Miley Cyrus and the Power of Music To Change Minds on Her Single “Bass Persuades”

On “Bass Persuades”, Miley Cyrus—now just Miley—wants to inspire a mutiny. The title track of her upcoming new album revolts against shyness with dancing amnesia. You can party in the U.S.A., but the dance floor knows no borders. Forget about your problems. Forget the chaos. Just dance. But she doesn’t need to change your mind because the groove will.

Make It All Disappear

History is full of music as a great escape. “Bass Persuades” echoes Joni Mitchell’s concern in “Big Yellow Taxi”, paving over paradise, or nature. However, Cyrus delivers a different call-to-action: crank the record and forget the world is burning, for a while anyway.

Step into the scene, you won’t catch an eye,
Walk into the party like the party is mine.
Paving over pastures ’cause horses are gone,
Forgetting there’s a world when this record is on.
Ghosts run to Bermuda ’cause there’s no one to haunt,
Candy’s cut with fentanyl that nobody wants.
Spin it for a minute, make it all disappear,
If we ain’t moving, baby, baby, why are we here?

The track hails music as a temporary antidote to the tumult of current events. Rather than shout at one another, put on your red shoes and dance the blues.

And I don’t wanna change your mind,
The bass persuades.

Chaos Is King

We absorb culture differently. And depending on when you were born, some of us remember how MTV broadcast culture globally. These days, depending on one’s social media feed, various iterations of popular music are siloed by algorithms.

Cyrus alludes to this change, spots madness everywhere, and then escapes to the dance floor.

Glued your eyes to the telephone screen,
But you missed the hit without MTV.
Go analog, yeah, like a cinema, yeah,
Just look out the window and what do you see?
In the treetops, it’s a clear shot,
Yeah, chaos is king, but you know that you can’t stop, won’t stop.
New fit is a monster,
Love it so much, go hang it on a poster.

I desperately want to avoid writing the cliché that music is a universal language, but music, indeed, is a collective force. And you don’t need to understand the physics of sound to appreciate how the right melody, beat—or bass—connects to evolutionary rhythms.

Cyrus is correct. If the groove is deep enough, the bass will, as she puts it, persuade.

You feel something in the music,
You don’t know what it is.
But I can see it in your eyes,
You want to lose yourself to this. Let’s go!

Photo by Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty Images