Fiery yet tender in her lyricism, Mitski Miyawaki is a force to be reckoned with in today’s music industry. “Half Japanese, half American yet not fully either,” the 29-year-old often explores themes of belonging, desire and cultural conflict, such as in her 2016 song ‘Your Best American Girl’.

“Your mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me,” she laments. “But I do, I finally do.”

Glass-shattering vocals

But why do we need Mitski? The answer lies in her combination of mournful minor chords and glass-shattering vocals – her ability to be raw and vulnerable in front of thousands, and her disregard for those who disagree.

That Kylie Jenner look

In the last decade, society’s perception of women has altered exponentially. With the arrival of the body positivity movement and the emergence of Instagram accounts dedicated to ‘exposing’ celebrities who don’t admit to editing their appearance, women have never felt more able to be themselves without fear of being moulded into society’s ‘perfect woman’. Yet even now, women are paying out of pocket for the ‘Kylie Jenner look’; paying to absorb another’s identity.

But out of this maze of fillers and chemical peels rises Mitski, who unapologetically breathes fresh meaning into the phrase “be yourself”. One of the most unadulterated performances of her career took place in 2015 for NPR’s ‘Tiny Desk’ concert series, wherein she wore no makeup, “radiating pain” as she later tweeted, and none of it mattered because she was doing what she loved.

Unfortunately, this philosophy is rarely matched by other female celebrities and influencers, and appearance has become the most important factor for many modern influencers.

Mitski’s latest single, ‘Cop Car’ was released in January 2020, but has been played live since 2014. Part of the soundtrack for the horror film ‘The Turning’, ‘Cop Car’ has the aural quality of a mind unravelling due to its messy, grunge-inspired guitar riffs and the repeated line “I will never die”. The dark irony of feigning invincibility in the face of death scares us; it hits us like a bullet and yet somehow, in that moment, we believe it.

Alongside it is “I am cruel, I am gentle, I can make you laugh,” which summarises the ‘cool girl’ trope found in so much of today’s pop culture: a woman who is strong without threatening her partner’s masculinity, yet feminine enough to be maternal and deeply compassionate.

An ode to teen dramas

Then we have ‘Townie’, one of the most popular songs on the 2014 album ‘Bury Me at Makeout Creek’. A simultaneous gut-punch and goodnight kiss from your 15-year-old self, ‘Townie’ explores the various rites of passage that make themselves known in adolescence, including parties, sex and the inevitable “change, change, change”. Despite its upbeat and hedonistic tone, there is also a sense of melancholy desperation – as though the entire song is a persona and the final line, “I am gonna be what my body wants me to be”, begins to make cracks in the surface. ‘Townie’ is an ode to teen dramas and romances alike, summarising the fatalism, experimentalism and yearning of an era in just one sentence:

“I want to kiss like my heart is hitting the ground.”

Whilst the 2018 album ‘Be The Cowboy’ has a much softer and more minimalistic music style, the previous themes of identity and longing prevail in lyrics packed with metaphors and symbolism. One of the most important examples is the omnipresence of the word “you” throughout the album, a word that refers to people, objects and emotions alike. Mitski is often dependent on this absent second person; she is submissive in ‘Geyser’, when she sings “I just can’t be without you”; she is mournful and nostalgic in ‘Old Friend’ with “that pretty girl is finally yours”; she is regretful in ‘Two Slow Dancers’ as she looks back on an old love. All in all, she appears to be searching for something to define her, a search that so many people struggle with, regardless of their gender.

Mitski is honest, raw and vulnerable in front of thousands of people every time she performs, and that is what makes her so powerful. It scares those who haven’t seen someone as brave as her before, and all of us should be more like her.