A few days after the plaudits started rolling in for “Your Best American Girl”, Mitski decided to post a little exposition of the song on Facebook. She’d noticed that a lot of reviews had “agreed on a narrative that “she wrote this song to stick it to ‘the white boy indie rock world’!” but I wasn’t thinking about any of that when I was writing it…” Of course she acknowledges the borrowed tropes, the nods to Orientalism, the male gaze, and so on. She understands that writers have to “decide on a theme” from which to hang their own ideas. She gets it. It’s just that “Your Best American Girl” is a love song, and every reference to gender and race and nationality is a single drop of rain beating a path to the ocean of that person will not ever love you the way that you love them. It comes from a place of unadulterated hurt, the kind that you start to couch in terms of a bereavement, because the lexicon of love is too pitifully inane to capture its spread. It is not a calculated sleight against cultural mores. This is a useful primer for Puberty 2.
Matthew Neale 