I’ll admit it: I was once a die-hard Hannah Montana fan. I waited five hours outside of the San Jose Convention Center to see a free Hannah Montana concert. I joined a Hannah Montana fan club to get an advanced-sale ticket for her next show. I once even owned two Hannah Montana shirts. In my defense, I grew out of the Miley Cyrus spell pretty quickly — OK, it lasted until I graduated high school. When the summer before my freshman year of college rolled around and the April 2008 issue of Vanity Fair featured a sheet-dressed Miley on its cover, I was pretty much done. However, the Miley train was at full speed, and the heart of the Cyrus family was ‘achy breaky.’

Although the ‘Hannah Montana’ television show ended more than a month ago, Miley has made her name more prominent than ever. Once again, Miley’s celebrity status is at the expense of her father. In the March 2011 issue of GQ Magazine, Billy Ray Cyrus, Miley’s father and official scapegoat, expressed how difficult it’s become to father Miley. It now seems like everyone is on Miley’s side.

In the interview, Billy Ray said the ‘Hannah Montana’ show cost him his family’s normalcy. ‘Heck, yeah. I’d erase it all in a second,’he said. But hindsight is 20/20 and such remarks are media gold.

So how does America’s famed daddy’s girl reply? She says Billy Ray is just jealous and bans him from appearing on ‘The View’ following the article’s release.

Though I’m not arguing Billy Ray can successfully pull the ‘victim of Hollywood’ card in the case of his now-fragmented father-daughter relationship, I am saying Billy Ray is not 100 percent deserving of US Weekly’s March 7 cover headline, ‘Destroyed by Daddy.’ Billy Ray’s claim that Satan is attacking his family is more than outlandish. However, he’s a man in crisis looking for justification,and his morals won’t turn him onto weed — I mean the legal salvia.

All in all, the Cyrus family’s spotlight is pretty much over. Miley has already exhausted the gamut of social scandals. Her latest single, ‘I Can’t Be Tamed,’ foreshadows a sex tape, which is all we’re really missing at this point. Billy Ray already made his has-been appearance on ‘Dancing with the Stars.’ The world already has enough father-daughter drama, thanks to Lindsay and Michael Lohan. The only benefit of the Cyrus drama is that it feeds material for ‘The Miley Cyrus Show’ on ‘Saturday Night Live.’ So between the pole dancing and the underage drinking, she really is just being Miley.

Amanda Abbott is a junior geography and information management and technologies major. Her column appears occasionally, and she can be reached at aeabbott@syr.edu.

Published on February 27, 2011 at 12:00 pm