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Dead Oceans | mitski.bandcamp.com
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In my Superlative Albums I Wrote About in 2018 list, Be the Cowboy was awarded the Coriander Cordon for Acquired Taste
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The doors swing open.
A gust of wind whistles in, pushing with it a handful of tumbleweeds that skitter like frightened mice along the skirting boards.
If the dilapidated old piano in the corner could make a record-scratch noise, it would, but seeing as it can’t, it settles for a piano-proximate equivalent.
Silence falls as every head turns to the figure silhouetted against the lazy low-slung afternoon sun.
A glass smashes jealously to the ground. Nobody notices.
She strides in slowly, knowing that all eyes are on her, savouring the feeling, making her way casually but deliberately to the greasy bar opposite her.
She swipes her card at the machine, which chirps unhappily at her.
A crease appears between her brows.
She swipes her card again, and is gratified to hear a different, altogether more accommodating beep.
She picks up her takeaway chalupas and begins to munch.
She turns on her heel, and leaves the same way that she entered.
She leaves a trail of red dust in her wake.
Dirt from outside, or maybe powdered jalapeño.
It’s not a saloon, exactly, but it’s certainly saloon-themed.
For her fifth studio album, Mitski Miyawaki has chosen to refine her palette. Gone is the fuzzy shoegazy shredding — what’s left is all clean noodling and crisp percussion.
Be the Cowboy is painted in polite beiges, making extensive use of creamy mellow scales and elliptical meanderings through tasteful browns. It is delightfully wholesome. It threatens to spill over into twee, but of course is far too neat and particular to ever dream of even speculating spillage.
The contrast with her poetry is striking.
For the grand expanse of the American landscape is sanitised into a postcard; grand mesas and glorious canyons glowing red under the rising sun stuffed inside a snowglobe. Just behind the placid whitewash is a radical reclamation, a Japanese-American woman seizing from the patriarchy what is rightfully hers: the opportunity to be an individual, on her own terms.
Which is to say the opportunity to fail.
Which she has done, over and over, and over again.
Mitski belongs to an ethnicity nastily and offensively stereotyped as deferential and decorative. Reading between the lines, before each song is an unrecorded prologue of proactivity. She’s the shoot first kind, it seems, and there are a lot of questions to ask later.
Even when she does lean a little closer to those racist clichés, she scoots them leftward in a way that is specifically Mitski.
“Spend an hour on my makeup /
To prove something /
Walk up in my high heels /
All high and mighty /
And you say hello /
And I lose”
But other questions are not so easily answered.
How, for example, do you heal after you’ve broken your own heart?
“Sorry I can’t take your touch /
It’s just that I fell in love with a war /
Nobody told me it ended /
And it left a pearl in my head /
And I roll it around every night /
Just to watch it glow”
What more can I, a successful and famous musician, do to be happy?
“I need something bigger than the sky /
Hold it in my arms and know it’s mine /
Just how many stars will I need to hang around me /
To finally call it heaven?”
And just how oblique is it possible to be with one’s euphemisms?
“Baby, will you kiss me already /
And toss your dirty shoes in my washing machine heart /
Baby, bang it up inside”
The call to action implicit in Be the Cowboy brings to mind other albums that I love, albums of beautiful and heartwrenching music that nonetheless unknowingly display the inherent passivity of privilege.
Kacey Musgraves, that whiskey-sweet country singer, articulated on Golden Hour that a simple change of attitude is all that’s required to make the world a better place. Even if you haven’t been keeping up with the news, you must be aware that this is not the case, not matter how smoothly you sing it. And on the pointedly-titled American Dream, James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem spends over an hour of thrashing dance-punk mourning what may not yet even be lost. Note the gradient of hope from the woman to the man in this situation.
Mitski has a better foil: a queer black woman who dances as if electrified.
Where Be the Cowboy is focused on small, personal vignettes, Dirty Computer sprawls dramatically into the big picture. Where the former boasts such saucy quips as “Nobody butters me up like you and / Nobody fucks me like me” or “Venus, planet of love / Was destroyed by global warming”, Janelle Monáe embraces our world with love, and with sheer irrepressible joy:
“I am not America’s nightmare /
I am the American dream”
The radical optimism of the oppressed is the lifeblood of progress throughout the centuries, and Mitski and Monáe show this in different ways. Be the Cowboy declares that I am. Dirty Computer pronounces that we are.
Still, Mitski knows that who we think we are is just as important as who we actually are, and that this is most truly expressed in who we pretend to be.
There are no cowprint chaps to be seen here, but bovine-themed upholstery abounds. There are no ten-gallon hats; the only thing measured in gallons is the swirling vats of sweet tea. (There is a clutch of tumbleweeds shimmying along the parquetry, but this one is a coincidence.)
Mitski’s doubt and anxiety and rage are crisp and clean, gracefully gift-wrapped, constrained to a mannerly pop-rock format, clipped and cropped and squashed and shrunk and made less.
And yet, this is the real thing. Precisely because it’s not.