Malibu, or the Sound of Someone Getting Normal

Miley was supposed to be the one who didn’t settle. That was the whole deal—the Disney princess who torched the castle, the former child star who showed up to the VMAs in foam latex and genuinely did not care who flinched. She was chaotic and naked and unsettling in the best possible way, and I loved her for it in that specific way you love a person who does the things you’d never do yourself.

Then she released Malibu, and I felt something close to grief.

It’s a soft acoustic ballad about sunshine and love and how great everything is. She filmed the video in what appears to be a perfume commercial—golden light, billowing fabric, the Pacific doing photogenic things in the background. The song itself isn’t bad in any way you could prosecute. It’s just nothing. It could be anyone. It could score a luxury resort ad without a single edit.

The lyrics flicker briefly into something stranger—lines about not knowing whether you exist, about wanting to swim away with the fish—and for a moment I thought she’d buried something weirder under all that warmth. But no. It surfaces, then vanishes. The rest is just Malibu. Sun and sky and being in love.

There’s a version of this story where growing up is brave, where the chaos was the persona and this is the real person underneath. Maybe. But I just hope I stay the way I am and nothing changes is not something a dangerous person says. It’s what you say when you’ve found a nice house and decided to stay in it.

I miss the freak. I miss the wreckage.