IN A SMALL VENUE, I watched Mitski perch on a white chair behind a white table, fold her hands, and start to sing emotional ballads.
The 29-year-old musician was performing in Carrboro, N.C., from her fifth studio album, Be the Cowboy. It’s one of my favorites from 2018 and plays with the American cowboy mythology in its loneliness (“My God, I’m so lonely ... still nobody wants me,”) and longing (“I just can’t be without you”).
I expected a typical concert, hearing favorite songs and seeing Mitski’s personality. But I was jarred by the lack of emotion she showed. The entire time she sang, her face was resolute and hardened, a seeming contradiction with her heartrending lyrics.
Second, she danced sensually, even while her face remained impassive. She wore nothing “sexy”—a white T-shirt, biker shorts, and kneepads—as she executed carefully choreographed sequences. But she leaned forward, slanted her hips, and flicked her hair. She climbed onto the table and spread her legs toward the audience. Yet she never broke a smile, never performed the emotion of eroticism.
A man interrupted: “I love you, Mitski!” But did he?
Mitski’s performance was a trap for assumptions. She offered deeply personal songs to people who don’t know her personally. She performed positions of intimacy, but assuming that she was offering intimacy was a mistake.
As two queer Asian-American women and I drank beers at a nearby bar after Mitski’s performance, they revealed levels to the experience that I had not registered as an Asian-American male. What I saw as a contradiction between Mitski’s singing, dancing, and lack of facial expression, they knew as a powerful inversion of expectations for Asian women in America.
Theorist Anne Anlin Cheng describes the “yellow woman” and her particular objectification as “a figure whose survival is secured through crushing objecthood.” She is an “aesthetic presence that is prized and despoiled.”
What Mitski performed was a revelation. She traced assumptions imposed on an Asian female body—that she is sexually available, demure, and cute; at the same time, she asserted control of the space and her body, pulling through practically an entire Pilates routine without taking a heavy breath.
She was in charge, completely ignoring the man who yelled his love at her.
After leaving the bar, my friends and I waited outside the venue: I wanted to meet Mitski. The band emerged and waved, but she didn’t appear.
Maybe in hoping for a meeting, I was seeking an intimacy that Mitski wasn’t offering. She owes me nothing. I don’t know her, and that’s the point.
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