mitski and the politicized vulnerability of 'be the cowboy'

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

Mitski by David Lee

Four tracks into Mitski Miyawaki’s new album, Be The Cowboy, she confesses rather cathartically: It’s just that I fell in love with a war. With an astute directness, Mitski’s one-liners don’t shy away from confronting the nitty-gritty of her emotional turbulence, existential angst, and loneliness face-to-face. Her powerful lyricism, combined with a stylistically sophisticated sound, engrain a striking new Asian-American mark on today’s DIY indie scene. Mitski, alongside her newest release, Be The Cowboy, is a bold force to be reckoned with - by all of us. 

Born in Japan with Japanese-American dual nationality, Mitski’s work similarly echoes an inimitable duality- a duality that emerges from her ability to be devastatingly self-deprecating one minute and bold and boastful the next. With her father’s itinerant occupation, Mitski would move frequently, inhabiting a total of thirteen countries prior to settling in New York City. There, she released her first two albums with a characteristic orchestral sound, Lush (2012) and Retired From Sad, New Career in Business (2013). The fifth of her albums, Be The Cowboy, almost serves as a pivot point in her work; whilst Puberty 2, released two years prior, is saturated with heavy distortion, Be The Cowboy assumes a much more thrillingly dramatic attitude, drilled in with bleak organ sounds which manically metamorphose into jaunty, explosive bubblegum climaxes. Abandoning her usual approach of doubled vocals, the matured instrumental work is paired with a heart-wrenchingly vulnerable, yet confident voice. 

Beyond its auditory characteristics, Mitski’s renowned Be The Cowboy serves to effectively subvert the normative categorization of Asian-American women in media. The stereotype of this pigeonholed identity continues to contend that Asian women fall into a distinctive binary - on one end, the hypersexualized, fetishised object ironically lacking in sexual agency, and on the other, the utter antithesis: reserved, meek and subjugated to a position of complete desexualization. A multiplicity of recent Asian female artists have taken tangible measures in debunking the harmful myths perpetuated by centuries of orientalist oppression, and Mitski is no exception- perhaps a hallmark- to this contemporary wave of progress. With bold lyrics such as 'Cause nobody butters me up like you, and / Nobody fucks me like me, it seems she reclaims her sexuality with a straightforwardness that raises an inquisitive brow or two. In Nobody, perhaps the most popular of the tracks, she laments over her loneliness with a humanity and candidness that undoubtedly mirrors our own realities: And I don't want your pity / I just want somebody near me. But this doesn’t make Mitski a “projection”, of which she deems to be an “uncomfortable and dangerous” position; for an audience, it grounds her in reality, manifests her humanity and is a particularly empowering step in demystifying constricting norms held of Asian women. 

Mitski’s entire oeuvre reverberates the truth that ‘the personal is political’, as her mere honesty and vulnerability, intentional or not, refract into politicized statements on much of what the Asian-American experience entails. I guess I couldn’t help trying to be your best American girl, she confesses devastatingly on Puberty 2’s fifth track, Your Best American Girl, a line all-too-familiar to the outsider. In Townie, she triumphantly articulates, I’m not gonna be what my daddy wants me to be, waving goodbye to the omnipresent cultural expectations enforced onto her. Revealing her battles against the internalization of whitewashed ideals, Mitski hits close to home for a large cross-section of society burdened by the onus of constantly striving to fit an archetypal bill.

With Be The Cowboy, Mitski has come to amass an almost cult-like following of outsiders. Ironically united by a common denominator, whether it be the all-consuming wrath of existential loneliness, struggles pertaining to cultural identity in an increasingly divided political climate, or the vengeful post-heartbreak mentality, this crowd of devotees isn’t going anywhere any time soon. Akin to artists like Rina Sawayama and Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast, Mitski is just beginning to reclaim her space as an indie forerunner in dismantling and reframing contemporary ideas of what it means to exist as an Asian woman in a postcolonial world.

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