product of The Walt Disney Company.  And, truth be told, I liked it. It wasn’t a perfect mimicry of the vocals on the album, but how would it have been special if it had been?
Of course I’m left with mixed feelings about the whole thing, reconciling a previous lifetime’s worth of angst and iconoclasm takes time, but from as objective of a perspective as I can muster, I gotta give props.  She killed it. And in my mind’s eye, I take a perverse satisfaction in picturing a 34-year-old Billy Ray Cyrus experiencing an inexplicable discomfort in his testicles so many years ago, the product of which was finally birthed onstage at the Forum, 26 years later.