white women, we need to stop being so weird about mitski
a brief detour from kitsch to consider the phenomenon of the Sad Girl
**This essay falls outside of what I initially imagined the scope of this newsletter to be, but it was important to me, so I wrote it, and I hope you will read it anyway. The next post will once again be about kitsch, but I may take some detours like this again in the future.**
Upon reading a tweet about her for an interview with Crack Magazine, Mitski tapped her fingers against the arm of her chair. “You know,” she said, “the sad girl thing was reductive and tired like five-ten years ago and it still is today. I mean, I get this person means really well and I appreciate them. I appreciate you, Jasmine. But let’s retire the sad girl shtick. It’s over. Sad girl is over.”
Sad girl is, in fact, not over yet. It is an aesthetic that seems to only be growing in popularity – with its disciples posting screenshots and writing poetry and over-relating to lyrics on tiktok and tumblr and twitter. It’s not just about the music, but music is a key part of it, and Mitski is arguably Sad Girl music’s star.
Sad Girl music is, according to NPR, “a category of female artists whose searing, poetic lyrics about breakups and heartache accompany us through our days.” It’s music that allows the internet’s Sad Girls to sit in their emotions, to revel in their heartbreaks, to aestheticize their lives according to a specific set of rules – namely, that the Sad Girls must remain sad.
It’s not a particularly healthy mindset to live in full time, and most of the artists beloved by this group don’t. They may not be expected to play by all the Sad Girl rules, but their fans don’t want them to stray too far. Lorde, once a Sad Girl icon, was quickly abandoned when she released Solar Power, a peppy, poppy album that is not so much achingly lonely as it is an invitation to smoke weed on the beach. It’s largely happy. The Sad Girls didn’t want it, and by extension they no longer wanted Lorde.
To be loved by the Sad Girls is to be cupped in the palms of their hands, precious and carefully watched and trapped. They, as a group, are largely white, mentally ill, and looking for community in those who love the same artists and feel the same pains as they do.
It’s a phenomenon that I understand, that I wanted to talk about because I was once seduced by it. As a teenager, with raging depression and a not-yet-fully-developed frontal cortex, I spent a lot of time reading poetry about suffering on tumblr and seeking out the absolute saddest music I could imagine. (I did not discover Mitski until my twenties, for which I am grateful.) I wanted to be held by this group of similarly broken girls, and we wanted to share our love for the art that felt like it was saving us with the people who created it. But none of us realized how painful and restrictive our love might seem from the other side. How much it might seem like an attempt at control.
The sad girl thing is, as Mitski said, reductive.
And it’s particularly unsettling to see the ownership white women seem to think they have over the emotions and inner life of Mitski. The number of white women who I have watched scream-sob to “Your Best American Girl” makes me seriously question our media literacy skills as a group. And look, I understand that it’s an incredible song, and that great writing finds universality in the specific. In talking about being too “foreign” for a white American lover, Mitski expresses the broader feeling of failing a lovers expectations, of needing to unlearn the guilt and shame that comes from that kind of painful relationship. A lot of women have been in shitty romantic relationships – it’s cathartic to scream out "Your mother wouldn't approve of how my mother raised me/But I do, I finally do/And you're an all-American boy/I guess I couldn't help trying to be the best American girl” as Mitski’s electric guitar crescendos.
Many of us, at one time or another, have tried to be our partner’s best American girl, only to realize we weren’t and never will be, feeling a ferocious sort of joy when we finally stop trying. But flattening the song into an anthem of female self-empowerment is to ignore its inherently racial message. Mitski can’t be this guy’s best American girl because she’s half Japanese. That’s how her mother raised her, and that’s all he and his mother will ever be able to see. The catharsis at the heart of the song isn’t a rejection of her lover, but of white American femininity and its impossible expectations.
“That all-American white culture is something that is inherited instead of attained,” she explained in an episode of Song Exploder. And while that culture may feel restrictive and punishing from the inside, as white women listening to this song we have to be honest about the fact that we are the inheritors.
Forgive me for such a simplistic analysis of a fairly straightforward song, but it feels like a lot of you guys either didn’t understand, or chose not to. I’m not going to argue that you can’t, in some tangential way, relate to a song that’s about a distinctly Asian-American experience, but you need to understand that it isn’t for or about you. Which is the key thing here, I guess – none of this is about you.
In order to best relate to her songs, we dismiss the aspects of Mitski’s identity and experiences that we do not share. We want to talk about womanhood, but we can only talk about white womanhood. This, to us, is raceless, so we try to make Mitski raceless. There is, of course, no such thing, and to imagine whiteness as the default, or ourselves as exempt from race, is white supremacy at work.
There is no gender outside of race. But white women, myself sometimes included, want to talk about womanhood as if it exists in a vacuum divorced from racialized experiences of gender. No such thing exists, and it is an act of violence to try. But Mitski’s music speaks to a part of us, and we want it to speak to all of us – for all of us – so sometimes we do try. We pretend that our experiences of alienation and otherness are the same, when nothing could be further from the truth.
I understand how deeply significant it is when you find an artist whose work speaks to your deepest aches and sadnesses. I also first loved Mitski because her music sounded like something in me that was too sad or raw or vulnerable to be spoken aloud. When I first heard “Last Words of a Shooting Star” I had to sit on the floor and play it over and over and over again, because it sounded so exactly like filling out intake paperwork in the psych ward, on the worst day of my life, and realizing that my parents were going to have to deal with the dirty laundry I left on my bedroom floor. It didn’t matter that the song wasn’t actually about this – it captured the feeling, and when I heard it I realized that that was a feeling I needed to be captured.
Finding a song that has somehow seen you, in your pain and vulnerability, as no person ever has, is profound. It validates you, and it starts to break apart the isolation that often encapsulates pain. But we can't force artists to be that, and only that, for us. For one thing, it’s impossible. No one person has the same pain as another – someone else can’t create your diary of suffering for you. But more importantly, it’s unfair, and it’s dehumanizing. If the only value you place on an artist is their ability to act as your mirror, you don’t really want them to exist. And if the only thing you want reflected back at you is your pain, I’m not even sure if you want you to exist either.
At some point, the Sad Girls, but not just the Sad Girls, decided that to be an artist meant to lay your pain bare for the world to see. Through poetry slams and chapbooks and tumblr posts and bedroom pop, we turned the act of creation into a competition for the most aesthetically pleasing trauma.
And I’m not condemning it, necessarily – we need to talk about pain because we experience it. Those of us with any sort of chronic illness or disability or trauma experience it often. It’s lonely, and we’re expected to swallow it silently, so we write about it instead because we want to be heard. We want someone to see us bleeding and verify that we are, in fact, in pain. But it’s insidious, too. At what point am I writing about my pain because I need your validation to know that it’s real? At what point do I start to watch my suffering with a critical eye, and wonder if I’m doing it prettily enough?
What is the line between sharing a narrative because you need or want to, and trauma dumping because you’re not sure how else to get people to pay attention? Of course you want attention – we all do – but when our personal narratives become completely centered around our suffering, we are unable to be anything else.
There’s a frequent feeling among one-time suicidal teens that we don’t know what we want to do with our lives because we never expected to live this long. But it goes deeper than that – we couldn’t imagine futures as functional, fulfilled human beings, so the concept of healing and improving is fundamentally at odds with our sense of who we are as people. We end up self-sabotaging rather than getting better and having to reshape our entire identities. If you wrote poetry or music or stories to cope, and someone told you that your pain was beautiful, and you believed them, how can you ever learn to be a person defined by anything other than pain? You are a person who hurts, so if you stop hurting what kind of person are you?
Maybe this is why a beloved artist’s growth feels so personal. When Mitski breaks out the synth and writes something other than an anthem of suffering, she’s doing the very thing we’re all too terrified to do. She’s forging an identity for herself beyond the worst things she can endure or imagine. She forces us to ask the question that we’ve been too scared to ask ourselves – what if we find out who we are when we aren’t hurting, and one likes it?
What if the person you are when you aren’t apologizing or lamenting or trying desperately not to take up space is, in fact, too loud or too weird or too ugly for the people whose love you’re chasing? Because inevitably, you will be. Not for everyone, of course, but for some people who only liked you when you were small. A scared person, a Sad Girl, is easy to ignore. But when you try to be more than a person who hurts – someone who hurts and laughs, maybe, or who hurts and writes love songs – you will lose friends who liked you for the way the pain kept you quiet. I know I did. But those people didn’t actually like me – they liked the space I left in a conversation for them to take up. They liked that I could reflect back an image of them. Sound familiar?
We want Mitski to be us, to be the most passive, damaged version of ourselves. We want her to write songs that tell us how we already feel, so we can feel it more deeply. We don’t want her to grow, and we certainly don’t want her to enter her “Solar Power era.”
I’m not trying to position myself as some sort of more virtuous white woman here, or to claim that I have any type of knowledge about how to ethically consume art. Nor am I trying to deny the very real and palpable sadness that exists in many of Mitski’s songs. She has written some of the most staggeringly sad lyrics I’ve ever heard. (“But if I gave up on being pretty/I wouldn't know how to be alive/I should move to a brand new city/And teach myself how to die” comes to mind.) I just keep seeing us engaging with her work as if it was not created by an actual human person, but some kind of entity that we can understand or control or consume.
In an interview with the Guardian, she described herself as a “black hole where people can dump all their shit.” And we did that to her, whether we meant to or not. We’ve done it to plenty of artists.
It is sort of inevitable, I suppose, that we create projections of artists based on their work. We don’t know them, but we feel like we do after seeing something raw and vulnerable in what they’ve created. And with artists now available to us through social media, there is little to no barrier between what we say about them and the actual person on the other side of our comments. We all have a strange sort of access to each other’s thoughts. Mitski even got off of social media to avoid this, and then was given screenshots of tweets to read on camera for our entertainment.
I don’t have any answers. I don’t know how we’re supposed to navigate any of this, or how we can avoid creating false narratives for the people we admire. Part of the problem is that none of this is cut and dry. There’s not a clear line that divides talking about how music makes us feel and accidentally erasing the personhood of the artist with our words. Is it wrong to tweet “this song made me sad”? What about “do people who don't have depression listen to mitski?” (something I actually tweeted five years ago, which I feel bad about now.) There is a huge moral gray area here, one that wouldn’t matter so much if our tweets weren’t so publicly accessible.
We all have personal, emotional relationships with the music we listen to, and we shouldn’t have to hide or lie about those experiences, but we don’t necessarily need to share them with the artists either. Only privacy is no longer so simple, and a message meant for a few friends can easily reach thousands of strangers. What feels like a personal statement to the person who said it might not read that way to anyone else, especially when it reflects a sentiment that’s echoed by many.
We like to joke about Mitski’s sadness online because it allows us to express our own emotions without the vulnerability of stating them outright. We can post a playlist, and laugh that it’s a cry for help, and we will never have to put our own sadness into words. I can tell you that I’m listening to Bury Me at Makeout Creek on repeat, and hope that you understand that I mean “I am in the midst of a depressive episode, and I want help, but I am never, ever going to ask for that help.” But Mitski did not agree to become this shorthand. Neither did Phoebe Bridgers, or Lucy Dacus, or Fiona Apple, or any of the other women we have deemed Sad. None of them signed on to be a symbol of our illnesses.
I am trying to figure out a way to love these women, to love their music and the feelings it activates in me, without putting them or myself in the box of the Sad Girl. Because I am not exclusively sad or suffering, and neither are they. I am not going to delete what I’ve already tweeted, but I am going to resolve to think more critically before I say something like it again. I don’t know how to navigate this, and I am far from perfect, but I am going to try to be better. I am trying to be better. If any of you have figured out how, let me know.
I got dumber after reading this. This was a self-involved essay written to echo your own bs moral-compass. Wow, how virtuous you are.