Instead of a traditional top-10 list for the end of the year, Split Tooth Media is releasing a series of essays about the music that we felt mattered most in 2018. Read why here and read other installments here.
Sadness isn’t everything, even when at its most overwhelming and unbearable peaks. 2018 was a hellish year for many reasons, so crying at a concert felt like nothing out of the ordinary for me.
When Mitski came to Portland in November, I searched her name on Twitter before her set began. Tons of cowboy memes and tweets about crying to her music appeared alongside more heartfelt messages that declared “Mitski cured my depression.” At Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus’ boygenius show a few weeks later, I half expected to see similar tweets and emotions rise up. I was actually the one who ended up crying and tweeting after the boygenius show.
But the sad girl stereotype and these memes don’t do the music or its creators justice. Boygenius’ self-titled EP and Mitski’s Be the Cowboy rose as beacons of humor, happiness and persistence — far more than just odes to sadness. Through their songs, these artists taught me to name what I’m feeling and make the best of it. Although it wants to be, sadness doesn’t have to be the dominant emotion of my identity.
Bridgers, Baker and Dacus are united by their age and experiences. They are all in their twenties, coming of age in similar ways. All three women write incredibly vulnerable and strong music tinged with sadness or grief or frustration: Baker’s looped-guitar rock focuses on mental illness, faith and sexuality; Dacus’ guitar-driven indie-rock focuses on relationships and self worth; Bridgers’ writes soft, wordplay-filled indie-folk about the tug and pull of emotions and relationships.
At the beginning of 2018, I turned to these three musicians separately to affirm what I was feeling — an incredible amount of grief from the passing of three important people in my life in the span of three months and, at the time, an undiagnosed illness. I had a feeling the boygenius EP would be important to me as soon as they announced the collaboration. I didn’t expect it to define my 2018.
The EP is tied together by their distinct styles, and their voices powerfully reflect and refract off one another. They each came to recording sessions with one song written and then wrote and recorded another three together in the studio. “Souvenir,” framed by Baker’s mandolin and Bridgers’ guitar, melds the best aspects of each artist’s music. Baker’s voice floats in on the first verse. Though her powerful vocal range isn’t showcased, it still emits a warmth that carries the harmonies. Bridgers arrives in the second verse: “Always managed to move in right next to cemeteries / And never far from a hospital / I don’t know what that tells you about me.”
As someone who struggled with a chronic illness and ended up in the ER down the street from my apartment many times in 2018, the song’s bluntness forced a laugh out of me. My friends and family joke that it’s good I live so close to a hospital, but in some hard moments this year, I really wondered being sick all the time said about me. I constantly questioned my relationships, and wondered why people stayed around me when I felt so miserable. You can hear the underlying desperation as Bridgers pleas for people in her life to stay around.
Sure, boygenius is full of sad images, like the endless tour wandering in “Ketchum, ID” and Bridgers’ chorus in “Me and My Dog”: “I want to be emaciated / I want to hear one song without thinking of you.” But the sheer power of Bridgers’, Dacus’ and Baker’s harmonization is the EP’s greatest strength. Together, their voices demand attention. They end “Bite the Hand” by singing the title in a round. Dacus’ low register is followed by Bridgers, then Baker joins in. The three voices swirl around and then settle into a moment of harmony and stillness that forces you to abandon whatever you’re doing to just feel with them.
Separately, each woman’s music affirms a different aspect of my identity: my womanhood, my queerness, my mental illnesses. But together, they tell a story that encompasses and affirms much of what I felt in the last year. I see parts of myself, both sad and not, in every member of this fleeting supergroup. I see my struggles with my mood and my sense of humor about it in Bridgers. In Baker, I see the minute details of my physical health and mental health — taking meds and going to appointments, wanting and working for a way out. In Dacus, I see the want to be seen differently by other people; to be seen differently by myself.
Together they challenge themselves, each other and their listeners to break through the sadness. “They say the hearts and minds are on your side / They say the finish line is in your sight,” they sing.
I see myself in Mitski and her album Be the Cowboy as well — but not to the extent that I identify with boygenius. Mitski Miyawaki, despite a fan base that largely believes her music is entirely confessional, isn’t necessarily playing herself on Be the Cowboy. As Jia Tolentino put it in a New Yorker article, Be the Cowboy is more akin to a book of short stories than a diary entry. Mitski’s powerful, astutely emotional lyrics and the parts she chooses to share of her own story complicate the idea that she’s writing vignettes. Couple that with a relatively young fan base that idolizes her and it grows even more complicated.
She writes nuanced songs that on the surface feel like they originate from a universal perspective. First person narration reigns on Be the Cowboy, but the “I” she sings as doesn’t always seem to be Mitski as her true self. “Me and My Husband” might be the best example of this, as Mitski isn’t married. “And I’m the idiot with the painted face / In the corner, taking up space / But when he walks in, I am loved, I am loved,” she sings.
It’s easy to think that Mitski understands what we feel in our moments of alienation. On the stark and dancey single “Nobody,” Mitski sings with urgency, “I’ve been big and small and / Big and small and / Big and small again / And still nobody wants me / Still nobody wants me.” Then she repeats the word “Nobody” over a ’70s dance beat. I’ve felt that sadness and desperation, and I bet Mitski has too, but therein lies the problem. Mitski has explained the lyrics behind this specific song in an interview with the website Genius, but she has stayed relatively quiet about other songs. As the cover, title and much of its marketing suggests, Be the Cowboy is more cinematic than autobiographical. The sadness portrayed on the album is both sweeping and minute — Be the Cowboy could soundtrack your life, but it’s at its best when fiction takes over.
Musically, the album is also cinematic. The unease, sadness or happiness might be different if it were just Mitski and her guitar, or even just Mitski and her voice, like on her recent Sirius XM performance of “Nobody.” But more often than not, Mitski isn’t alone like that on Be the Cowboy. “Me and My Husband” begins with a sigh and moves forward with boppy but tentative chords.
On “Old Friends” Mitski writes about two friends — possibly former lovers — meeting for coffee. There’s nothing that directly attaches this song to Mitski other than the first-person lyrics. And yet her simple wording makes the song all the more specific in its speaker’s wants and needs: “I haven’t told anyone / Just like we promised / Have you? / Every time I drive through the city where you’re from / I squeeze a little.” “Me and My Husband” and “Old Friend” are probably the least emotionally wrenching songs on Be the Cowboy, yet Mitski provides padding between herself and the characters she writes about by singing with an affectation or adding in just enough details to make it specific but still vague. These aren’t grand declarations of separation. Instead Mitski quietly defines herself and her characters moment by moment.
Youtube comments and Twitter memes about listening to Mitski and the members of boygenius during a depressive episode obviously have some truth and relatability. Yet focusing on only the sad parts of their music — which encompasses a powerful range of emotions — limits not only the listener, but the artist. Yes, 2018 was a hard year. Yes, Mitski and boygenius have a bunch of overwhelmingly sad songs, but they rose above the labels bestowed on them by defining their music on their own terms— in turn helping me define my year by something other than sadness.
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