Miley Cyrus' 'Younger Now' continues her sanitized reinvention

Maeve McDermott | USA TODAY

At just 24 years old, Miley Cyrus is already looking backward.

The title track to Cyrus' forthcoming sixth album Younger Now flips the common pop music trope of young stars, singing about how old they feel. Instead, Cyrus moves in the opposite direction, singing "No one stays the same / You know what goes up must come down / Change is a thing you can count on / I feel so much younger now."

Accompanied by a glossy video featuring a mishmash of '50s-inspired imagery, Younger Now is Cyrus' latest twangy pop track that, like her lead single Malibu, reckons with the changes she's experienced over the last several years. While the song is infinitely more listenable than most of the music from her Dead Petz phase, Cyrus doesn't offer much in the way of meaningful self-reflection on the song, explaining away her past as "living in a dream" from which she "just woke up."

There's been a distinctly unsettling aspect to Miley's latest reinvention, which the New Yorker dubbed a "creepy return to wholesomeness." In the video's most on-the-nose moment, one of the sideshow characters that populate its carnival setting spins upside down on a stripper pole, as the words "No one stays the same" flash in front. Intentional or not, it's a flashback to Cyrus grinding on Robin Thicke and twerking in the We Can't Stop video during her Bangerz years, a particularly overexposed phase of the singer's career that, with Younger Now, she's attempting to erase.

While her Bangerz-era antics weren't always enjoyable to watch, the viewer has to wonder why Cyrus is trying so hard to rewrite her own history, especially when she's doing so by dressing up like an extra in American Bandstand. Considering the '50s' ghoulish visions of traditional femininity, it's odd that Cyrus, after spending the past decade at least attempting to do something interesting with her music, is embracing a new identity that's so sanitized, almost regressive. Does she really hate her former self that much?

Younger Now is due Sept. 29.



