Weekend Music: Mitski

Last summer, I saw a delightful movie, Hearts Beat Loud, about a father and daughter who (after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing) play music together. It was a bit frothy, but it was modern, it had all the right messaging, and it did everything a nice summer indie movie is supposed to do. I did a tiny little write-up here. It was a tiny write-up because there wasn't anything much for me to say. Cute movie. All the right things. Go see it.

During the movie, in which the daughter and father somehow end up with a song on one of the Spotify indie hit playlists (which I happen to listen to), there is a scene where the daughter (played by Kiersey Clemons) is listening to a song by Mitski. I don't know why I sat up in my seat and paid attention at that particular moment, but I just knew that Mitski was someone I wanted to check out. Maybe it was the Japanese name, maybe it was the interesting music, maybe it was the indie playlist, I don't know. But that afternoon I went home and looked for Mitski online. And I found the music video for her latest release, Nobody:

I dare you to watch this video and NOT end up humming it all day long. How often are indie songs earworms? Not often, I assure you. I was hooked.

However. It got complicated.

I was struck by the fact that Mitski has a Japanese mother and white American father, like myself; that she moved around a lot as a kid; that she ended up going to conservatory in New York. All of this fascinated me, and I wanted to read something into it, but I didn't know what. I googled and read some articles, but it was confusing. Hearts Beat Loud referenced Mitski as a way to show the success of the movie characters in the indie music world; in other words, Mitski was an icon, a sign of success, not a sign of a rebel. But I couldn't quite figure out who Mitski was as a person. She is private, and doesn't talk about her family story much. I wondered if she spoke Japanese, if she had gone to American high schools, if she felt as divided as I often do, in the sense that I feel neither Japanese nor white.

And the lyrics to her songs? They struck me as simple love songs. She sings about loneliness, alienation, feeling displaced. None of them sounded terribly edgy.

I bought her new album when it came out, Be the Cowboy. I had really liked Nobody, but some of her other new songs perplexed me. They sounded…angsty and discordant. In other words, they sounded like many of the other indie musicians out there. And yet, she seemed so different, someone who perhaps sits on the fringe, just outside the group.

In other words, what often gets me about indie music is that it can all sound the same. Which is kind of oxymoronic, right? How is “indie” just like everyone else? How is it that Mitski has become an indie icon, while being herself? And how has she become so beloved by people who swear they aren't included, that they sit on the fringe…and yet they are all in the same tribe?

As a tribe-less person myself, I was baffled.

We were lucky enough to grab tickets for a Mitski concert in our neck of the woods, at a small venue north of Boston. I didn't quite know what to expect. I had thought Nobody was one kind of Mitski, and then her album left me uncertain. Her performance left me even more fascinated. Here's a snippet:

It was almost a kind of performance art, with carefully choreographed moves. Here's another:

The above is from the song, Your Best American Girl:

When I first heard Your Best American Girl, I thought I knew what it was about. Loneliness, not belonging, and not being “really” American. All of that spoke to me loud and clear. When I saw the music video, I thought smugly that I'd been right. But when I saw Mitski's performance of the song, I wondered if I was overreaching. All those hand gestures! All those scripted movements! They looked like the 1970s-era Japanese pop idols that I had grown up listening to. I wondered if Mitski had been subjected to the same overly cutesy, overly choreographed pop music that I had been:

(apologies for this blast from the 70s, but this is the kind of pop music presentation I cut my teeth on!)

But then I heard the crowd singing along, a crowd that looked to me like they couldn't possibly know what lusting after the “American Boy” was like when you were definitely NOT the “American Girl,” and I realized that they were projecting all of their own feeling of sadness and despair onto a narrative that they had no way of understanding–and they didn't care, it didn't matter to them. And whatever Mitski's childhood influences had been–it didn't matter. She was telling her story, and they were grabbing onto it.

Last month, I found that The New Yorker agreed:

Wikipedia will tell you that the album is about “longing, love, depression, alienation, and racial identity,” but, to me, it still sounds like it’s mostly about Mitski. Its breakout song was “Your Best American Girl,” an instant-classic pop-rock anthem whose chorus alluded to a relationship obstructed by cultural mores: “Your mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me, but I do, I think I do / And you’re an all-American boy / I guess I couldn’t help trying to be your best American girl.” The song was interpreted as a political statement. Mitski was catapulting a boulder into the moldy walls of our national bigotry! She was challenging a music industry in which Asian women were so rarely visible—and sometimes fetishized, by bands like Weezer, which the song’s chord palette cuttingly nods to—as well as a genre, rock, that ignores the women in its midst! Eventually, Mitski posted a note on Facebook explaining that, as far as she was concerned, “Your Best American Girl” was a love song. A lot of reviews had decided that she had written the song to “stick it to ‘the white boy indie rock world’,” as Mitski wrote. But “I wasn’t thinking about any of that when I was writing it,” she countered. “I wasn’t trying to send a message. I was in love.”

It took a long time for me to come round. I've decided I like Mitski. I wasn't ready to say that last summer, but I'm ready now.