Miley Cyrus Sings Nine Inch Nails As Pop Songs In New Black Mirror
Who would’ve thought that 2019 would give us a whole lot of connections between Nine Inch Nails and the Cyrus family? Because that’s happening. For the past nine weeks, the #1 single in America has been Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus’ “Old Town Road,” a song built from a sample of an old Nine Inch Nails instrumental. And today, we get an episode of Black Mirror in which Miley Cyrus remakes a few NIN tracks, reimagining them as glossy and vacuous pop anthems.
Today, Netflix has three new episodes of Black Mirror, the intense anthology show about the different ways that technology can twist our brains into unnatural shapes. As previously reported, one of those episodes is called Rachel, Jack And Ashley Too and it stars Miley Cyrus as a struggling pop star (which is consistent with past Miley Cyrus acting gigs) who lends her voice to a robotic personal assistant (which is not). But what we didn’t know is that the episode features Cyrus as a giant onstage hologram, singing satirical plastic-pop versions of Nine Inch Nails songs. Toward the end of the episode, we see Cyrus remaking “Happiness In Slavery” and “Head Like A Hole” in her character’s image.
As The Independent reports, Black Mirror creator Charlie Booker says that the show got enthusiastic permission from Trent Reznor himself:
Actually, every song that [Miley Cyrus] performs in this, they’re all Nine Inch Nails songs that we adapted into pop standards. That was actually one thing that was in the script early on — that we had to get permission from Trent Reznor to do that, to re-write some of his tracks as upbeat pop songs…
It was via email, and he was really happy, like, pretty quickly. He wanted to see the script, and I got to re-write his lyrics in a chirpy way…
I’m not the best lyricist in the world. In the first thing, she’s singing, “I’m stoked on ambition and verve,” instead of “you’re going to get what you deserve.”
You can watch that episode of Black Mirror here and hear the “Head Like A Hole” flip below. Cyrus’ new EP She Is Coming came out this past Friday.