I had one main concern about bringing my grade school-age daughter to see Miley Cyrus at the House of Blues on the Sunset Strip, where she performed a show streamed live on the Internet celebrating the release of her "adult-themed" album "Can't Be Tamed." I was worried that the show might be too loud. So we made sure to pack the earplugs before heading to the concert, and we sat on the floor and ate a grilled cheese sandwich before America's latest sexual menace took the stage and entertained us for an hour.

Does my lax parental attitude shock you? Try to consider this with a clear head. Cyrus is currently surviving Scarlet Letter levels of reproach for wearing costumes not much skimpier than what many elementary dance schools hawk to their prepubescent students, imitating Adam Lambert in a video and miming a kiss with a female dancer onstage -- a reference to a form of exploration quite common among high school girls.

My daughter has heard jokes as suggestive as anything Cyrus offered Monday night at kids' movies such as "Madagascar," and saw racier images on the billboards hovering above Barham Boulevard on the drive to the club. Sexual display and broad innuendo run rampant in the forest of images and references in which she's growing up; that's part of contemporary life, and my job as a mom is to help her navigate it while developing self-respect and good sense.

I also believe in bodily joy, which is something pop music has always provided me. Miley Cyrus, product of the Disney machine that she is, projects more explosive happiness in her hits than cold Britney or calculated (if admirable) Gaga offer, and she's more of a tomboy than Taylor, whose princess act I find grating, though I admit that the politic blond is, at this point, a better songwriter than her more uncensored friend.

Hannah Montana wasn't too much of a hit in our house -- my kid and her friends all prefer the snappier iCarly, and SpongeBob rules supreme. We never saw Cyrus' movies. But we like her hits. "7 Things" kicks foolish-boy butt with a forgiving heart; "The Climb" shows her godmother Dolly's influence. And "Party in the U.S.A."? You haven't really heard that song until a back seat full of kindergarteners has sung it to you. 

So I didn't hesitate a bit when the chance arose to make this review assignment a mother-daughter date. I wasn't alone; the Cyrus show was initially planned as an 18-and-over event, but many concertgoers complained (including plenty of VIP's, judging by rows of sparkle-drenched tweens and their little sisters lining the balcony) and, day of show, it was announced that youngsters would be admitted.

Did you know this? We didn't. Is the "Party" in "Party In The U.S.A." actually the Communist Party? Is "Fly On The Wall" an Orwellian nightmare of federal government wiretaps? Or does BigHollywood.com need to re-calibrate its pop culture tin-foil helmets a bit?   

-August Brown

Hat tip -- Yglesias

Miley Cyrus' "The Climb" helped her cross over into a Nashville audience, but it won't net her a Grammy. The song has been removed from contention at the 2010 Grammy Awards because it was determined that the tune was not written specifically for the film "Hannah Montana: The Movie."

The slot then goes to the song that's next in line, in terms of votes, and that would be Karen O and the Kids' "All Is Love" from "Where the Wild Things Are." The film's director, Spike Jonze, broke the news, posting an e-mail of congrats from an Interscope employee. 

Over the last decade, Hakeem Seriki  has lived up to one-half of his stage name.

After dominating the iTunes charts, winning a Grammy Award in 2007 and nurturing his music label on Universal Records, Chamillionaire certainly has money in the bank.

But the rapper is fulfilling his self-professed transformation. In chameleon-like fashion, he appears to be changing -- from feared underground-rap up-and-comer to a technology-consumed geek.

Like many celebrities, Chamillionaire has taken to Twitter. He uses the service to promote things such as his new single, "Good Morning," which shot up  iTunes when it was released Tuesday.

He spends a great deal of time on Twitter, conversing directly with fans and sending dozens of tweets some days. That time commitment is one of the reasons Miley Cyrus says she ditched Twitter.

Perhaps surprisingly, the platinum-selling rapper is a regular at technology conferences. He showed up at Digital Hollywood last year and sat on the panel of judges at TechCrunch50 last month. Pop & Hiss met up with Chamillionaire a few weeks ago at 140: The Twitter Conference in Los Angeles, where the rapper participated in panels the first day and, unlike most celebs, returned the second day to listen.

Looking around the room, Chamillionaire, with his backward cap, T-shirt and gold chain necklace, isn't hard to pick out from the sharply dressed twenty- and thirtysomethings. We predict the vast majority have Jack Johnson on their iPods.

Why is Chamillionaire here?

A fast-rising country superstar and a fallen pop icon dominate the nominees for the 2009 American Music Awards. Taylor Swift, who was the bestselling artist of 2008, leads all nominees for the fan-voted gala with six, including recognition in the artist of the year field. Yet in major categories she'll be up against sentimental favorite Michael Jackson, who has dominated sales and headlines since his death June 25.

Jackson received five nominations, including artist of the year, favorite pop/rock album, favorite soul/R&B artist and favorite soul/R&B album. Unlike the industry-voted Grammy Awards, the American Music Awards base their nominations on sales and radio data from Nielsen. Expect the American Music Awards to play out as a tribute of sorts to Jackson, allowing his 2003 greatest hits package "Number Ones" to score a nod for favorite album, where it will compete against Lady Gaga's "The Fame" and Swift's "Fearless."

The American Music Awards will air live for the East Coast from downtown's Nokia Theatre on ABC at 8 p.m. Nov. 22. The awards are determined by onling voting from fans.

After Jackson's death, his "Number Ones" surged to the top of the charts. It sold more than 440,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan, in the 10 days following the star's death. It may very well end up as 2009's top-selling album. Jackson was featured heavily on the first-ever American Music Awards broadcast in 1974, and has a total of 20 American Music Awards trophies as a solo artist, including one for artist of the century, according to an AMA spokeswoman.

In 2009, SoundScan reports that Jackson's "Number Ones" has moved a total of 1.9 million copies. Swift's "Fearless" ranks as the year's second-best selling album thus far, having sold 1.8 million copies.

Swift remains on track for a blessed award season. After securing an entertainer of the year nomination at the Country Music Awards, Swift snared American Music Award nominations in major country and pop categories. In addition to artist of the year and favorite album, she's up for favorite country female artist, as well as favorite pop/rock female artist.

Twitter continues to lose some of its most-followed music celebs. Days after teen star Miley Cyrus removed her account, perpetual ranter Courtney Love has disappeared from the social-networking service. Love's Twitter disappeared without warning, but its removal came soon after Love's teenage daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, laid into young Ali Lohan.

Cyrus, however, isn't disappearing so quietly.

With rumors that she left Twitter at the behest of her supposed love interest Liam Hemsworth, the tween star and their friends channeled all their non-tweeting free time into a short, cheesy rap. "I stopped living for moments, and started living for people," Cyrus sings, adding, "Everything that I type and everything I do / All those lame gossip sites take it and they make it news."

Cyrus admits to some withdrawals, as well as missing Dane Cook's latest updates, but promises no more "fake feuds" with Demi Lovato. If the result of Cyrus leaving Twitter is more charmingly bad videos like the one above, Pop & Hiss applauds the move.

Cyrus was leaving Twitter while she was on top. According to data from BigChampagne, Cyrus had the third-most Twitter followers among musicians as of Oct. 6, with more than 2.2 million users tracking her pimple updates. Only Britney Spears and John Mayer had more.

But Cyrus and Love aren't the only high-profile musicians to disappear from the site. British singer Lily Allen, who ranks No. 9 among active Twitter musicians, hasn't updated since Sept. 28, going quiet after taking heat for her views on Internt file-sharing. Earlier this year, Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor stopped updating his account, declaring on July 17 that "flesh and reality are calling." 

In May, rapper Kanye West ranted against the service, writing in his "Caps Lock" glory, "I'M TOO BUSY ACTUALLY BUSY BEING CREATIVE MOST OF THE TIME AND IF I'M NOT AND I'M JUST LAYING ON A BEACH I WOULDN'T TELL THE WORLD. EVERYTHING THAT TWITTER OFFERS I NEED LESS OF."

Although she wasn't nearly as blunt, it appears Cyrus would agree.

-- Todd Martens

Related: Demi versus Perez? See Twitter, where celebs rant

Some of us here at Pop & Hiss have a theory that almost everything is better with cats. To see whether such a hypothesis extends to music criticism, we reached out to two clever women who were responsible for bringing the LOLcat phenomenon to the stage.

Kristyn Pomranz and Katherine Steinberg are the brains behind "I Can Has Cheezburger: The MusicLOL!," an off-Broadway production based on the popular blog about silly kitties with misspelled captions. The musical premiered at the New York Fringe Festival in August and may make its way to other areas of the country (paws crossed).

Ben Huh, the chief executive of Pet Holdings Inc., which is the parent company of the I Can Has Cheezburger blog, recommended the pair for our project. Despite being an expert in cat-speak, the Seattle-based Huh says he's not very knowledgeable about new music.

So while other music publications have already jumped on the phenom, Pop & Hiss went straight to the source, and asked Pomranz and Steinberg to bestow their musical criticisms onto goofy pictures of cats. In between work on their new musical -- "which is also about food but not about cats," Pomranz wrote in an e-mail -- the duo has let us know what your pets think about your music collection.

We can has musik revyooz.

Lady Gaga

Lady Gaga is one of the hottest --- and most unusual -- acts around right now. She wrestled with Madonna on Saturday, and recently parted with Kanye "Imma-let-you-finish" West for her November tour.

Between all these forays into pop stardom and designing high-end headphones, does Gaga even have time to make good music? The cat thinks so.

Click "read more" for the rest of the LOLcat music reviews.

The tween sensation sings and even raps with ease but offers very few glimpses of a real, more truly compelling Miley.

The last time Miley Cyrus toured North America, in 2007, she didn't make the trip alone. Her money-minting "Best of Both Worlds" road show featured sets by both Cyrus and her Disney Channel alter ego, Hannah Montana, and as is often the case in this town, reality didn't always come out on top.

At a Honda Center stop in Anaheim, Cyrus, then 14, struggled to express herself in a way that lived up to her on-screen persona; when the concert climaxed with a virtual duet between Cyrus and a video version of Hannah, one of the girls seemed more two-dimensional than the other.

Nearly two years later, Cyrus is out on her own on the "Wonder World" tour, which hit Staples Center on Tuesday before a show at Honda on Wednesday. She wasn't in competition with Hannah this time, but Cyrus still had to battle herself.

The onslaught of year-end releases has begun. Whitney Houston, perhaps the most talked-about comeback of the year, debuts atop the U.S. pop charts, returning to the No. 1 spot with her best sales week since Niselen SoundScan began tracking data back in 1991.

Her "I Look to You" sold 304,000 copies following its Aug. 31 release -- a day earlier than the usual Tuesday release day in order to remain eligible for the upcoming Grammy Awards. Of course, Houston's biggest hits came prior to 1991, but the sales number is a good sign for the artist in this depressed market. Even while not making the first week impact of an Eminem, the 304,000 tally is a significant bump over her first-week SoundScan numbers for 2002's "Just Whitney," which Billboard tells us bowed at the top after selling 205,000 copies. 

But Houston is still going to need a hit for sustained sales success throughout the holiday season. Thus far, the title track hasn't reached the top 50 on Billboard's Hot 100 singles chart, and her more recent single, the swift retro cut "Million Dollar Bill," has yet to penetrate the big chart. Nevertheless, "I Look to You" is Houston's first album to debut at No. 1 since 1987's "Whitney" topped the chart when it was released.

A run-down of other chart notables below:

The 1960s: We just can't get away from them.

As the muddy dust of Woodstock nostalgia settles -- taking with it the whining protests of sensitive little-sibling Gen Xers -- the baby boom is immediately reasserting its pop cultural might, this time in a much more effective way. The marketing campaign for "The Beatles: Rock Band" game moves forward hour by hour, with today's song list announcement stoking an appetite already primed by major media attention, and the already unveiled chart allowing users to check that their fake instruments will work with the highly compatible game. (Sorry, would-be Ringos in possession of "Rock Revolution" drums, you will be purchasing a new set.)

Between the attention given rock's most fondly remembered musical gathering and the careful campaign to remind everyone of what Fab Four still matters the most, any hope non-boomers had that they'd finally moved to pop's center seemed dashed.

Yet the truth is, it's getting hard to argue that any generation dominates pop. A nationwide telephone survey by the Pew Research Center's Demographic and Social Trends project, timed to coincide with the Woodstock birthday, found that while some differences remain between elders and youth, in general they're not a source of antagonism. Furthermore, rock was found to be the dominant music of both generations. President Obama may symbolize the rise of the hip hop nation -- a view that Hua Hsu effectively put forth in his Atlantic magazine piece, The End of White America?, earlier this year -- but it's well known that Obama has Springsteen and Bob Dylan on his iPod.

So what does it mean that 24-year-old New Jersey police Officer Kristie Buble didn't recognize Dylan when she picked him up as a possible vagrant during a pre-show stroll in the rain last month? Nothing, perhaps, beyond the fact that even iconic faces age and change. But that small incident also raises a thought about the changing relevance of the generational ideal.

Country duo Sugarland has another No. 1 album with the CD/DVD package "Live on the Inside," but in a slow sales week, the emphasis shifts to how the product was sold rather than how many copies have been sold. 

For the live follow-up to last year's "Love on the Inside," Sugarland took a page from the likes of AC/DC, Guns N' Roses, Christina Aguilera, the Eagles, Bruce Springsteen and Prince to go the exclusive retail route. Initial returns for Sugarland are modest, as Wal-Mart-exclusive "Live on the Inside" sold 76,000 copies in its first week, according to Nielsen SoundScan. 

But the Atlanta-area band drew some heat earlier this week from its local indie shop Decatur CD. The store's owner, Warren Hudson, criticized the band on the company blog, writing to Sugarland that  "by shutting the door on independent record stores, you’re in effect shutting the door on your hometown."

"We’re not trying to put the band in the cross hairs, by any means," Hudson said to Pop & Hiss this morning. "I have no doubt that Wal-Mart is one of the best avenues for this band. We just happen to be in the town where the band got their start. We didn’t start the band, by any means, but we supported them from Day 1."

Retail exclusives remain a controversial topic. For bands and labels, it's an instant payday, as retailers pay for the exclusivity, plus sales to the retailer are often one way, meaning they are not returnable to the distributor. Yet the practice blocks mom-and-pop, music-specific outlets from selling the CD, and limits a fan's buying options. 

Additionally, the corporate partnerships often seem -- at least on the surface -- to go against rock idealism. Springsteen, for instance, told the New York Times that selling a Wal-Mart-exclusive greatest hits package was a "mistake," adding that “given [Wal-Mart's] labor history, it was something that if we’d thought about it a little longer, we’d have done something different.”

Pearl Jam, for its upcoming "Backspacer," due Sept. 20, walked a careful line. The album, the band's first outside the major label system, is a Target exclusive, with qualifications. The album will continue to be available at indie shops and Apple's iTunes store -- just not at Best Buy and Wal-Mart.

Hudson points to such a solution as a workable arrangement, and chided Sugarland for not going a similar route. Sugarland's Kristian Bush appears to have heard Hudson's complaint, as a user named "Kristian" responded on the blog, writing that Hudson was right, and that he would come by the store with a couple boxes of CDs and "peel off the Wal-Mart stickers together while we catch up."

Hudson says he hasn't made an effort to verify whether or not Bush was the one who did indeed post. Pop & Hiss reached out to Sugarland's management, but has yet to receive confirmation or denial. Nevertheless, Hudson has no doubt it was indeed Bush who wrote in, and says he will not be upset if the artist isn't able to make it to the store.

"I’m pretty sure that was him," Hudson said. "He’s been in this store. But we haven’t heard a thing, and it’s completely up to them -- how they want to do it. I wouldn’t think less of them, regardless of what they did. The principal of the idea has been put out there now."

"Live on the Inside" isn't on par with Sugarland's recent numbers, but that likely has more to do with the lack of new studio material than the album's availability at retail. About a year ago, the act's "Love on the Inside" debuted at No. 2 on the U.S. pop charts after it sold 314,000 copies in its first week. The album sold 485,000 copies in its first two weeks in stores.

Elsewhere on the charts:

Fans continued to feverishly purchase Michael Jackson albums in the days after his Staples Center memorial last week. More than 1.1 million copies of Jackson's catalog were sold through Sunday, according to Nielsen SoundScan figures released to Billboard.

Jackson was expected to be the week's hot seller, but it was a bit of a surprise to see the numbers increase once again. Overall, Jackson's sales jumped 37% over the previous week. His sales were led by "Number Ones," which sold 349,000 copies, followed by "Thriller," which sold 264,000 copies.

Jackson again, however, is relegated to Billboard's catalog charts, as are any albums that are older than 18 months and have fallen below No. 100 on the U.S. pop chart. In two and a half weeks, Jackson titles have sold 2.3 million copies.

On the current U.S. pop charts, R&B singer Maxwell leads. His "BLACKsummers'night" opened with 316,000 copies, and Billboard reports that's a career best. His last album, 2001's "Now," debuted with 296,000 copies.

Also new is Miley Cyrus' latest soundtrack to the "Hannah Montana" TV series. The album lands at No. 3, having sold 137,000 copies in its first week. That number is significantly lower than some past "Hannah Montana"-branded titles. A 2006 soundtrack to the Disney Channel series sold 281,000 copies in its first week, and a double-disc effort in 2007 bowed with 326,000 copies.

Yet don't make the mistake of thinking that "Hannah Montana" has run its course.