![]() “It’s all about me.” Perhaps this is why smart, emotional and occasionally anxious young women – girls who are witty on the internet and wish they could be as witty in person – relate to her music. “When I’m in the process of writing I don’t have the mental space to think about anyone else,” she says. But Mitski isn’t writing for anyone other than herself. In fact, most of her fans are teenage girls, thousands of them clinging to her every tweet (even – and especially – the ones about her cats). The reason for the boy-girl ratio, she thinks, is because British fans don’t yet understand that the space she holds is “not necessarily for men” Last night’s audience was surprisingly man-heavy, with one bellowing baritone voice demanding she play “Last Words of a Shooting Star”, from her 2014 record Bury Me at Makeout Creek – a song whose lyrics evoke Sylvia Plath in their feminine malaise (“ They’ll never know how I’d stared at the dark in that room / with no thoughts”). “I never expected there to be anyone else like me,” she says, making it clear that she always felt destined to represent herself. This is because she didn’t see Asian-Americans like herself reflected in the world of indie rock. She started making her own music at the age of 19, which she describes as “really late” for a musician. I got to be a new person, I got to start over every year.”Įxcitement around Mitski’s recent full-length release, Puberty 2, had all the fever-pitch atmosphere of a debut it might surprise new fans, then, that it’s taken some four albums for her to burst the indie bubble. “No one would know me, so I got to experiment with identity. “I moved to a different place every year, so I was always the outsider,” she muses, slipping off her trainers and tucking her legs beneath her. Eventually, she settled in New York to study classical composition. Born in Japan, she grew up in a family that moved frequently, living in locales as diverse as Malaysia, China, Turkey and the Democratic Republic of Congo. But the musician born Mitski Miyawaki is used to being on the road. We’re sitting in an east London pub the morning after her sold-out show across town. “I just wanted to use that and play on it, while talking about how I can’t be part of it.” But if Mitski doesn’t fit into the very white, very male culture of indie rock, her music punctures it, seeping into its blood and exposing its frailties. “I kind of did that on purpose,” she grins, describing how the noughties power-pop smash speaks to an all-American brand of white suburban angst she could never wholly subscribe to. Some have likened it to Weezer (says Mitski, “I would love for Rivers Cuomo to listen to my music and see what he thinks”), though it’s easy to detect a trace of Wheatus’s “ Teenage Dirtbag” in its DNA. In response, she makes out with the back of her hand with admirable gusto. In the video for the song, Mitski watches as her “ all-American boy” swoons over someone else, someone skinny with blonde hair and a flower crown. Mitski’s soft-spoken inflections today are in contrast to her beautiful scream on the track, a head-thrashing loser anthem with a gorgeous slow build that burned up the internet in March. But you can’t blame them, they don’t realise it, that’s just how they already existed. Then you start to realise, ‘Oh, I’m bending a lot,’ and they’re just standing there existing, and I’m bending around them. “When you are a minority it’s your job to bend, and when you love someone you really want to make it work. “I’ve had more lonely relationships than not,” says the 25-year-old Japanese-American singer. With its underdog tale of disapproving mothers and teenage pessimism, Mitski’s “ Your Best American Girl” conjures the bone-penetrating nostalgia and accompanying mixed emotions of being lonely in love. Taken from the summer 2016 issue of Dazed:
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