Unbecoming the Cowboy
If you know me well enough, you know that I will compulsively listen to a great album. Like, for months at a time. Like, for 8+ hours in a single day (a fact my Spotify data can confirm!). This post is about two of those albums, my thoughts about them, and my thoughts about my thoughts about them. Enter: Be the Cowboy (2019) and The Land Is Inhospitable, and So Are We (2023) by Mitski.
Be the Cowboy
Mitski is a master of building sonic tension through lack and anticipation, only to never really resolve it, leaving you with deep feelings of yearning. It’s almost erotic: a lover chasing a beloved, no end in sight. A sonic blue balls. Musically, this is often achieved through rich melodies, culminating with drawn out notes, perfectly blending with the instruments, echoing in the distance. Mitski songs draw you into a rich world of melodies and vivid characters, often ending abruptly, like half-baked vignettes, leaving you hungry for more.
Be the Cowboy has all of these ingredients, and it is the album that got me into Mitski back in 2019. Commenting on the album’s title, Mitski explained that the protagonist, someone who’s felt the need to apologize for existing in every room they walk in, strives to be the cowboy. That Marlboro-smoking white guy leaning on a fence, squinting his eyes looking at the horizon. Well, maybe not him per se, but the freedom, self-sufficiency, and arrogance that comes with being him. The American mythos of a cowboy, “riding into town, wrecking shit, and then walking out like he’s the hero”.
The theme of Be the Cowboy is a feminine yearning for masculine freedom and self-sufficiency. The protagonist in this album is less the cowboy, and more the housewife waiting for the cowboy to come home. Being so in love that you she is not herself. Not self-sufficient but dependent. “The idiot with the painted face” convincing herself to stay with her husband (Me and my husband); losing at “hello“ (Lonesome Love); never enough, big or small (Nobody); pathetically closing her eyes to kiss, thinking “I know who you pretend I am“ (Washing Machine Heart). Among the lyrics lamenting non-cowboyness, there is also a subtle quest for glory (Remember My Name)… “maybe I’m the same as all those men?”, wonders the protagonist in Come Into the Water.
Two albums later, on The Land is Inhospitable, and So Are We (TLIIASAW), the protagonist is all those men, is that cowboy. The songs take us on the frontier, where the buffalo are replaced with trains (Buffalo Replaced), where the protagonist is “King of all the land” (I Love Me After You), loved by the people (I’m Your Man), and listening to a “thousand hands that clap for [them]“ (When Memories Snow). The protagonist has conquered it all, but this vision is not a positive one. Our cowboy is not well. In I Don’t Like My Mind, the cowboy drowns unpleasant thoughts with work and loud music, in Bug Like An Angel alcohol feels like family, they are deserted with no one to share memories of The Frost, and in The Deal they would sell their soul for nothing, would give it “just to give“. There is a deep loneliness in being a cowboy — not from being left, but from being abandoned, from being deserted. It’s too late to give now. The cowboy may be fun, independent, and free, but also selfish, uncaring, they’ll destroy you like a man… inhospitable. If the aesthetic thread in Be the Cowboy is one of a feminine yearning for masculine freedom, the aesthetic thread in TLIIASAW is one of a masculine yearning for feminine fecundity.
Unbecoming the Cowboy
On that emotional plane, these two album hit for very different reasons. Be the Cowboy hits for familiar reasons, in which a vulnerable protagonist sings sadly, pathetically even I often think, about their incorrigible lovers. I don’t identify with the protagonists in these songs, no, no, that could never be me. I am villain in their stories. Lana Del Rey sings “goddamn man-child… you talk to the walls when the party gets bored of you” in Norman Fucking Rockwell. In Grapevine, Weyes Blood says “My baby thinks, he always believes, that he is always right“. I don’t have to become the cowboy — I’ve always been the cowboy. Having trapped myself in a masculine prison from which I have sworn not to show any vulnerabilities, these song scratch an itch. Whether I’m listening, playing or singing them, these songs allow me to be vulnerable through the protagonists. A vicarious vulnerability, an emotional voyeurism. I don’t get to feel my feelings, they are safely stored in the repression box deep inside me, but I do get to feel something.
TLIIASAW is different in this regard. It is not a safe space for feeling emotions anymore, it’s an ominous prophesy. I feel the sadness of the protagonist as the logical conclusion my own cowboyness. It’s my future sadness. I was talking to a friend earlier this year about what we yearn for. What is that void that will never be filled, that eternal conflict that will never be solved. What I said was something along these lines: I yearn to reconcile my dominant desire to be the cowboy, free, selfish, King of all the land, with my repressed desire to be vulnerable, to depend on others, to belong in a community and to take care of it. I’ve been thinking, more and more recently, that balancing these desires is not just good for personal growth, like unlocking yet another part of myself, a new skill or an evolved opinion. It’s a matter of diffusing an existential threat. What good is being King of all the land, if my land is inhospitable, and so am I?
The title image was borrowed from Ebru Yildiz’s work with Mitski.
