Mitskis Ghost Stories – The Nation

Mitski. (Photo by Ebru Yildiz)

Three years ago, during the summer of 2o19, Mitski announced a hiatus. For the past five years, shed been touring nonstop. The 2016 breakout success of her fourth studio album, Puberty 2, had vaulted her from a well-loved indie artist to a crossover success story, then onward and upward into the firmament of pop stardom. Lorde tapped her as an opening act in her 2018 Melodrama tour; Iggy Pop name-checked her on his radio show; her subsequent album, 2018s Be the Cowboy, was a perennial favorite on year-end lists. She still didnt have a permanent mailing address and stored her things at her parents house, but no mattershe was, as NPR crowned her, the 21st centurys poet laureate of young adulthood, and her future, as Pitchfork declared, was limitless.

In a recent interview, Mitski recounted the time leading up to her hiatus as a period of detachment: Looking back, she said, she couldnt remember long stretches of the overlapping tours. Her hair was graying; her body was breaking down. I felt it was shaving away my soul, little by little, she told Rolling Stone. But even in moments of exhaustion, she was productive. Stuck in Kuala Lumpur during the holidays, depressed and lonely, she had written Nobody, the best-known track on Be the Cowboy, which in 2021 became TikTok famousand as a result, according to Billboard, multiplied her daily streaming numbers sevenfold during both the height of the pandemic and her retraction from the public eye.

Mitskis most ardent fans can be intense, too: They cry at shows, they call her mom, and they tattoo her lyrics onto their bodies. They say her music saved them. John Doe from the punk band X once turned to Phoebe Bridgers at a Mitski show in Los Angeles and commented, All these kids look like theyre at fucking church.

The unfortunate reality of being an artist beloved for granting unflinching access to your emotional underbelly is that, unless you want to do it in obscurity, you dont exist in a vacuumyour art is always steps away from misguided co-option and misinterpretation. As your star rises, access to your pain becomes a service, or a resource to be tapped. With fame, Mitski realized art was a bad jobone she wanted to quit. She was sick of selling her emotions and memories, little by little.

So by the summer of 2019, she made the announcement: She was leaving social media, and her September appearance at SummerStage in New York Citys Central Park would be her last live show indefinitely.

Its time to be a human again, she tweeted.

Laurel Hell, Mitskis newest album, is a putative reclamation of her agencyand it does come across as Be the Cowboys corrosive rebuttal. (Cheekily, one of the songs is titled Everyone, in which she sings, Everyone said, Dont go that way / So of course to that I said, I think Ill go that way.) While Be the Cowboy thrashes with manic electricity, each song either building to an explosion or crackling in breathless anticipation of one, Laurel Hell maintains a rueful distance, looking back with something like pity. You stay soft, get beaten, Mitski sings. Only natural to harden up.

Be the Cowboy pantomimed this kind of fatigue, playacting a hard-won world-weariness with the jaded characters of Me and My Husband, Blue Diner, and Two Slow Dancers. Laurel Hell gives us a Mitski who has caught a glimpse of this herself: Working for the Knife, the albums lodestar, is a haunting ballad of a working artist forced to shoulder the crushing churn of work and self-promotion. I always knew the world moves on / I just didnt know it wouldnt go without me, she sings. I start the day high and I end so low / Cause Im working for the knife. In the songs music video, Mitski doffs a cowboy hat and, dead-eyed, turns to an empty theater. She collapses to the floor, rises and dances with a manic smile to canned applause, throws herself down again, and beats her fists against the ground, the meaty pounding of her hands against the wood as she pummels it, drowning out the song. The video ends with a closeup of Mitskis forced grin. The stage lured her back and crushed her again.

I used to think Id be done by 20, she sings in Working for the Knife. Now at 29, the road ahead appears the same / Though maybe at 30 Ill see a way to change. The new songs may flash a weary attitude, the video may depict her flaying herself onstage, but there she is, as beforedemonstrating her pain to you, trapped under the spotlight.

Mitski, like some of her contemporariesLorde or Billie Eilish, for exampleis using her new songs to explore the particular fatigue that online fame has produced: Our narrator, ambivalent about dealing with the absurdities of being a popular artist in a crumbling world, cleanses herself of social media and, hopefully, the crushing, deluded expectations of success. Unlike other riffs on this arc, Mitskis version doesnt present us with the redemptive beatitude of the other side. Instead, she tells us tales from the crypt, the horror of being raised from the dead.

Laurel Hell, then, is about the singers acceptance that her pain and vulnerability are currency; their performance can be cashed in, but the expectation that she will expose them to others with searing, consuming honesty, on demand and without end, exacts a punishing toll. And I opened my arms wide to the dark / I said, Take it all, whatever you want, she sings in Everyone. I didnt know I was numb / I didnt know what it would take.

Readers like you make our independent journalism possible.

Lyrically vivid as ever, Mitski tosses us images of lingering specters in the dark, wet teeth shining, eyes glimmering by a fire, as she sings on Valentine, Texas in a low, trance-like murmur over the groans of an organ. At its best, Laurel Hell seethes with these kinds of monstersones you see at the corner of your eye, all the more frightening for never fully showing themselves. I left the door open to the dark / I said, Come in, come in, whatever you are, she sings in Everyone. But it didnt want me yet.

Mitski is comfortable in horror; as a genre, its suited to the comic, sometimes caustic, always self-conscious spirit at the foundation of her best songs. Laurel Hells best moments embrace this dynamic. Open up your heart / Like the gates of hell, she sings on Stay Soft. In the music video, figures in Edo-period masksblond-haired, blue-eyedchase her out of a garden shes tending, then corner her and drag her into their lair. Stay soft, get eaten, she sings with a wink as the masked figures begin their torments. She slays them and feeds their blood to an Audrey IIlike flower, which wiggles with fiendish glee in her hand.

But if Laurel Hell is a ghost story, its only as good as the teller is at sustaining a mood. This is the case when the enemy is ambiguous, and therefore disconcerting, as in the brilliant music video for Stay Soft or the demonic thrashing that closes out the video for Working for the Knife. The image of a hand plucking Mitski from her life and dropping her into a labyrinth in Shouldve Been Me crests on a shimmer of synths and carries us with it, into the perplexing daydream that stole her day and deeper into an uncertain, troubling world.

But this isnt most of Laurel Hell. Only Heartbreaker, the catchiest and tightest song on the album, is also its dissonant chord: a moment of high-octane fun that dissolves as soon as it ends. I need you to love me more, Mitski tells us in the similarly hyperactive Love Me More. Love enough to clean me up. Tied up so neatly, the opportunity to feel an uneasy chill deflates into a resigned shrug; what could unsettle merely makes us pine. A limitation that Mitski could thrive on, if she leaned into it, is also a truism of the genre: The real horror is what you dont reveal.

Originally posted here:

Mitskis Ghost Stories - The Nation