Who Is Mitski?

unorganized thoughts on identity, creation, and parasocial relationships

Final exam season is just around the corner — or already here in some cases. I myself have just finished a twelve-hour exam at the time of writing this (I did not take all twelve hours to take the exam).

In the spirit of things, I’ve been listening a lot to “Working for the Knife” by Mitski. You’ve probably listened to it too. I don’t know enough about music to give a beat-by-beat analysis but, to put it very simplistically, it’s like a more sorrowful and thoughtful version of “Workin’ for the Weekend” by Loverboy. 

Pitchfork characterizes the song as one “surely colored by [Mitski’s] own experiences with success.” NPR calls it “a comeback, reflecting the gaze of hungry fans with a daring intensity.” Rolling Stone remarks upon how “[s]he’s returned sharper and wiser than ever, grappling with age and the responsibility that comes with her career as one of indie rock’s foremost artists.”

The artist herself has said the song is “about going from being a kid with a dream to a grown up with a job, and feeling that somewhere along the way you got left behind. . . It’s being confronted with a world that doesn’t seem to recognize your humanity, and seeing no way out of it.”

But is it?

In books and film, there’s a general presumption that when you’re reading a work of fiction, even if there are parts of it you can tell or reasonably believe as coming from someone’s personal experience, it’s still a work of fiction. Jo Nesbø isn’t a murderer just because he writes about murder. Ottessa Moshfegh isn’t a rich girl who needs to reset her empathy by sleeping for an entire year just because she wrote about it. We know it’s all fake, to an extent.

Then there’s autofiction, that pesky little genre that blends memoir and fiction into something that could very well be true but it isn’t but it could be and maybe it is but no it’s not but winky face kombucha girl meme, etc. But again, it comes back to the fact that it is still fiction. Karl Knausgaard can put in as many intimate details about his personal life as he wants into My Struggle but at the end of the day, it’s not an autobiographical account. It’s fiction. There are liberties taken in the presentation in order to support an overarching narrative and we understand that. Fuck, Stephen King inserted himself and the guy who ran him over into the Dark Tower series but that doesn’t mean the account of that story in this work is cold hard fact. It’s fake, even if it’s real.

It’s hard to call music “fiction.” It’s, well, music. It’s the artist themselves singing words, often written by themselves, directly to you. Musicians aren’t shy about pointing out the personal influences that go into their works: Rumors by Fleetwood Mac. “thank u, next” by Ariana Grande. Most of Taylor Swift’s discography. It’s an easy assumption to make, then, that songs musicians make are about them. After all, when someone says, “I” they’re usually talking about themselves, no?

No, authors can write in first-person narratives and people understand that it isn’t really about the author itself, it’s a character the author has created. Even if the character has the same name as the author. Looking at you, Anthony Horowitz!

So, aren’t musicians allowed to write songs from different people’s perspectives? Sure! Remember how the internet loved that “Kill V. Maim” was about a genderfluid vampire Michael Corleone, before we all discovered that Grimes is a sellout? I’m sure there are other, more relevant examples but you get the point — it is generally acknowledged that people can create works of art not about themselves.

You might be wondering then, what’s the problem? If people can create art that’s not about themselves, why are we talking about it? Why bring up Mitski at the beginning? What is this newsletter even about?

Look, I said this was gonna be disorganized. You walked in here with will knowledge of that. Let me ramble a bit until I wander into the point I realize I’m trying to make.

James Baldwin. There’s a better chance you know who he is than Jo Nesbø or Karl Knausgaard. You’ve almost certainly heard of his quote from Notes of a Native Son:

“One writes out of one thing only--one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.”

In an interview with The Paris Review, Baldwin delves a little deeper on this topic.

A little further down the line, the interviewer states, “Ralph Ellison said in his Paris Review interview that he writes ‘primarily not concerned with injustice, but with art,’ whereas one might almost find you a sort of spokesman for blacks.”

Baldwin replies, “I don’t consider myself a spokesman—I have always thought it would be rather presumptuous.” The interviewer counters, “Although you are aware of the fact that many people read and are moved by your essays, as well as your speeches and lectures . . .” and there, it seems Baldwin cuts him off and dives into his relationship with the civil rights movement.

I would love to see a video of this interview. There is just so much nuance in conversations like this that can only be extrapolated from tone and body language. But based on a plain textual analysis, it feels like there is an idea of Baldwin that the interviewer is trying to commune with that Baldwin is at the same time trying to refute. But is the interviewer’s idea of Baldwin any less real than the actual person Baldwin is?

Let’s circle back to Mitski again. There’s a great Pitchfork article (I know, I didn’t think I’d ever be putting those words in that order either, jk jk) about the relationship between her fans’ interpretation of her and her own interpretation of her. Here’s the part of the article people love to quote:

When discussing this quote on Tumblr, a friend directed me to a similar sort of quote from Carrie Brownstein’s book, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl.

“Musicians, especially those who are women, are often dogged by the assumption that they are singing from a personal perspective. Perhaps it is a carelessness on the audience’s part, or an entrenched cultural assumption that the female experience can merely encompass the known, the domestic, the ordinary. When a woman sings a nonpersonal narrative, listeners and watchers must acknowledge that she’s not performing as herself, and if she’s not performing as herself, then it’s not her who is wooing us, loving us. We don’t get to have her because we don’t know exactly who she is. An audience doesn’t want female distance, they want female openness and accessibility, familiarity that validates femaleness. Persona for a man is equated with power; persona for a woman makes her less of a woman, more distant and unknowable, and thus threatening. When men sing personal songs, they seem sensitive and evolved; when women sing personal songs, they are inviting and vulnerable, or worse, catty and tiresome.”

There’s another Mitski interview, in The New Yorker, that sort of bridges this sentiment with what was happening in the Baldwin interview. The article starts out by talking about how people have interpreted Mitski’s hit song “Your Best American Girl” as a pushback against the fetishization of Asian women, but in a Facebook post, Mitski states, “I wasn’t thinking about any of that when I was writing [the song] . . . I wasn’t trying to send a message. I was in love.”

Artists across the gender spectrum have toyed with how much of their personal life they inject into their music. Annie Clark, a.k.a. St. Vincent, loves to play this game. According to The New York Times, she “delights in world-building and role-playing, assigning each album its own highly stylized attitude, hairdo and mood board of references.”

Her latest album, Daddy’s Home, hits — pun unintended — close to home, as it references her father’s recent release from prison. But does the album itself betray her feelings? The same article describes the album as “Clark sometimes creep[ing] up to her edge, only to return to that playfully distorted hall of mirrors that has become her comfort zone.”

In an interview with NME, Clark stated that she wanted to tell her own story. “I wanted to tell stories of flawed people doing their best to survive, and write about the human condition with humour, compassion, and a lack of judgement.” Later on, however, she adds, “I want to just make great work, and I want to have a glass of tequila and that’s kind of… it. All I really care about is making great work and just kinda chillin’. The other stuff – play it as lays.”

Musical autofiction. Just like what any other artist would do. But there’s also a sort of fascination with it, isn’t there? People really want to know how much of it is fiction and how much of it is real.

Some artists double-down on the personal and the emotional. Joni Mitchell. Tori Amos. I’d argue Megan Thee Stallion. In an interview with Jeremy O. Harris for Vice, she says, “I’m not a fake person. I’m not a character. What I say is how I feel.” After her shooting and the ensuing and unfortunate debacle that resulted, she wrote an op-ed in The New York Times titled “Why I Speak Up for Black Women.” The byline is credited not to Megan Jovon Ruth Pete, but to Megan Thee Stallion. An interview with GQ credits her comeback after that summer to “not who she’d become, but because of who she’s been all along.”

You might notice here that what Megan Thee Stallion is doing here is quite similar to what Baldwin did in his time: using one’s platform to address the issues surrounding the community of one’s identity. You may also have noticed that she’s fully embraced her persona and the relationship that persona has with the world at large. It seems in contrast to what all the other artists here have been doing — trying to separate themselves from who people believe them to be. But it’s not really all that different. I’d argue she is kind of like St. Vincent, both of them unapologetically themselves regardless of how people perceive them. There’s no conflict between their identities because they refuse to engage in what people think of them. They’re just themselves.

All the people mentioned in this article so far have been women and/or people of color. There could definitely be an argument here, similar to what Brownstein said in her book, about the nature of racial or gender identity and how it informs an audience’s relationship with an artist. But let me throw a little bit of a curveball here.

In this interview with NPR, Springsteen talks about how he built his stage persona out of his father, in a way to possibly get close to him, and how that persona is radically different from the shy and anxious kid he was growing up. Putting aside the daddy issues here as we have elsewhere, it’s pretty interesting to me how a guy who has been held up as a paragon of masculinity is really just a sensitive and nice guy. It’s a little like how people have misinterpreted “Born in the U.S.A.” as a patriotic anthem when it’s more of a disappointment-filled satire.

So, it seems no matter your identity, you can have a persona that you may have constructed or that was constructed for you, that’s different from what you are yourself or what you’re trying to inject into your art.

Let’s go back a few topics for a moment. Think for a moment about the argument people make about how only gay people should play gay actors. Think about how Becky Albertalli had to come out as bisexual in order to quench the discourse surrounding her books. Think about how people publicly speculated whether Kate Elizabeth Russell was sexually abused because she wrote My Dark Vanessa.

There seems to be a trend pulling away from the idea that artists can create anything and toward an idea that only artists of a certain identity should create art about certain subjects. Ostensibly, this is about making sure people of marginalized identities get to have their voices heard. But it doesn’t seem to be doing that. The issue is rarely who is creating what, but mainly just a broad spectrum of who is creating. Not enough marginalized people are allowed to create, and the idea that people should only create what they are isn’t going to open up a bunch of opportunities. Put very simply, it’s just gonna lead to straight white people writing about straight white people. And when marginalized voices get a chance to step in, there’s going to be a certain expectation that they should be a spokesman for their community. The expectation that “Your Best American Girl” should’ve been about the fetishization of Asian women.

Maybe this is just fear-mongering. Maybe limiting people is a good thing. I don’t know, but based on what I have seen in the world, limiting people doesn’t open up opportunities. You have to just cut out the middleman and force those opportunities open. It’s hard, though. It’s very hard.

The ride is almost over but there’s a stop or two I want to make before journey’s end.

Based solely on this image, I don’t think people actually know what “Death of the Author” really means. I sure as hell don’t. Every time it’s brought up in discussion it feels like it’s a new argument someone’s making that’s completely different from the last time someone brought it up. But based on this amalgamation and skimming through the text itself, it seems to be about divorcing authorial intent from the created work. Think people saying Hatsune Miku wrote Harry Potter.

This paragraph from a piece in The Michigan Daily, which I did also only skim through (cut me some slack, an entire new Mitski song has been released between the beginning of this piece and now), sums up the main criticism:

“The death of the author means we do not seek to “resolve” art through its creators. At the end of the day, the death of the author is about the consumer of the art. It’s about the consumption of art without ever stopping to ask the author what they want or what they wanted, at least not directly. The reader can ask themselves what they think the author may have intended, but such a reading or interpretation is still rigorously based on the art itself.”

That old internet meme, the one with the teacher laying symbolism upon symbolism on the curtains being blue and the author saying the curtains were just fucking blue. The thing is, though, the curtains are never just blue. Back to the James Baldwin quote — one only writes out of one’s experiences. Everything happens to you. Whether we mean it or not, everything we do is colored by our experiences and the biases that developed from those experiences. There’s a reason the curtains are blue and not red or green or white or black. There’s a reason J.K. Rowling wrote about a race of greedy creatures with hooked noses who ran the banks. There’s a reason why certain film directors love to show scenes of brutalizing women. There’s a reason.

In a review for Anne Carson’s new book, based on the play “Herakles” by Euripides, the reviewer writes, “But, as [Carson] well knows, to read “Herakles” simply as a private tragedy is to miss its political dimensions, which no audience member in ancient Greece would have done.”

“Herakles” is the story of how the titular hero kills his family in a mad rage caused by Hera. Most playwrights say this incident is the impetus for the famous twelve labors, where Herakles goes around the Greek world and does some incredible tasks to essentially regain his honor. But Euripides has this event take place after the labors are done, when Herakles has come home already a hero. This play was written around the time of the Peloponnesian War, and was directly in response to and critical of the public’s reaction and reception to the death and horror that come with war.

Like the review says, to view it as a simple tragedy misses its political dimensions. It changes what the story is about.

Here and now, especially in the age of the internet, we love to kill the author. It happens every time you post a line from a poem, a dialogue from a book, a screenshot from a movie — you’re removing the creator’s intent and creating a new meaning for it in isolation. People love using quotes from Ocean Vuong’s book, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” when making romantic quote compilations, when the book itself is about the complex relationship between a mother and child.

But the thing is, it’s often really fun to kill the author. Take me for example. I’m watching Criminal Minds right now (mainly because I’m waiting for after school December to start The Good Wife as my no-thinking show) and I’m telling people that Aaron Hotcher is a closeted gay man who lies awake at night and tries not to think about how he saw Derek Morgan dancing with those girls at the club and how he wishes he could be the one dancing with him instead. I love saying Cobra Kai is a love story between two old men and their sex sounds like a fresh bowl of Snap Crackle Pop. Obviously, the writers of Criminal Minds didn’t create their scenes from my perspective, but I take those screenshots and add my silly little caption and suddenly it looks a lot like what I think it’s saying.

Which view is correct? Is there a correct view? Can these two opposing views, the creator’s and my own, be held at the same time? I’d argue yes. After all, what’s life without a little cognitive dissonance, huh?

(Except for the Cobra Kai thing. That one is true and all opposing views are false.)

The biggest thing is, though, that we can’t stop people from forming opinions that are different from our own. Even if we’re the creators of that thing. Even if we are that thing.

Back during the third John Mulaney scandal, the one where we found out about the baby, a certain New York Times reporter who has a silly joke handle on Twitter and a funny little icon, whose bestselling book is turning into a prestige miniseries, tweeted (he’s since deleted it so I have to recall from memory but it was something to the effect of): People better not be forming parasocial relationships with me.

That’s a nigh impossible request. From the moment you create an account on the internet and start posting — hell, from the moment you are born and interact with society — you’ve signed a contract that allows people to form a parasocial relationship with you. You have no idea what image of yourself has been built in their head, what it’s about, how true you believe it to be. You’re forced to live with it. You’re forced to be seen and be thought of. You’re forced to have some barista think you’re an asshole for ordering a complex drink. You’re forced to have some guy who sees you jerk off to thoughts of you when he gets home. You’re forced to have someone think about you whenever they want and think whatever they want.

It gets worse when you’re in an industry that requires a certain level of interaction with people — usually creators. Your livelihood is dependent on how many people have formed a positive parasocial relationship with you to the extent that they’ll monetarily support you. As big as Beyoncé is, she would be nowhere without the Beyhive. The reason Nicki Minaj is still around is because barbs won’t let you forget her. The reason that NYT reporter has a TV show coming out about his book is because enough readers are a fan of his that they bought it and made it a bestseller. And, like John Mulaney learned, you can’t control what they’re gonna do or how they’re gonna feel about you when you act outside of the persona they’ve created for you.

Like it or not, parasocial relationships are here to stay. 

We’re pulling up to our final stop. Let’s go back to the beginning. The very beginning. The first questions posed in this article.

Who is Mitski? What is her song about?

Is Mitski my best friend? Is her song about me, personally, going through a rough time? Is Mitski a communist hero and her song is about living under capitalism? Is Mitski a person and her song is about herself? Is Mitski Mitski and her song is about her song?

Mitski is whoever I think she is and her song is about whatever I think it is. For better or for worse.