The Poetry of Mitski’s Puberty 2
By Katherine Luo
Playing a Mitski song for the billionth time today, I have to ask myself: “Am I a person? Or am I just a bunch of Mitski lyrics glued together?” When the song comes on, it’s truly hard to say. She is so incredibly raw and impossibly real that it feels as if her poetry flows through my blood, that somehow, unfathomably, she knows me in ways I didn’t know myself.
To call this a review of Mitski’s fourth album, Puberty 2 is using the word in a loose sense; Moreso, this is written as a poetic analysis. I am no professional in music, but I am a professional in going through puberty. In fact, all of us are veterans of this confusing, infuriating, disorientating war fought between us and our own minds. In a short 31 minutes and 25 seconds, Mitski illustrates so beautifully a seemingly endless rollercoaster of angst, anger, and anxiety; In 11 gut-wrenching tracks, she tells us that this war is never really over and hardly ever won.
1. Happy
A repeated kick sample runs, “incessant and obsessive,” throughout the entire first verse of the opening track “Happy.” Immediately, listeners are met with a grungy, rough sound, setting the tone for the rest of the album. Mitski introduces a core theme of Puberty 2: happiness. She tells NPR in an interview, “I’m obsessed with trying to not only be happy but maintain happiness, but my definition of happiness is skewed more towards ecstasy rather than contentment. Ecstasy can’t last forever, so there’s the inevitable comedown from that.” Mitski personalities the abstract yet straightforward idea of happiness into a short term relationship. The experience of it is just as fleeting as a one night stand; The ecstasy of one moment gone just as readily the next. Each night, Mitski invites a new lover to her apartment and names him ‘Happy’, thinking him to be her permanent guarantee. Yet, without fail, each morning she wakes up to an empty bed. Realizing her dependance, she tells Happy that “when you go, take this heart/I’ll make no more use of it when there’s no more you.”
2. Dan the Dancer
Mitski opens her album’s second song with Dan, a man with “very long limbs from leading day to day/Hanging onto a cliff that stretched him everyday.” Though his two hands are the only things keeping him from a fall to certain death, he is willing to let go of one just to hold his lover’s hand. Mitski sings urgently, warily of a Dan known to all of us, one who endangers their own mental health for their partner. Pityingly, she writes, “He liked her more than life itself, I’m sure.” Dan trusts his partner to no end, loving her profoundly that she is the only one who’s seen his “bedroom dancer”, that she is worth sacrificing his own wellbeing for. While their fingers interlace and she smiles, Dans strains, teetering off the edge of the cliff, “his whole life in one hand, his whole life.” Dan’s love, though the pure conviction in it is almost admirable, just twists my stomach in knots. Originally a track that I criminally overlooked in the album, only discovered in the writing of this article, “Dan the Dancer” is now one of my favorites.
3. Once More to See You
Often claimed by the LGBTQ+ community as an anthem of queer love, “Once More to See You” is a haunting track of aching longing and secret passion. Mitski begs her lover for intimacy hidden safely away from the judging eyes of the world around them. “We keep it secret,” she sings, “Won’t let them have it.” Mitski’s entreaty to be alone together resonates with queer youth, both careful to keep their love locked away in private. Gentle whispers echo in the backing track, and in a climax of yearning, Mitski sings in the chorus, “Then I wouldn’t have to scream your name/Atop of every roof in the city of my heart./If I could see you/Once more to see you.”
4. Fireworks
“Fireworks” tells of Mitski’s hidden depression, one not of extreme sadness or anger, but worst of all, numbness. “One morning, this sadness will fossilize,” she sings, “and I will forget how to cry.” There is a new horror in feeling nothing, being so spent mentally that your tears freeze over your heart. Gut-wrenchingly, she sings, “And when I find that a knife’s sticking out of my side/I’ll pull it out without questioning why.” Depression numbs you and sutures shut your mouth. It secludes you from those you love, and terrifyingly, they won’t realize anything has changed. Mitski swears a vow of isolation, singing, “I will be married to silence.” In this union with silence personified, she is alienated, and more lonely than ever. Yet, her sorrow builds and builds, and when she hears fireworks outside, it triggers all her memories to come flooding out through her eyes. Finally, in her anguish comes a much needed release.
5. Your Best American Girl
The lead single and perhaps most popular song of the album, “Your Best American Girl” explores Mitski’s cultural angst. As an Asian American, she yearns to fit into the American lifestyle but is so fundamentally different that it’s impossible. Her lyrics show her gentle torment with a tragic beauty, paralleling her white lover to the sun, “you’re the sun, you’ve never seen the night/But you hear its song from the morning birds/Well, I’m not the moon, I’m not even a star/But awake at night I’ll be singing to the birds.” Growing up in such different worlds and households, Mitski laments the lack of understanding between them, feeling as if she has to trade her cultural identity to fit with her partner. She sings regretfully, “I guess I couldn’t help trying to be your best American girl.” This track hits close to home as an Asian American myself. I lived in western environments, albeit with considerable Asian populations, during my developmental years. Still, I often felt a need to reject the culture of my parents, participating in this willing self-whitewashing in order to be one with my peers. As callow as it sounds, my young self thought detaching myself from my Asian culture would somehow put me above the other Asians, as if it would make me one of the few ‘cool’ ones. Having the classic ‘Asian Tiger Mom’, I often looked to my white friends and wondered what it would have been like to grow up with their parents. As if the words are my own, Mitski sings with a trueness backed by heavy, distorted guitar, “Your mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me.” Finally, as I learn to come to terms with my childhood, my heart sings with Mitski, “But I do, I think I do.”
6. I Bet on Losing Days
In “I Bet on Losing Dogs”, Mitski revists the album-wise theme of the numbness of depression. She bets on ‘losing dogs’, relationships she knows are set for doom but give her that fleeting, evasive happiness. Yet, in that self-sabotaging pursuit, she is finally able to feel something, what she’s been chasing so incessantly through the endless numbness. Willingly and knowingly, Mitski sends herself on a cruel cycle of betting and losing, paying her place by the race track to watch the complete dejection in the dogs’ eyes as they fail and singing,“I wanna feel it.” In the bridge, she interestingly reverses her metaphor, becoming that losing dog. Mitski entraps herself on an endless emotional rollercoaster, stating, “I always want you when I’m finally fine.” When she finally catches her breath the moment before the drop, she dives into yet another relationship that isn’t good for her. Her partner, another ‘Happy’, looks down into her wide eyes and sees her pain. The tosses and turns crack her heart and she knows she can’t take it anymore, begging with wet dog eyes for “someone to watch me die, someone to watch me die.”
7. My Body’s Made of Crushed Little Stars
This track is an agglomeration of her pubertic anger, the production almost discordant and unbearable. The heavily distorted guitar claws at my brain like nails on a chalkboard. I can’t help but feel her rage, her each and every word as she sings, “my body’s made of crushed little stars/And I’m not doing anything.” In a dismay relatable to me and surely many at Phillips Exeter Academy, Mitski sings of her wasted potential. Though her body is made for and from stardom, she feels like she does nothing of value with it. Instead, she lives a banal life, laboring after meaningless troubles like her rent when she’d rather be seeing the world. She longs to escape the mundane, commonplace, insignificant life to become something great in death, even paralleling herself to Christ, begging to be crucified. She repeats again and again, “Would you kill me, Jerusalem?” She is overcome by a suicidal craze, nearly shouting, “I work better under a deadline/I pick an age when I’m gonna disappear/Until then I can try again/Until then I can try again.”
8. Thursday Girl
As the sudden mania dies away, Mitski mellows down in “Thursday Girl”. In slow and melodic words, she praises her darkest hours, singing, “Glory, glory, glory to the night/It shows me what I am.” Her mind finally clear after the anger recedes, she prays to the world for help, someone to take her pain and self-destructive tendencies away, to “Tell me no, tell me no, tell me no.”
9. A Loving Feeling
“What do you do with a loving feeling/If the loving feeling makes you all alone?” sings Mitski in the shortest track of Puberty 2, posing an unanswerable question. She shows the painful paradox of being in love with another, only for that love to make you more lonely than before. Echoing the earlier track “Once More to See You” but with a new edge of discontent, Miski writes, “you only love me when we’re all alone.”
10. Crack Baby
“Crack Baby” references a child born with a cocaine addiction because of their mother’s drug abuse during the pregnancy. In an angry confusion the baby would go through withdrawals without even knowing what crack is. The poetry in Mitski’s lyricism shows especially in this allusion, she writes, “Crack baby, you don’t know what you want/But you know that you had it once/And you know that you want it back” In this second puberty, Mitski shows that indescribable tragedy of longing with all her will for something she can’t understand. In such a hormonal time, we, too, are each a “crack baby.” Though, some of us evidently more literally than the rest.
11. A Burning Hill
The final track of the poeti masterpiece that is Puberty 2 ends the album with a sort of incomplete resolve. Mitski begins to understand the full scope of her mental self-torment, singing, “I am the fire, and I am the forest/And I am a witness watching it.” At last, Mitski is coming to terms with being unable to be fully happy, recognizing the self destructive behavior it creates. She writes, “I’m tired of wanting more/I think I’m finally worn.” This full exhaustion of her ceaseless chase forces her to end her corrosive cycle because she has nothing left to corrode. Before we, too, reach that stage, Mitski warns us in 11 tracks to not fall into the cycle she has. In a bittersweet note, Mitski ends Puberty 2 with a simple promise: “I’ll love some littler things.”
