The Thriving, Redefined Girl Power of Mitski

By JAEL GOLDFINE

This story was first published on March 22 here. 

“Girl power” is a tainted term in our cultural vocabulary — infected probably first and foremost by its visual trigger of Gwen Stefani, bindi-clad, prostrating herself onstage in her “Just A Girl” video whimpering “fuck you, I’m a girl,” or Taylor Swift parading around with her #girlsquad of impossibly beautiful models/singers/very famous people, explaining (mainly when other women criticize her) to Twitter how important it is for “women to support each other.” The term, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a self-reliant attitude among girls and young women manifested in ambition, assertiveness and individualism” has been largely debunked as a privileged and commercialized white feminist ideology, based on vaguely defined assertions of rights and equality, which ultimately boil down to conforming to maleness while still looking hot — which is why probably the last time you heard the term was in an ad selling tampons or cellular data to women (products that, if she buys this brand, can help a woman be and act just like men despite her misfortune of having a vagina and female social preferences!).

So, while conspicuous performances of girl power like those of Stefani, Courtney Love, Cindy Lauper, Madonna and the Spice Girls — whose have-it-all, you-go-girl cultural feminist legacy, I would posit, was inherited by Swift and her peers — were subversive in the 90s and aughts, and will always be fun as hell to dance to, it has since become clear that these women’s brands (remember kinderwhore?) were ultimately complicit with the relentless trivialization and eroticization of women within rock culture.

In 2016, “girl power” in music is either obsolete, or begging for redefinition. The latter, I argue, is happening, and in an unlikely genre. Although the site of an undeniable feminist legacy and immense progress, DIY, punk and indie continue to be an appallingly male-dominated scenes (a reality that has been widely criticized by feminist writers over the past several years). However, while we cynical listeners are waiting for girl power to get off its ass and for the lethargic wheels of musical history to turn, women in the scene — like Brooklyn-based, Japanese-American Mitski — are doing the work on both counts.

Last week, I heard Mitski’s recently-released single off her forthcoming Puberty 2, “Your Best American Girl” for the first time. It was one of those first listens that arrests you from the first line (“If I could, I’d be your little spoon”); which exhausts, soothes, burns and confounds you as to how this strange alloy of instrument and words can be feel so liberatingly real and so urgently necessary. Its narrative is that of the frustration and ambivalence of a relationship in which a woman is expected to sacrifice parts of herself. It is a piece of music with the capacity to un-hook you from the indifference of your day or your life, and make you, if only momentarily, more honest, vulnerable and compassionate with yourself.

So what do Mitski and this song have to do with the fraught tradition of girl power?

The song, and much of Mitski’s catalogue are a diaristic account of modern young-adulthood. Her music is also inconspicuously but unapologetically attentive to and expressive of female experiences: the specific uncertainties, anxieties, pleasures and pains that come with walking around as a girl in the world.

It operates aesthetically and instructionally counter to everything traditional girl power espouses in confidence, independence, invulnerability and self-reliance. Instead of the tired rhetoric of “being a strong, Independent Woman,” “not listening to what the haters say,” “you go girl” and “you don’t need no man,” the radical girl power of Mitski can be found in the way she, subtly yet so vividly, evokes and interrogates distinctly female realities, particularly those seen as shameful or weak or dumb things to be and to feel.

Mitski says what is unspeakable for women. She says that we do not feel like grown (strong, independent) women, but “like tall children”; that we are not always independent; that we want things that we know are bad for us; that we are vulnerable to self-doubt, and trying to squeeze ourselves into ill-fitting roles; that we are confused about everything and call our moms to ask for help (“Mom, am I still young / Can I dream for a few more months?”); that we can “want a love that falls as fast as a body from the balcony” while crying out “I am not gonna be what my daddy wants me to be”; that we can be sadgirls and rockstars at the same time. She says that we can be tender, graceful, whispery and thrashing, huge and wild, swelling to the size of the world — just like the way “Your Best American Girl” sounds through headphones in in my bedroom.

This is girl power. As it turns out, it feels like having a productive argument with your father, with whom you have a complicated relationship. It feels like worrying that you’re not a good or thoughtful or radical enough feminist, but you’re trying to learn more every day. It’s realizing that your self-doubt is not your own personal failing, but something you were trained in. It’s learning that your insecurity and indecision and are much less at odds than you thought with your capacity to be bold, powerful and happy: to be and do all the things you want.

Diet Cig

Pitchfork wrote of “Your Best American Girl” that “this is not the ‘go girl’ triumph of pop anthems.” This is true. True girl power is not found in shiny declarations of boss-ass bitchness or self-love or body positivity or even female solidarity — because these are so often one liners, and even more often advertisements for someone or something, which paint a glossy coat over the true trials and liminality of girlhood. Instead, girl power exists in the validation of and space-making for the full range of female experiences and emotions, the complex and often contradictory anxieties and desires that define women’s lives.

Mitski is doing this work — and creating these cultural, artistic and personal spaces — whether she means to or not. And this question of “means to” is actually one of the most affirming things about her music. Mitski’s consciousness and concern for female experiences — her girl power — is incidental, rather than instrumental to her music. It is uncalculated, innate and not particularly sexy or bankable in the economy of popular culture. Mitski is just singing and playing guitar, making records and concerts, “giving a shit” and being honest. The kind of girl power I’m interested in emerges naturally when women find ways to do this.

Katie Crutchfield, aka Waxahatchee

The uncalculatedness of Mitski’s music speaks to how inarticulable I find this reframed girl power. So much of it is very sensory, and feels deeply personal, intimate and encrypted — so much so that I am afraid I’ve wasted 1,500 public words trying to construct a theory of girl power around what is really just a particular artist who “does it for me.” However, I suspect that from reading and talking about Mitski, that other women are also finding that coming-home familiarity, catharsis and exhilaration in her urgent, tattering guitar-playing, steely but choked-up vocals, and the glimpses she allows us into her remarkable life.

It probably sounds like I am positing a single artist as the solution to the failed tradition of girl power. But that brings me to the very best part of all of this, which is that Mitski is making music as a part of a much larger (actual and figurative) artistic community of female and female-centric indie groups like Frankie Cosmos, Eskimeaux, Waxahatchee, Girlpool, Diet Cig, Palehound and more — all of whom are producing their art explicitly, enigmatically and unapologetically from and around women’s perspectives and experiences. There is an honest-to-god motherlode of this quality of music being made right now. It is still surprising and intoxicating whenever I hear and feel their stray experiences, emotions and reflections that I recognize.

Girlpool

Doubtlessly, the music of this particular female rock community wields artistic intimacy, self-consciousness and vulnerability that any listener can appreciate tremendously. But when I listen to Mitski and her peers, it feels I’m like being told a secret — like a nod to the girls in their bedrooms or the audience or on the other side of the ear-buds; like maybe this music actually was made for us in this brave, quiet, extraordinary way.

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