Yes, I Will Be The Cowboy

When Mitski steps on stage, the first thing she does is confess to the audience that she’s not good at engaging audiences. It feels odd at first, because how else is an artist supposed to connect with their audience? The reality is, Mitski uses her apprehension to her advantage and lets her music, and accompanying interpretive dance, speak for itself, resonating to the core within each member of the crowd. You hear about her troubles, what angers her and what depresses her. You hear about her experiences with love and you hear about her alienation. And when the chorus of “Your Best American Girl” comes in, and she stares piercingly into the crowd, you realize what it’s like to be seen by someone like you.

Mitsuki Miyawaki is a Japanese American indie and alternative rock singer-songwriter. She studied at SUNY Purchase College's Conservatory of Music, where she self-released her first two albums: “Lush” and “Retired from Sad, New Career in Business.” Her work has been nominated for awards such as the Libera Awards and the Grammys, the music video for her song "Nobody" even winning the Libera Award for Music Video of the Year. All of her music is drawn from her personal experiences, such as her life as a college student entering young adulthood, unrequited love and her experiences as an Asian American.

Much of her music focuses on love and the experience of being visibly Asian in predominantly white places and the lack of belonging it comes with, as these themes are tied together in her life. The rejection she experienced in life, both societal and romantic, had been a result of her being an outsider due to her race, and is thus reflected in her music. Mitski addresses this in an interview with The Line of Best Fit: “I write personal stories about relationships, and living in this world and being a human being…but I happen to live in a world which views me as an Asian American.”

This connection is first seen in her song “Strawberry Blond,” which appears in her second self-released album, “Retired from Sad, New Career in Business.” “Strawberry Blond” focuses on the singer’s feelings of inadequacy due to unrequited love, and the bittersweet memories associated with the other person that they cannot let go of because of the nostalgia. This nostalgia is tied to things that the narrator associates with their crush, such as strawberry blond hair and the stereotypically white pastoral setting they both lived in, where one sticks out while the other blends in seamlessly. Reminiscent of summer, strawberry blond hair is considered the epitome of candid, white beauty. The narrator longs for “a life in your shape” and the ideal the crush represents, aching over their inability to have a place in their crush’s life. The narrator then says they “follow the white lines,” a double entendre that literally refers to the white lines on the road but figuratively refers to the life path white society has set for her to follow.

In the summer of 2020, “Strawberry Blond” saw a surge in popularity as the summery themes and plucky folk chords resonated with the niche internet subculture “cottagecore,” which focuses on an idealized rural life and romanticizes western agriculture. The community had been criticized in the past for pushing colonialist and Eurocentric settler values, making the adoption of “Strawberry Blond” into the subculture an uncritical celebration of everything the song criticizes and an erasure of its inherent racial commentary. Furthermore, the adoption of this song resulted in farm animal adaptations of “Strawberry Blond,” such as “Strawberry Cow,” causing backlash for whitewashing as a song about the unattainability of whiteness had been turned into a cute song about animals.

Mitski further explores her feelings of alienation and inadequacy as she revisits the topic in her fourth studio album, “Puberty 2.” In the music video for the song, “Happy,” this theme is visualized. Featuring an Asian American housewife in the 50s, “Happy” translates racialized inadequacy in the form of a crumbling relationship as the woman’s husband cheats on her with different, glamorous, white women. These feelings are hinted at over the course of the music video, in scenes such as her disappointing her husband while serving him, her finding locks of blonde hair in his clothes and finding a purse with even more hair and “for my blue-eyed cookie” embroidered within. The purse scene is then cemented by the woman looking at the mirror, her brown eyes reflecting back at her strikingly. Throughout the video, there are cutscenes from the white women to the Asian woman, the former being praised by the man while the latter cries alone, visually depicting the feelings of inadequacy the housewife feels in comparison to the other women.

The lead single of “Puberty 2,” “Your Best American Girl,” is much more explicit about Mitski’s experience with racial discrimination. The narrative of the song refracts into double meaning, where at face value the song represents the turmoil of understanding one being too different from their partner, though in depth represents the cultural divide Mitski experienced as a Japanese immigrant in America. As the song opens, Mitski establishes contrasting metaphors, starting with the big spoon and the little spoon, where the former refers to her lover and the latter, herself. She states, “But, big spoon, you have so much to do/ And I have nothing ahead of me,” to set up their differences physically and in terms of status, as his future holds so much opportunity while hers holds nothing ahead of her. Mitski then compares her lover to the sun that’s “never seen the night” as he virtually exists at the center of everything and blinded by his own light, or his upbringing and privilege, and therefore unable to see those in the darkness. Essentially, he is everything unattainable for an outcast, like Mitski, but is blind to it.

Contrastingly, Mitski is “not the moon, [I'm] not even a star/ But awake at night [I'll be] singing to the birds” as she does not have a light of her own but exists in darkness. All she can do is sing about her experiences in hopes that someone will hear her trying to move past the darkness and lack of opportunity. She wishes to be seen, and wishes to be heard in spite of an environment that tells her she is undeserving. The greatest comparison in the song is a personal one, directly referring to the differences in their upbringing in the chorus: “Your mother wouldn't approve of how my mother raised me/ But I do, I think I do/ And you're an all-American boy/ I guess I couldn't help trying to be your best American girl.” In the chorus, Mitski is painfully aware of how her lover’s society perceives and disapproves of her, and as a result, attempts to become the “Best American Girl.” For many young Asian Americans, this means assimilating into white American “culture” at the cost of rejecting their own. She then compares their mothers in homage to her culture and the importance of family values where she is aware and apprehensive of how her Japanese mother’s parenting differs from traditional (white) American families. As the song progresses, Mitski comes to regret wanting to conform to American society and realizes there was nothing wrong with her upbringing. In the final chorus, she admits: “Your mother wouldn't approve of how my mother raised me/ But I do, I finally do,” and begins to embrace her mother’s upbringing and herself.

The song’s meaning is driven home by the accompanying music video, featuring Mitski herself sitting across from a white man. In the music video, the two appear to get along until their incompatibility becomes evident when another woman appears, a white woman outfitted in a fringed crop top and flower crown as a visualization of a youthful American. As the song progresses, Mitski grows into exaggerated self-love, paralleling the engrossed love of the couple across from her, following along the line “but I do, I finally do” and ends the video playing her own music and walking away from the couple, and their ideals. She is finally able to overcome her feelings, setting out to create her own path with her love, rather than yearn for the love of others. By playing her guitar and walking away, she resolves the line of “singing to the birds,” now “singing” for herself out of self-love.

Mitski finally overcomes her feelings of not having the unattainable— love and acceptance in white spaces— by deciding to take it for herself anyway, giving us her most recent studio album, “Be the Cowboy.'' The title of the album in particular is Mitski’s response to overcoming the outsider's struggle in being accepted as American as she takes a pillar of American iconography and makes it her own.

To GQ Magazine, Mitski states:

“When I say 'cowboy' I mean the ideal swaggering Clint Eastwood cowboy. In my daily life I tend to be the quintessential Asian woman so I thought, 'What if I was a tough white cowboy?’ This album is about not taking responsibility for your mistakes. Just fucking up and being like, 'Whatever.' That's what a white guy would do. In cowboy movies they're destroying a town but they're the hero. I'm entitled to these things.”

Mitski is no longer holding herself back with the idea that she isn’t American enough, but she also understands that being a part of Asian representation doesn’t mean that's all there is for her. “Be the Cowboy” as an album shows Mitski as an artist who is in control of her own narrative as the songs follow an exaggerated persona, essentially her Cowboy. In her song “Remember My Name,” the narrator comes to terms with their loneliness and dissatisfaction, and decides to aggrandize themself, much like how the album is made as a narrative to separate Mitski’s past and present works. At first, it seems like rejection; however, it is a -bold statement of self-indulgence that comes from a place of self-love.

Over the course of her discography we can see the path from lamenting being an outsider, to understanding and accepting the fundamental differences in cultural upbringings, to realizing that identity isn’t all there is to Asian Americans and letting herself choose how she is defined rather than letting those around her define her. If she is going to stand out, it will be on her own terms: Accepting all parts of her identity and taking them by force to forge something new altogether.