Here's the story, of a lovely lady ... and she can't stop, she won't stop. Miley Cyrus is obviously everywhere you look these days, and Tuesday night she teamed with Jimmy Fallon, late-night TV's musical magician, for another buzzworthy performance.
Occupying the center square in a "Brady Bunch"-style video, Cyrus performed an a cappella version of her hit "We Can't Stop" with Fallon and The Roots singing from other blocks. Questlove kicked it all off with the deep-voiced intro to the song: "It's our party we can do what we want ... ."
Two and a half minutes later, after clicking on yet another Miley Cyrus link to listen to a song we've heard way too many times, we're left shaking our heads. How does Jimmy Fallon keep making us fall for singers and songs we thought we'd given up on?
If you can get beyond the twerking and the tongue and the T&A (thanks, Terry), you have to recognize the talent when Miley's voice rises above it all. Some of the responses on the YouTube video above speak to that: "I forget she can actually sing," and "DAMN IT DAMN IT DAMN IT ... I actually liked it a lot" were the top two comments on Wednesday morning.
Credit Fallon and his house band for always putting a non-foam finger on what it takes to make us watch and listen. Remember "Call Me Maybe"? Carly Rae Jepsen got a get-out-of-overplayed-jail card for life by performing it with kids instruments on "Late Night." Robin Thicke, who escaped most of the scorn of Cyrus' MTV VMAs fallout, had his "Blurred Lines" hit blaring all summer. Fallon helped redirect our boredom.
Cyrus dropped her new "Bangerz" album this week, hosted "Saturday Night Live" and performed on TODAY. In the previous weeks she's posed pretty much naked, lobbed Twitter insults at a letter-writing Sinead O'Connor, and ridden a "Wrecking Ball" into the video record books. The VMAs hoopla still has traction going on two months later. But, as Cyrus sings in "We Can't Stop": "Forget your haters, because somebody loves ya."
A little love from Fallon and company is proven to go a long way.
