Mitski - Nobody

Born in Japan, to a Japanese mother and an American father, and having lived in 13 countries before settling in the US, Mitski might know a few things about broken identities. In her biggest hit to day, Your Best American Girl, she explored the anxiety of dating somebody from a different culture, and how cultural nuances could be fatal for a relationship. Through her music, she has analyzed on different levels the feeling of not belonging. Just the title of her new album, Be The Cowboy, reveals that she is planning to dig deeper on the topic, how much the pressure to "Americanize" herself is itching in her skin, how much she needs to toughen up, be a rude cowboy sure of him(her)self to fit into the standards of a society that still have a lot of prejudices towards Asian women (yes, people like Yoko Ono, Björk and Karen O have been working hard to deconstruct them, but still...). Nobody, the second single of the album, finds Mitski in one of those vulnerable moments of self-discovery. As told by her, the song came after she found herself alone on winter in Malaysia, one of the countries she grew up in, finding that she has no longer ties with the place or the people, and experiencing one of the loneliest holidays ever, at the point of having to open the windows, just "to hear sounds of people".

Nobody is our most embarrassing moment of fragility, the point when we throw a childish melodramatic tantrum. In the chorus, Mitski only repeats the word "Nobody" until it starts losing its meaning, she gloats in her own misfortune and pairs it with a disco beat that gives it contrast, almost as if she was accentuating the ridicule on her situation. If some of the lyrics of the song seem taken from the dairy of an angst teenager, she is very careful at letting us know that it was on purpose, since she can accompany them with a verse about the global warming destroying Venus, that is a beautiful and bitter comment on the nature of love and on our common behaviors as a society. This might be the closest to a party track we could ask for Mitski, but like in Robyn's Dancing On My Own, dancing and singing prove to be the best weapons to deal with a lonely heart. Mitski states that she doesn't wants our pity, she is happy to let us peer into her moments of intimate frailness to maybe find a reflection of our own inadequacies. She exposes herself, and that's her most daring act, the one that really makes her the bravest Cowboy in town.