The smug obsession Californians have with the precious beauty of their state, the endless reserves of pride and superiority they have over “aesthetic greatness” has perhaps been what has led the gods to smite them for their self-satisfaction, recently upheld by a prime example of such pomposity in the form of last year’s “Malibu” from Miley Cyrus, from her album, Younger Now.
Written during that most L.A. of all phenomenons, traffic, Cyrus waxes poetic about how “the sky is more blue in Malibu,” especially with her lover (Liam Hemsworth) by her side. But how surreal it would be to bump this track on the beach now, with the polluted skies above mocking such declarative bravado. The dark grey-infused puffs of smoke mistakable for apocalyptic clouds, the burning palm trees easily identifiably as one of Dante’s circles of hell. The morbidity of it all enhanced by the lyrics, “Hoping I just stay the same and nothing will change/And it’ll be us, just for a while/Do we even exist?/That’s when I make the wish to swim away with the fish.”
Too bad the fish aren’t about to give up their own safe haven to share with beings as haughty as humans. Or rather, beings as haughty as celebrities. For only someone living as though we were still in the bathetic and blithe ignorance of the Bush II years could so earnestly sing, “We are just like the waves that flow back and forth/Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning and you’re there to save me…a dream come true in Malibu.” Ah yes, how peak ironic it would be to remake the video to this song while Malibu is in its present state of disarray and ruin. Because as it stands, it would appear that there is no one there to save anyone, not even Miley, who is one of many celebrities whose houses have burned down in the line of the fire.
Thus, her jubilant declaration, “But here I am next to you/The sky is more blue/In Malibu” now comes across as a mocking jeer, the skies anything but more blue, and the endless debris of wreckage, marked by the demise of homes that once represented that last bastion of an era in which it was deemed appropriate to flout wealth as opposed to conceal it like a secret shame from the many hordes forced to remain forever down at heel, a taunt against the very insolence of the lyrics–particularly when paired with the Ariel from The Little Mermaid-like war cry (as her voice is being stolen by Ursula), “Ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah.”
