The 50 best albums of 2018, No 5: Mitski – Be the Cowboy
In 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman published the seminal feminist short story The Yellow Wallpaper, the semiautobiographical account of a woman confined to a strange, isolated house who becomes increasingly obsessed with her room’s “repellent, almost revolting” wallpaper, retreating deeper and deeper into psychosis.
The same sense of unease and gradual detachment from reality runs through Be the Cowboy, the remarkable fifth album by the Japanese-American singer-songwriter Mitski Miyawaki. The first song, Geyser, opens with an organ note: Mitski’s spectral vocals appear, intoning the generic romantic sentiment: “You’re my number one / You’re the one I want.” But as soon as “want” is sung, the music glitches, signalling that all is not well; like the geyser of the song’s title, the music swells, deepset emotions rising forcefully to the surface. “Somebody kiss me, I’m going crazy / I’m walking round the house naked / Silver in the night,” she sings later.
With Be the Cowboy, Mitski continues to disrupt and update the conventions of indie rock, building on her 2014 album Bury Me at Makeout Creek and 2016’s superb Puberty 2. Gnarly guitars contrast with her extraordinarily nimble, pure voice; there are upbeat disco numbers and delicate, ethereal piano ballads. As a rule, the cheerier songs conceal the bleakest sentiments.
On one level, the album tells the story of a marriage in which the narrator is still obsessed with an idealised but toxic ex. It is told through short, weird vignettes: in Me and My Husband, which opens with an exasperated sigh, the narrator says, over and over, that the two “are doing better … we are sticking together”, the frenzied repetition undermining what is being said out loud.
The album has an arch, dark humour (“Nobody butters me up like you / And nobody fucks me like me”) that echoes Marry Me-era St Vincent, paired with an underlying maelstrom of high drama, loneliness and psychosexual dysfunction. Underneath the exquisitely beautiful melodies there is rage, an exploration of internalised misogyny and validation through male love (“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”). Talking to the Guardian earlier this year, Mitski described the album as “feminine in the violent sense ... wanting power but being powerless and blaming it on yourself, or just hurting yourself as a way to let out the aggression in you.”
And yet Mitski does not simply portray a victim; there is a sense of fighting back against these forces. The title of the album exhorts the listener, and possibly the artist herself, to swagger. She is not merely trapped in the house by the repellent wallpaper – she picks it off the walls and proudly wears it. In Remember My Name, all guitar riffs, bravado and triumphant horns, Mitski reveals the scale of her ambition: “I need somebody to remember my name / After all that I can do for them is done,” she sings. “I want something bigger than the sky.”