"Me and Robin [Thicke,] the whole time said, 'You know we're about to make history right now.'" 
 
 In an exclusive clip provided to MTV News by a crew filming a previously announced documentary, Miley Cyrus has addressed, for the first time, reaction to her performance at last Sunday's Video Music Awards. 
 
 Cyrus had one goal in mind when she agreed to perform: to give folks something to talk about... not just now, but for years to come. 
 
 And so far, it looks like she's accomplished that goal. In the days since the VMAs, her daring performance of "We Can't Stop" has dominated discussion. It's been subject to criticisms and critiques, called "hyper-sexualized," "the nadir of American Civilization," "an exaggerated spectacle meant to subvert pop-culture sexism," and just about everything in between. 
 
 Yet, it also drew praise for embodying the signature style and swagger of the VMAs, and for boldly going to places pop has rarely dared. It was a polarizing performance, one that made parents nervous and had pundits' pulses pounding ... yet, also thrilled her fans, inspired no shortage of memorable memes and bested Beyonce's Super Bowl mark for most tweets per minute. 
 
 In short, it became a moment, one that instantly told you which side of the generational divide you stood on. 
 
 And because of that, "We Can't Stop" may very well be on its way to joining the ranks of other VMA performances that touched nerves, rankled reactionaries and have come to define a time and place in pop: Think Madonna's iconic "Like A Virgin" or Britney's "Oops ... I Did It Again," performances that were strident, defiant and certainly scandalous in context. 
 
 But while those stars learned there was a price that came with provocation, Miley isn't about to back down. She did what she came to do, nailed it, and feels great about it. 
 
 "What's amazing is I think now, we're three days later and people are still talking about it. They're over thinking it," she says. "You're thinking about it more than I thought about it when I did it. Like, I didn't even think about it 'cause that's just me." 
 
 And, to that point, Cyrus isn't going to let her detractors hold her back. She's doing things her way, defining her career on her own terms. After all, though she may be just 20 years old, she certainly knows a thing or two about pop history. 
 
 "I don't pay attention to the negative because I've seen this play out so many times," Miley asks, "How many times have we seen this play out in pop music?" 
 
 "Madonna's done it. Britney's done it. Every VMA performance, that's what you're looking for; you're wanting to make history." ||||| Miley Cyrus put on her best "look at me, I'm wild" act at Sunday's Video Music Awards, performing "We Can't Stop" (her take on the syrupy strip club anthems re-popularized as of late by Rihanna, a resurgent Juicy J and a host of other black acts) and fumbling her way through an instantly polarizing smorgasbord of lip-licking, wannabe twerking and (black) ass slapping. 
 
 All the elements of nu-Cyrus that critics have called foul on in recent weeks were on display: black people used as props (see above), black cultural signifiers like twerking used as a means of connoting that Miley's now wild and dangerous, and little in the way of new or evocative imagery. 
 
 I've written about Miley's race problems (or, racism, depending on how you take it), but here's a quick summary: She's gone around telling people she wants to make music that "sounds black," that she likes "hood music" but isn't "a white Nicki Minaj," and most recently proclaimed that she's "not a white ratchet girl." Extending her master class on racial identity to social media, she told her followers that she is, indeed, aware of her skin color. 
 
 The 20-year-old's VMAs performance marks another chapter not only in Miley's reckless use of black culture as proof that she's subversive and no longer a Disney star, but of the entertainment industry's casual co-signing of her team's idiocy. How did no one, for example, think that having voluptuous, black backup dancers figure as meat for Cyrus' slapping was offensive? 
 
 Well, some people noticed. Audience reaction shots during Cyrus performance revealed less-than-amused takes from One Direction, Drake and Rihanna (the latter, who knows something about being provocative, seemed hilariously bored), and a number of the biggest American cultural critics have bashed the performance. 
 
 Writing on Vulture, Jody Rosen calls it "a minstrel show routine" and says "her act tipped over into what we may as well just call racism": 
 
 Cyrus is annexing working-class black "ratchet" culture, the potent sexual symbolism of black female bodies, to the cause of her reinvention: her transformation from squeaky-clean Disney-pop poster girl to grown-up hipster-provocateur. (Want to wipe away the sickly-sweet scent of the Magic Kingdom? Go slumming in a black strip club.) Cyrus may indeed feel a cosmic connection to Lil' Kim and the music of "the hood." But the reason that these affinities are coming out now, at the VMAs and elsewhere, is because it's good for business. 
 
 Over at the New York Times, Jon Caramanica noted that "this was a banner year for clumsy white appropriation of black culture," and ripped "the shambolic, trickster-esque performance by Ms. Cyrus, to whom no one has apparently said 'no' for the last six months or so." 
 
 In the pre-show telecast, red carpet host Sway asked Miley how she would follow up wild moments from previous pop acts like Madonna and Britney Spears. Miley seemed to bristle at the comparison to the (white) stars who came before her -- she was, after all, walking the carpet with Mike Will, a hip hop producer -- and promised "something crazier than the kiss." Whether or not she delivered is up for the lamest debate of all time, but let's not forget that even Madonna, Britney and Christina Aguilera's 2003 lip-lock was actually just some straight women playing bi-curious for the gratification of a mostly straight audience. 
 
 Of course, it's hardly new to say nothing is new in pop -- Beyonce's cribbed a healthy chunk of her career from subcultures and the words "Lady Gaga" and "Madonna" are basically superglued to one another. But try replacing the word "straight" with "white" and "bi-curious" with "black" and you've arrived at 2013 version. The formula, it seems, for supposedly "wild" but ultimately just uninspired and tacky performances at the VMAs hasn't changed much in 10 years. 
 
 Loading Slideshow Miley Cyrus 
 
 Katy Perry in Emanuel Ungaro 
 
 Lady Gaga in Prabal Gurung 
 
 Selena Gomez in Atelier Versace 
 
 Taylor Swift in Hervé Léger By Max Azria 
 
 Rita Ora in Alexandre Vauthier Couture 
 
 Ciara in Givenchy 
 
 Ellie Goulding in Brian Atwood 
 
 Miley Cyrus in Dolce & Gabbana 
 
 Katy Perry in Emanuel Ungaro 
 
 Robin Thicke 
 
 Erin Wasson in Alexandre Vauthier Couture 
 
 Naya Rivera in Vintage Paco Rabanne 
 
 Lady Gaga 
 
 Adam Lambert 
 
 Lady Gaga 
 
 Rihanna in Rihanna for River Island 
 
 Drake 
 
 Lady Gaga 
 
 Jennifer Hudson in Christian Dior 
 
 Shailene Woodley in Emilio Pucci 
 
 Shailene Woodley in Emilio Pucci and Miles Teller 
 
 Robin Thicke and Paula Patton 
 
 Wiz Khalifa 
 
 Iggy Azalea in Emilio Pucci 
 
 Holland Roden in Naeem Khan 
 
 2 Chainz in Versace 
 
 Lil' Kim 
 
 Riff Raff 
 
 Chilli 
 
 Coco Rocha in Fausto Puglisi 
 
 Daft Punk 
 
 Kanye West 
 
 Justin Timberlake 
 
 Ryan Lewis and Macklemore 
 
 Mary Lambert 
 
 Ashanti 
 
 Willow Smith in G Star and Jaden Smith in Alexander Wang 
 
 Joan Smalls in Viktor & Rolf 
 
 Allison Williams in Valentino 
 
 Grimes 
 
 Jemima Kirke 
 
 DJ Cassidy 
 
 Sarah Hyland in Marchesa 
 
 Kendrick Lamar 
 
 Jillian Rose Reed 
 
 Flying Lotus 
 
 Tomo Milicevic, Shannon Leto and Jared Leto 
 
 Jermaine Fowler 
 
 J Woww 
 
 Ronnie Magro and Sammi Giancola 
 
 Follow Kia Makarechi on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Kia_Mak ||||| ELLE UK celebrates its 30th anniversary with our boldest issue yet; covering the end of gender, fluid sexuality, and the trans revolution. 
 
 And who better to be the face of such a daring new issue than Miley Cyrus - pop star, provocateur, LGBT activist (and the sure to be controversial host of this weekend's VMAs). 
 
 In the issue Miley, 22, talks about her role as a gender activist and a politically engaged young woman, on a mission to make the world more tolerant, and gender and sexual identities less fixed. 
 
 Miley discusses why she decided to use her power, and popularity, to do something important by setting up her charity The Happy Hippie Foundation. ‘I was kind of embarrassed that I got paid money to shake my ass in a teddy bear costume,' she says, 'I should not be worth the amount I am while people live on the streets.’ 
 
 As a provocateur she's acutely aware of how to command attention to get her voice heard, ‘If you get your tits out, and they are all looking, then you can use that space to say something and get them to listen,’ she continues later. 
 
 She then goes on to discuss her opinions on gender, and relationships saying, ‘I’m very open about it – I’m pansexual. But I’m not in a relationship. I’m 22, I’m going on dates, but I change my style every two weeks, let alone who I’m with.’ 
 
 Read the fascinating interview in full in this month’s issue of ELLE Magazine. 
 
 The cover is shot by Matt Irwin and styled by Alison Edmond. Miley wears a white Emporio Armani suit and Rachel Boston earrings. 
 
 Download The October issue of ELLE to your iPad via the App Store. And don't forget to subscribe to ELLE today so that you never miss another issue. 
 
 Music: Fidlar "Max can't surf" ||||| Last summer, when "Wrecking Ball" earned her a VMA for Video of the Year, Cyrus sent 22-year-old Jesse Helt -- one of nearly 114,000 homeless men and women presently living in California -- onstage to palm the statue. A year had passed since she'd tugged on a flesh-colored latex bikini and intimated digital intercourse with a foam finger while Robin Thicke, bedecked in Beetlejuice stripes, stood smirking behind his aviators. The 2014 performance was less jubilant, if significantly more heartfelt. Helt, reading from a small piece of paper, recounted his plight. When the camera cut to Cyrus in the audience, wearing a black leather ensemble and perched, precariously, on some kind of partition, her eyes were glinting, hot. "I felt like I was witnessing a modern-day 'I Have a Dream,' and it had nothing to do with me," she says. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Happy Hippie is designed as a corrective to what Cyrus understands as immoral politicking, the sort that pits outliers as pariahs and favors an archaic status quo. The foundation treats at-risk kids with art and animal therapies, two proven balms that have been instrumental in Cyrus' own self-care. Although she was raised Christian, Cyrus maintains a particular contempt for fundamentalist lawmakers who rally against this sort of progressive, potentially life-saving change. "Those people [shouldn't] get to make our laws," she says. Those people -- the ones who believe that, say, Noah's Ark was a real seafaring vessel. "That's fucking insane," she says. "We've outgrown that fairy tale, like we've outgrown fucking Santa and the tooth fairy." 
 
 
 
 
 
 Eventually, she says, the problem of homelessness became impossible for her to ignore. "I can't drive by in my fucking Porsche and not fucking do something," she says. "I see it all day: people in their Bentleys and their Rolls and their Ubers, driving past these vets who have fought for our country, or these young women who have been raped." She pauses. "I was doing a show two nights ago, and I was wearing butterfly nipple pasties and butterfly wings. I'm standing there with my tits out, dressed like a butterfly. How the fuck is that fair? How am I so lucky?" 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Cyrus grew up outside of Nashville with her brothers and sisters on a 500-acre farm where, she says, she began a formative practice of getting up early in the morning and riding a dirt bike around in the nude. In the year of her birth, her father, Billy Ray, became briefly, colossally famous for wearing a mullet and performing a country song about getting dumped. Dolly Parton is her godmother. ("She taught me how to treat people well," Cyrus says.) In 2006, Cyrus was cast in the title role of the Disney Channel's hugely popular Hannah Montana, the gig that would handily propel her to mega-stardom. Cyrus grew up outside of Nashville with her brothers and sisters on a 500-acre farm where, she says, she began a formative practice of getting up early in the morning and riding a dirt bike around in the nude. In the year of her birth, her father, Billy Ray, became briefly, colossally famous for wearing a mullet and performing a country song about getting dumped. Dolly Parton is her godmother. ("She taught me how to treat people well," Cyrus says.) In 2006, Cyrus was cast in the title role of the Disney Channel's hugely popular, the gig that would handily propel her to mega-stardom. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Although her parents' marriage has been, at times, tempestuous -- each has filed for divorce and subsequently called off the proceedings -- Cyrus is wholly enamored with both. She calls her dad a "cool hippie psycho freak," which, in Cyrus' world, is praise of the highest order. Her mom, Tish, a producer and actress, is "super cosmic" and "a complete optimist, the fucking cheerleader of the universe." There is deep affection in Cyrus' voice, even when she refers to them again, later, as "conservative-ass motherfuckers." 
 
 
 
 
 
 She says she has come to consider her own sexuality -- even her own gender identification -- fluid. "I am literally open to every single thing that is consenting and doesn't involve an animal and everyone is of age. Everything that's legal, I'm down with. Yo, I'm down with any adult -- anyone over the age of 18 who is down to love me," she says. "I don't relate to being boy or girl, and I don't have to have my partner relate to boy or girl." She says she's had romantic entanglements with women that were just as serious as the ones (Liam Hemsworth, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Nick Jonas) that ended up in Us Weekly. "I've had that," she admits. "But people never really looked at it, and I never brought it into the spotlight." 
 
 
 
 
 
 She recalls confessing to her mother, at age 14, that she had romantic feelings toward women. "I remember telling her I admire women in a different way. And she asked me what that meant. And I said, I love them. I love them like I love boys," she says. "And it was so hard for her to understand. She didn't want me to be judged and she didn't want me to go to hell. But she believes in me more than she believes in any god. I just asked for her to accept me. And she has." These days, Cyrus only wants to grant others the same clemency. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Since leaving the Disney cocoon for a pop career, Cyrus has accrued equal amounts of public adoration and derision. At times the naysayers have been loud, nearly gleeful. There is, for example, a four-minute YouTube montage titled "Miley Cyrus Worst Moments" that features her jokily simulating various sex acts on her buddies, smoking alone in a parked car and crying while singing. To which I say: who among us has not had that kind of day? Since leaving the Disney cocoon for a pop career, Cyrus has accrued equal amounts of public adoration and derision. At times the naysayers have been loud, nearly gleeful. There is, for example, a four-minute YouTube montage titled "Miley Cyrus Worst Moments" that features her jokily simulating various sex acts on her buddies, smoking alone in a parked car and crying while singing. To which I say: who among us has not had that kind of day? 
 
 
 
 
 
 There's also a sizable amount of twerking, the move for which Cyrus is infamous: hands on knees, back pitched into a perfect arc, buttocks outstretched, cheeks gyrating so wildly they appear to be operating independent of the rest of her body. It is strange, now, to think this was ever considered subversive. With Cyrus, there were initial rumblings of cultural misappropriation -- that she was not entitled to perform this dance, this way, with the partners she chose -- but then twerking got cute, trickled down, became one of those buzzwords local news anchors over-enunciate with forced bemusement while inwardly fantasizing about the first scotch of the evening. 
 
 
 
 
 
 What is less discussed is that Cyrus is a very good pop singer and occasionally a great one. She has a porous, burly voice that recalls Rumours-era Stevie Nicks -- the kind that's good for communicating particular strains of duress (specifically: what it feels like to love too hard). But what she has managed to do better than nearly anyone -- save, perhaps, Andrew W.K. -- is legitimize partying as an ideological choice. In Cyrus' hands, "La da dee da dee / We like to par-tee" becomes a resonant generational credo. That she has been persecuted for these things -- or at least openly mocked -- makes her commitment to love-yourself-no-matter-what activism even more poignant. 
 
 
 
 
 
 As for the next record, she's moving forward on her own terms, despite some nail-biting from her camp: "They're like, 'Don't make it too weird, don't make it avant-garde; you can't go from Miley to Björk!'" She's recording at all hours in a studio she recently built out of her garage in Los Angeles. "I don't have to have writers, I don't have to have fuckin' producers in there. Mike Will will text me a beat, and I'll go in my studio and work on it by myself." She says she's been listening to the Flaming Lips "almost exclusively." (Lips frontman Wayne Coyne, whom she calls "the most closest fucking human in my life," is a recent collaborator.) Also a little Gucci Mane. A little Waylon. 
 
 
 
 
 
 For Cyrus, it's less about renouncing her past than imagining a wild new future, one in which people are free to buck expectations and live whatever kind of life feels truest to them. She remains refreshingly cognizant, meanwhile, of everything that's left for her to learn. Which sounds unremarkable, maybe, but is anomalous among people for whom all the traditional signifiers of success (fame, adulation, profit) have been realized. It gives her a specific charm -- an uncommon openness. 
 
 
 
 
 
 I believe her when she says she's the least judgmental person ever. "As long as you're not hurting anyone," she says, "your choices are your choices."
– Miley Cyrus has a coming out of sorts in her new Elle UK cover interview: "I'm very open about it—I'm pansexual. But I'm not in a relationship. I'm 22, I'm going on dates, but I change my style every two weeks, let alone who I'm with." What is pansexual, you might ask? Urban Dictionary defines it as "like bisexuality, but even more fluid," noting that pansexual people "can love sexuality in many forms. ... A pansexual person can love not only the traditional male and female genders, but also transgendered, androgynous, and gender fluid people." Cyrus, who is hosting this weekend's VMAs, also gave a recent interview to the New York Times in which she addresses the 2013 VMAs—you know, the one where she twerked all over Robin Thicke. "I got so much of the heat for it, but that's just being a woman," she says. "[Thicke] acted like he didn't know that was going to happen. You were in rehearsals! You knew exactly what was going to happen. And he was actually the one that approved my outfit, so I thought that was very funny. He wanted me as naked as possible, because that's how his video [for 'Blurred Lines'] was." She notes that the whole thing shouldn't have been so controversial: "It wasn't shocking at all." Click to see what she had to say about Nicki Minaj.