February 17, 2011, - 3:57 pm
Achy Breaky Boo Hoo: No Tears for Billy Ray Cyrus, Pimp Dad
I always laugh when Sean “Family Values” Hannity brags about “my good friend, Billy Ray Cyrus, a great American.” The thing is, Cyrus was not much of a dad. And he’s certainly not a great American. Not even close. But he was, indeed, a great show biz pimp. Daddy Dearest Cyrus was, after all, the one who designed for daughter, Miley Cyrus, the stripper pole to which she gyrated a couple of years ago on a Nickelodeon kids awards show. It’s that stripper pole that prompted me to start calling the Hannah Montana alter ego, “Miley Virus.”
Hannah Montana Transforms Into Hannah Chlamydia
So, now, it’s a little disingenuous to hear Pimp, er . . . Pops Cyrus whine in an interview with GQ about a TV show ruining his daughter. No, it wasn’t a TV show. It was a father, or rather someone who should have been a father to his daughter, but saw her as a personal piggy bank–a meal-ticket.
The fact is that–while we often hear about show biz kids who turn into disasters as adults–there are many more who end up normal with their heads on their shoulders. Every single Cosby kid did all right. Mayim Bialik, from TV’s “Blossom,” and Kirk Cameron, from “Growing Pains,” are fine, too. The same goes for “The Wonder Years” Fred Savage, who recently became a father (with his wife), and his co-star, Jason Hervey, who is a successful Hollywood producer. And there are so many other examples.
It’s not about whether they were in TV shows and earned a lot of cash. It’s about how they were raised and how their parents regulated and monitored their experiences in Hollywood. In the case of Miley Cyrus, Billy Ray didn’t do much of that. He readily admits in an interview that he was more of a friend to his daughter than a parent. That was the problem here, not the cute TV show in which she acted. In fact, he even used her show and its success to engineer a role for himself on it. It’s tough to be a parent when you still want to be famous and your kid daughter has the power to decide if you can be on her show.
Billy Ray Cyrus Discovers Parenting a Little Late for Miley
And it’s especially schadenfreude-esque to hear Cyrus admit his daughter’s a disaster-in-development, after years of his warring attacks on parents who complained about Miley Cyrus’ growing slutty image and rising level of bad influence on their kids. He had no problem infecting millions of young girls, for whom he knew his daughter was an idol and role model, with the results of his malpracticed parenting.
I don’t know how much money father Cyrus still has from his one hit, “Achy Breaky Heart.” But I doubt it was enough to finance the Cyrus family’s glam Hollywood life. It appears that he and divorcing wife, Tish, instead, relied on their daughter’s fame and riches to fund the Lalaland lifestyle.
And when it became clear their daughter was growing up and her child character on TV wouldn’t last forever, the Cyrus sperm and womb donors had no problem farming their daughter out to more provocative roles and clothing (or lack thereof), in addition to the previously mentioned stripper pole. But, as I pointed out, the Billy-Ray-designed Miley Cyrus ho act failed, and her last album bombed.
It’s not exactly a newsflash or rocket science that real parents parent, that they protect their kids, not pimp them out and tell them to gyrate on strippers polls on national TV. How sad that Billy Ray Cyrus doesn’t yet quite comprehend that. Even now, the Cyrus “dad” is using his daughter for publicity, as he sings his “TV Show Done Me Wrong” song–which rivals the rest of his non-hit country songs–to a popular men’s magazine, instead of a forum where it might actually be constructive, rather than attention-getting. I wouldn’t be surprised if this interview was spurred on less by a lesson learned about bad parenting and more by the possibility that millionairess Miley, now 18 and now a legal adult, has cut Pops off (or maybe put him on an allowance).
It’s probably too late to reclaim his eldest daughter and family from the trash. And Billy Ray Cyrus’ fame-whoring and daughter-pimping is at the top of the garbage heap for why she’s such a slutty-acting, bong-hit-videos-on-YouTube mess.
Tags: absentee dad, Achy Breaky Heart, Billy Ray Cyrus, Hannah Montana, kid stars, Miley Cyrus, parenting, TV stars
I tell my first cousin Lori that Miley Cyrus is a bad role model for her two young daughters.
Matthew on February 17, 2011 at 4:32 pm