Way to kill it, Milez. Your VMA performance put the Internet in traction, enraging liberals with its dicey racial burlesque and scandalizing conservatives with its twerking-toward-Bethlehem decadence. You've taken raging-bull control of your sexuality, even if it has often looked like LBJ taking control of our policy in Vietnam. And now you've sealed the deal with the Rihanna-meets-Gaga-meets-Pink-meets-Britney party grenade of a record your special moment merits.

Bangerz is the sound of Hannah Montana gone Miami Vice. "You think I'm strange, bitch?/Shit's bananas like a fuckin' 'rangutan, bitch," she rhymes in a sketchy hip-hop drawl on "Do My Thang." It's strange but it's also traditional: Her Disney-steeped voice never takes a back seat to the wide-ranging production (from the likes of Pharrell, Will.i.am and Dr. Luke), and Billy Ray's daughter rocks a country vocal during several tracks. Some skeptics – let's call them haters – might argue that Cyrus isn't wholly comfortable in her new dirty/crazy persona. But that's part of the strange charm: "We Can't Stop" undercuts wild-child woo-hoo with dark, uneasy sonic textures, and ballad crushers like "Wrecking Ball" ride the hunger and confusion that make great coming-of-age pop. "I just started living," she sings on the starkly beautiful album opener, "Adore You." There's as much terror as power in that realization. That's what makes it stick.

“Respect”

Aretha Franklin went into Atlantic Records' New York studio on Valentine’s Day, 1967, with the idea to remake the then-two-year-old Otis Redding track “Respect.” Producer Jerry Wexler brought in musicians from Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and celebrated sax man King Curtis; Aretha’s sisters, Carolyn and Erma, provided backing vocals; Arif Mardin arranged and Tom Dowd engineered. Mardin summed up the feeling of the day: “I have been in many studios in my life, but there was never a day like that. It was like a festival. Everything worked just right.” Aretha and Carolyn Franklin came up with the idea to spell out the word respect in the bridge and to add the “sock it to me” chant at the end. “I fell off my chair when I heard that!” said Dowd. To clarify, that often-misunderstood line is “R-E-S-P-E-C-T, take care, T.C.B.,” where T.C.B. stands for “take care of business.”