The Singular Woes of the “Geriatric” Pop Star: Miley Cyrus’ “Used to Be Young”

In the spirit of “close-up videos” that have come before, including Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” Gwen Stefani’s “Used to Love You,” Selena Gomez’s “Lose You To Love Me” and even Madonna’s “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore” (with its slow tracking shot eventually leading to a close-up on M’s face), Miley Cyrus intends for her audience to know she means Serious Business with the earnest simplicity of the Jacob Bixenman and Brendan Walter-directed video for her latest single, “Used to Be Young.”

For those who would rightly balk at Cyrus effectively branding herself as “old” at thirty, one need only look back at all the venomous flak Madonna got (and gets) for continuing to be a successful pop star into her thirties (and well beyond). Told to pack it in and cover up, Madonna refused to do anything of the kind. Indeed, despite all the barriers she broke down for women like Cyrus to continue into their “old” age, female pop stars are still keenly aware of the tick of the clock when they enter their thirties. Even someone as theoretically “untouchable” and “failproof” as Taylor Swift knows that “nothing gold can stay.” Which is why she commented to Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, about a month from her thirty-third birthday, that she was a geriatric pop star. Therefore, amazed that she can still break all these records as she told Fallon, “It’s like, you know, I’m thirty-two. So we’re considered geriatric pop stars.” Both Swift’s and Cyrus’ sense of “jocularity” with regard to aging in the pop arena is meant to mask an inherent fear about “losing their job” as a result of losing relevancy. 

As Swift put it in 2020’s Miss Americana, “It’s a lot to process because we do exist in this society where women in entertainment are discarded in an elephant graveyard by the time they’re thirty-five. Everyone’s a shiny, new toy for, like, two years. The female artists that I know of have reinvented themselves twenty times more than the male artists. They have to…or else you’re out of a job. Constantly having to reinvent, constantly finding new facets of yourself that people find to be shiny… This is probably one of my last opportunities as an artist to grasp onto that kind of success. So I don’t know, like, as I’m reaching thirty, I’m like, ‘I want to work really hard, um, while society is still tolerating me being successful.’” In that sense, evermore‘s “tolerate it” could also be about society still “tolerating” her success. And oh how they’ve been tolerating it with the Eras Tour. The massive, stadium-hopping juggernaut that has found Swift ramping up her parasocial relationships as Cyrus seeks to shirk live touring altogether. And yes, Cyrus received quite a bit of backlash for comments she made in a British Vogue article from earlier this year, during which writer Giles Hattersley described, “Cyrus was known to give everything on tour. She would perform for hours, take requests, not quit that stage until she was pretty sure every single person had had the night of their lives, swaying to ‘We Can’t Stop,’ bouncing to ‘Party in the USA,’ shedding a tear to ‘The Climb.’ Now she’s not sure she can do it anymore; certainly not in the foreseeable. He then quotes Cyrus as saying, “It’s been a minute. After the last [headline arena] show I did [in 2014], I kind of looked at it as more of a question. And I can’t. Not only ‘can’t,’ because can’t is your capability, but my desire. Do I want to live my life for anyone else’s pleasure or fulfillment other than my own?” 

The answer appears to lie somewhere between yes and no, as she still works hard to please the fans. This latest single released so soon after her album, Endless Summer Vacation, being a case in point. And it seems she was planning “Used to Be Young” for a while, as she also mentioned it in that British Vogue article from May. Appropriately, it came up after she recounted how “a songwriter came to her with a track” that prompted her to say, “It was like, you know, the standard fucked up in the club track. And I was like, ‘I’m two years sober. That’s not where I spend my time, you know. You’re more likely to catch me and my friends literally walking through rose gardens or going to a museum…’ It’s not about being self-serious. I’m just evolved.” Hattersley then concludes, “It inspired her to write a different song. She hopes to release it soon, she explains, as she recites a line from it to me, her eye contact steady, her voice calm. ‘I know I used to be crazy,’ she says. ‘I know I used to be fun. You say I used to be wild. I say I used to be young.’”

Of course, to some, this comes across as though Cyrus is essentially saying you become boring and banal after your twenties, a trope that, quite honestly, doesn’t need to be reemphasized. Least of all to the already highly age-discriminatory Gen Z (see: the “Young and Beautiful” TikTok trend), which seems to have no awareness of their own “jig is up” fate as Alpha comes up the rear on “youth supremacy.” Then again, once everyone becomes a humanoid, perhaps age really will be rendered immaterial. In the meantime, Cyrus continues the tradition of confirming that one can only be “wild” in their youth (“acceptably wild” anyway, for to continue that behavior into later years amounts to what we see on Britney Spears’ Instagram). Thus, she offers the staid, understated video for “Used to Be Young,” during which her figure cuts through a black space to approach the camera wearing a red sequined leotard with a white sleeveless Mickey Mouse shirt peeking out of the top. This being an obvious nod to her Disney days as Hannah Montana. The girl she ultimately had to kill over and over again with the type of wild behavior she also addresses on songs like “D.R.E.A.M.” (Drugs Rule Everything Around Me). Addressing it once more here, Cyrus appears to do it with a greater sense of gravity as she feels as though her youth is “spent” for real this time, whereas before she was merely talking about being “old” from the still-naive perspective of her twenties. But again, we apparently need to reiterate that being in one’s thirties isn’t old either. Even though Cyrus’ Disney star contemporary, Selena Gomez, also seems to feel that way if we’re to go on her comment about being “too old” for social media.

But maybe there is something to why these pop stars who are still actually young tend to feel so old by their thirties. It’s a wizening lifestyle, after all. Even though you’re supposed to keep looking young no matter how old you feel—this belying the adage, “You’re as young as you feel.” If that’s true, no wonder Cyrus feels positively decrepit. Cyrus’ examination of age and it occasionally being “nothin’ but a number” were also apparent on 2017’s country twangin’ “Younger Now,” during which she claimed, “I feel so much younger now.” Six years later, that’s evidently no longer the case, with Cyrus both mourning and welcoming the loss of her youthful rebellion. This shining through as she gives Claire Danes a run for her “crying face” money right from the outset of the video, realizing that she’s “left [her] living fast/Somewhere in the past/‘Cause that’s for chasing cars/Turns out open bars/Lead to broken hearts/And going way too far.” This is something many a pop star has had to learn the hard way over the years, especially if they came of age in the 00s. Just look at Britney Spears, Lily Allen (who once sang vis-à-vis a woman approaching thirty, “It’s sad but it’s true how society says her life is already over”) or Amy Winehouse—the latter of whom didn’t even survive the follies and wildness of her youth. All three women were endlessly dragged through the tabloid mud for their “exploits,” though if they were men, such behavior would have been par for the course. 

At the one-minute, eighteen-second mark of the video, a crack of light starts to appear as the “doors” of the soundstage part. As though to symbolically indicate there’s some positivity to growing “old.” Even for a pop star. For one thing, it means more leeway with creative expression, ergo the ability to release a song like this. With its frank subject matter and sparse piano instrumentation thanks to co-production from Cyrus, Michael Pollack and Shawn Everett, something about its intonation might also remind listeners of “Never Be Me” from 2020’s Plastic Hearts. A song that shows Miley, only two years ago, insisting that she could never be “stable” or “faithful.” Two qualities that are decidedly associated with being “old” a.k.a. mature. But maybe Miley could be those things now that she’s decided to relinquish the wildness of her past. Or so she says.

However, knowing Miley (and pop stardom), it’s more likely she’ll flip-flop again to echo what MARINA sang on 2015’s “Can’t Pin Me Down”: “You ain’t got me sussed yet/You’re not even close/Baby, it’s the one thing/That I hate the most/All these contradictions pouring out of me/Just another girl in the twenty-first century/I am never gonna give you anything you expect/You think I’m like the others/Boy, you need to get your eyes checked, checked/You can paint me any color/And I can be your clown/But you ain’t got my number/No, you can’t pin me down.”

And, as fellow “geriatric” Taylor Swift mentioned, preserving one’s career as a female pop star depends on that kind of “elusiveness.” As she sardonically phrased it in Miss Americana, “Be new to us, be young to us, but only in a new way and only in the way we want. And reinvent yourself, but only in a way that we find to be equally comforting but also a challenge for you. Live out a narrative that we find to be interesting enough to entertain us, but not so crazy that it makes us uncomfortable.” Nonetheless, Cyrus might actually be making people too uncomfortable with all this talk of age and time passing. Decidedly “unsexy” topics in the realm of pop stardom. Even when you’ve had bouts as a rock and country star embedded within that framework.