Mitski is the pop chameleon, the TikTok phenomenon & the self-proclaimed “black hole that people throw their shit into.”
About depression and consolation: Even with her current album THE LAND IS INHOSPITABLE AND SO ARE WE, she doesn’t focus on the big questions in life. But how could it happen that a young TikTok audience adores the art-pop author Mitski in global star dimensions?
“Everyone wanted a piece of me”
When the almost teenage Elisabeth of Thuringia died in 1231, little remained of her body. Even during her lifetime she was considered a saint. Reason enough for the grieving Christians who made a pilgrimage to her corpse to secure a piece of heaven for themselves, as it seemed to be manifested in her body. Hair was torn from her head, nails from her toes, ears and fingers were cut off. “Everyone wanted a piece of me. I was so overwhelmed by the hands reaching for me that I began to cry, but they didn’t seem to see my crying face. People grabbed my shirt, and when I got away it was more or less taken off,” says US songwriter Mitski, describing very similar experiences a good eight hundred years later.
Only: after a concert. Just: alive. And threatening. Admittedly, the Beatles and BTS were also under escalating siege from their audience. They always seem like they actually think it’s a good thing to be stars, the pushy fans are more of an amusing anecdote than a physical threat, good material for B-roll. Sure, there’s this thing with gender. But there is something else too. Mitski Miyawaki, born Mitsuki Laycock, is not, after all, a teenage shooting star who was placed on the market by clever major managers, but rather in her early 30s, known for years as the author of great but also offbeat indie pop albums – you Her latest work, THE LAND IS INHOSPITABLE AND SO ARE WE (“I pulled a Fiona Apple,” she comments on the long title; names like Arthur Russell, Ennio Morricone and Caetano Veloso are mentioned) definitely belongs in this series.
The TikTok phenomenon
So someone whose fame should actually be based on catering to a middle-aged audience with taste (aka: you, dear Musikexpress reader). Instead, she became a global star on TikTok, of all places. So in this parallel world that takes what pop theory has always said about the Internet to the extreme – that the entire archive of music history is now available at any time and ready for collage. And that meant: The African traces of hip hop can now easily be combined with new music, even outside of long-term academic studies. And now on TikTok you get: The return of Otto Waalkes’ “Friesenjung” with Joost and Ski Aggu or the delayed global success of the shanty hit “Aloha Heja He” by Achim Reichel. For Mitski, it was the song “Nobody” from 2018 that exploded on the video platform in 2021. The hashtag #mitski has been posted there a total of 5.4 billion times to date.
Not only is Mitski no longer on social media, she is also not a person who says much about her private life on the usual channels. Nowadays, not even anything at all: Mitski has decided not to give any interviews for her new album for the time being. The quotes are collected together, on the one hand from the artist’s past interviews, for example the long one above from the “Guardian”. On the other hand, Musikexpress has exclusively received several sound files from their management in which Mitski talks about individual songs, admittedly not particularly juicy – “loving is the best thing I’ve ever done”, something like that, nothing that’s available, to understand the phenomenon, but music theory is quite exciting, chord progressions and production tricks.
The pop chameleon
Mitski’s self-portrayal, if at all, is more like classic pop: somehow you have to talk about yourself, at least in music, if you’re serious about songwriting. But the fact that the music then has to be about an ego that agrees with the singing body – that’s something that pop has always undermined. And the fact that Mitski does that is actually great. Because the famous pop chameleon is usually a white man, while women of color in pop are often forced by the audience and the press to represent their origins and identity.
Mitski has played both options in her career. Her breakthrough in 2016 came with an album of indie punk catchy tunes. PUBERTY 2 had bittersweet explosions, but was also about the feeling of not quite belonging, outsiderism, loneliness, insecurity. It was easy to read discriminatory experiences as an Asian American woman into a song like “Your Best American Girl” or “Strawberry Blond.”
The fact that BE THE COWBOY had much more grandeur than punk attitude was no coincidence, but rather a return to their sound, as their first, less successful albums were more piano-heavy art pop. BE THE COWBOY was a great album not only in sound, but also in its sophistication and compositional quality. And precisely because, as the title suggests, this implicitly creates a game of roles. Roles in which Mitski seems to thrive with a performative sincerity.
Just the right pop perhaps for the sensibility of Generation Z, no, no, alpha, for whom feelings have to be authentic, but on the other hand, they become authentic through the fact that they are communicated, i.e. can be made productive for their own identity. Radical subjectivity, but it has to work in the language of external representation and also in the grammar of social media. Mitski delivers pieces that sound so specific that they seem to refer to a real experience, even if the artist refuses to confirm or even disclose it, but which are also so open that they appear to her fans as Stories from one’s own life can be appropriated.
“I am the black hole that people throw all their shit into.”
“I am the black hole into which people throw all their shit, be it their need for love, hate or anger,” she said in 2022. Which is an exciting image for “projection surface” – namely its exact opposite. After all, a black hole is not a mirror, not even matter, but a matter eater, passive and active at the same time.
It would be difficult to accuse Mitski of having figured out pop much sooner than the big one-size-fits-all acts from Bill Haley to Helene Fischer, but her completely unexpected success beyond the music industry suggests that something is happening here is not simply a combination of chance and an algorithmic avalanche, but a different economy of emotions. Mitski is a pop star not because she actually makes sophisticated pieces full of oddities and issues, but because of that. Because there is a need to see issues represented, as long as the suffering from them remains so consumable that it still fits into pop. And what a, in this case! And how great that she is being heard!
Sung by crowds
It remains a strange experience, on the one hand, to hear this cleverly played, intimate, mature and, as always, larger-than-life music from THE LAND IS INHOSPITABLE AND SO ARE WE, to find moments of great fragility, comfort and love and to know that these songs will soon be heard by masses be sung along. Songs that try not to force the self into commodity form. “Bug Like An Angel”, the beautiful, sad lead single, comes in an acoustic guise and the musician in the video in a gospel robe. But the song tackles alcoholism, one of the few addictions that can’t really be glamorized. In general, Mitski thinks that this is actually an album like a person in a midlife crisis, and the beauty and sadness here obviously come from the same source. Did Mitski want to become even darker to shake off the darkness that her fans cast on her?
It’s almost ironic that the passage where the gospel choir enters the song to embrace the drinking narrator who finds family in her drinks with a warm “Family” just begs to be sampled and duetted on TikTok.
The physical and emotional attacks and assaults on the person Mitski are actually about healing, about Elisabeth of Thuringia. Mitski not as an object of desire, but as a fetish of connection, as a saint of identification in fear and illness. Which doesn’t make the experience any less threatening. When in 2022 she asked her fans on her Twitter account, which had long been managed by a PR team, to film concerts a little more sparingly, saying that she no longer felt a connection to the crowd and just felt consumed, numerous fans reacted by insinuating that she was Ignoring the need for security in the face of mental illnesses such as ADHD or depression, which require holding onto the cell phone as a resistance strategy. Radical Softness as a Weapon, but against whom? The fact that she keeps going and still makes music like this is a credit to her.