Be the Cowboy
Be the Cowboy (2018) — Mitski
Mitski Miyawaki's music, a voracious, antsy, highly deliberated, stylized amalgmation of lyrical precision and jarring instrumentals. The Japanese-American contemporary indie-rock musician's music occupies a specific cultural space, her work self-described, in various interviews, as "fucking with form in ways that make me uncomfortable," and as "subtly unhinged." Her 2018 album, Be the Cowboy, explicitly embodies an unexpected form of the monstrous-feminine: that of the cowboy archetype. The unique cultural mythology of the American cowboy is generally perceived as a role synonymous with heroism, not monstrosity. I'd like to subvert this sanctified heroism and question the foundational qualities and depictions of the American cowboy, to suggest that perhaps the figure's heedless freedom, violence, abandonment, ability to move through space and country, and self-mythologization meld to crystallize a site of monstrosity disguised as a site of idealism, much like the mythos of nationhood and capitalism. In a piece on the history of the cowboy mythology for The Guardian, writer Eric Hobsbawn writes, "In other words, the invented cowboy tradition is part of the rise of both segregation and anti-immigrant racism; this is a dangerous heritage." Indeed, the American cowboy tends to represent a callous individualism that marginalizes and enacts violence upon the imagined other. Mitski's Be the Cowboy acknowledges the impossibility of inhabiting such a privileged and exclusive archetype, in her status as a queer, Asian-American woman, and dismantles the very form of cowboy-narrative in response. Mitski enters this mythical, monstrous white masculinity and imbues the entryway with unhinged femininity. She encounters the border of the abject and vandalizes it. She describes the album as feminine. In an interview with The Guardian, she clarifies, explaining, “When I say feminine album, immediately the perception is that it must be soft and lovely, but I mean feminine in the violent sense. Desiring, but not being able to define your desire, wanting power but being powerless and blaming it on yourself, or just hurting yourself as a way to let out the aggression in you. It’s a lot of pent-up anger or desire without a socially acceptable outlet.”
In Powers of Horror, Kristeva remarks, "I shall set aside in this essay a different version of the confrontation with the feminine, one that, going beyond abjection and fright, is enunciated as ecstatic" (Kristeva 59). The deeply hidden threat of femininity as a site of ecstasy writhes and bursts in Mitski's music. In "Geyser," the song posted above, Mitski disintegrates the associations of femininity as easy listening, dismembering its attachments to mandatory softness or to ontological, intrinsic consumability. Rather, femininity is malignant and alive, grotesque, reeling, and unlocatable. The violence and volume of the instrumentals, particularly Mitski's electric guitar, speak the "coded language" of the abject Kristeva works to decipher. The lyrics pulse with the monstrosity of female desire not targeted at a male subject but instead at the act of creation:
"Though I'm a geyser
Feel it bubbling from below
Hear it call, hear it call
Hear it call to me
Constantly
And hear the harmony
Only when it's harming me
It's not real, it's not real
It's not real enough."
The imagery of the bubbling, monstrous geyser claims the feminine not as an absence or wound, and refuses the idea of anatomical, essentially "female" monstrosity. The geyser is described as a birthplace without literal childbirth, without any relation to the vaginal or Freudian. Mitski at once honors and challenges Creed's monstrous-feminine in this way. Mitski sings to the abject, somehow manages to give it shape and sound. She adores and worships its unsteady presence—what she is addressing is the inherent abjection of the artist. She infiltrates the restricted borders of the cowboy, of hegemonic power structures, and forms a razoring intertextuality, daring cowboy legend and the texts of the monstrous-feminine to converge. She embodies the geyser, the monster, rather than deny its existence and bloodiness.
In Susan McClary's Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, & Sexuality, she writes, "For feminine pleasure has either been silenced in Western music or else has been simulated by male composers as the monstrous stuff requiring containment in Carmen or Salome." Feminine pleasure, unsettling the theoretical doorhinges of femininity itself, is slowly infiltrating the cultural iconography of womanhood, and reinventing the monstrous-feminine, insisting that the medium can be the monster. The medium needn't be text alone, but visceral and growling tonalities as interpretive modes of the monstrous, new translations privileging structures of feeling above textual weight.
