Female artists, writers and musicians from Mitski to Bjork to FKA Twigs to Sylvia Plath have been celebrated for being “raw”, “confessional”, “honest”. These are words used frequently in music criticism in particular, where disproportionate weight is placed on the relationship between a musician’s personal life and their work. These terms aren’t blatantly offensive, which is maybe why they’re so pervasive – they’re almost compliments, and that’s certainly what they’re framed as. However, to describe a musician or writer (or their work) as raw or instinctive is to imply a lack of control or purpose over the thing they have created, and implies that they aren’t fully responsible for the power or success of their work.
The idea of “confessional” or “diaristic” art, literature and music created by women is a difficult thing to talk about. On the one hand, it’s most definitely reductive to think about any art as unmediated in the way many people think about “confessional art”. This perspective makes experience, the recording of experience for the self (through diary or memory or conversation), and the expression of that experience for others seem equivalent, when each of those things is different. This idea of the unmediated, flowing expression of the self is connected to the perspective of thinking about a woman’s work only in relation to her biography and her personal experience, stripping any intent of layered meaning or narrative creation. On the other hand, it can also be a problem when people completely reject the biographical, implying that the personal and the domestic are not enough to warrant the creation of art, that these perspectives are too small to contain large and complex ideas. These ideas of what is and isn’t art, and what it means to be ‘diaristic’, are endlessly tricky – there’s a balance to be found between acknowledging the personal elements to a song (if the purpose of that song is to express something personal) and acknowledging the control an artist has over her own narrative.
Mitski is an artist who encapsulates some of these ideas. She’s a graduate of SUNY Purchase, a skilled and trained songwriter from a technical point of view. She’s also an artist who has spoken often about the feeling of duty to express her own experience and experiences aligned with her own – the experience of people who occupy marginal spaces, who feel unanchored, who are othered particularly by race or gender. This is something she has spoken about being very aware of as an Asian American woman – and her hunger to connect with others through that expression. However, even in her desire to express her own experience, she has spoken about her deliberate de-specifying of these experiences – ‘Geyser’, the opening song from her most recent album, Be the Cowboy, is a conflicted and fractured song of love and dependency. It is also, however, for Mitski a song about her relationship with the music she makes.
These complexities are elided in so many profiles of the musician. Pitchfork’s review of Puberty 2 is highly complimentary about all aspects of the album, acknowledging the deliberateness of technical choices, her editing skills, her musical training and versatility, her expression of mundane experience and her tackling of large and messy ideas and emotions. However, there remain glaring missteps and paradoxical statements, such as one of the final comments on the album, that: “Mitski’s very Mitski-ness is what holds Puberty 2 together”, and related comments on the versatile sound of her voice and the wry clarity of her lyrics. This is the problem of writing on Mitski and other diaristic, personal female musicians – they can be as purposeful and skilled as they like, but when it comes right down to it, the parts of their music that make them special, according to many reviewers, are the “inexplicable” qualities, the uncontrollable qualities inherent to their personhood – another way of talking about the instinctive rawness of their work.
One New York Times article on Mitski’s critically acclaimed 2016 album Puberty 2 is entitled “Mitski’s ‘Puberty 2’ Mines Her Scars for Raw Meaning”. It’s a complimentary review of Mitski’s work, and involves a sensitive and perceptive interview with the musician. Even in its lauding of Mitski’s work, though, it brings the music again and again back to ideas of rawness and honesty – the album is “purple like a new bruise”, Mitski is “radically transparent”. There’s an emphasis on her ability to delve into old memories with the same emotional intensity as was there when those feelings were first felt. The emphasis is always on the feeling, though, rather than the deliberate choice to attempt to express that feeling. A scar can’t be mined for raw meaning, where a scar implies a healed wound, and mining implies strategic searching and uncovering. To sift through old hurts and memories can’t be the search for something “raw” – it’s necessarily retrospective, it requires perspective. The idea of mining scars for raw meaning is completely paradoxical, and robs Mitski of the creative purpose involved in song-writing and the construction of an album.
Mitski is a particularly interesting artist to think about in terms of her apparent unfettered and unmediated honesty in her very controlled narrative about her personal life. The ‘early life’ and ‘personal life’ entries on her Wikipedia are each two lines long. There are no mentions of the names of past romantic partners, and very little on her family. Mitski’s most recent album, Be the Cowboy, is preoccupied by ideas of performance, from the album’s cover picture of Mitski having the finishing touches applied to her makeup, to the central figure of the album, a protagonist which Mitski has said is not quite her. This centrality of performance contradicted the narrative surrounding Mitski of a diaristic, impulsive, raw musician. However, speaking about some of the reviews of the album that acknowledge this orchestrated, controlled element to her work, Mitski criticises the opposite perspective that: “it’s no longer personal for her”. Instead, she asks: “why does it have to be one or the other? I’m just using all these techniques or tools in order to express emotions that I actually had”.
What these conflicting ideas point to is a difficulty in thinking about female writers, musicians and artists as creators of complex, deliberate art. If an album seems “diaristic”, that doesn’t mean it’s “raw”, or “instinctive”. Successfully writing with apparent honesty about anything, including personal experience, requires a level of craft, purpose and narrative-shaping ability which cannot be encompassed by words like “raw”. For something to be raw or confessional, it must be unmediated and unshaped, which implies that its creator has a lack of control or agency over it. Mitski has described this as a narrative that: “makes me into a vessel for creation instead of the creator”. If a song or album seems emotionally truthful, that is due to the skill of whoever created it – to attribute it to some essential, inherent ability to feel deeply and to pour those feelings into music is to engage in the denial of the creative, narrative-shaping agency of the musician who wrote that song or album. Women create their own narratives. If a musician’s work seems so emotionally intense that it’s as though you’re peeking in their diary, that doesn’t mean that the work is raw or unmediated. Instead, the apparent rawness of any song is a mark of craft and skill, a successfully crafted artifice, as all good art is. If a song seems raw or unmediated, that’s because somebody made it seem that way, not because of a prioritisation of instinct and impulse over creative control.
