New Mitski: Has a Song Called "Happy" Ever Been So Ominous?
Has a song called “Happy” ever been so ominous from its title alone? As if Mitski, with her keen sense of the inevitable, would make an upbeat strummer about good times. On the second single from Puberty 2, her forthcoming fourth album (and first for Dead Oceans), she recounts a visit from happiness, bearing cookies, and the news that everything is going to be fine. “Well I told him I’d do anything to have him stay with me,” she sings, in a slow, rounded melody that wanders cryptically down and back up the single notes of a scale. “So he laid me down and I felt happy/ Come inside of me.”
Happiness, it turns out, is a scrub who gets his kicks and runs while you’re freshening up in the bathroom, leaving you to deal with the mess in his wake. “Well I sighed and mumbled to myself/ Again I have to clean,” Mitski sings, her voice effervescing like steam from a kettle. “Happy” may be one of her bleakest songs yet, implicitly asking what’s the point if all that follows a high is a low. She doesn’t reason with herself about why we subject ourselves to these vacillations—the opposite, in fact, shrugging that her heart is a spent vessel for which she has no use.
Yet though “Happy” lays down, it doesn’t roll over. Mitski resists psychic death by constantly pushing forth into bolder textures, refusing to be meek and sedated even as joy feels compromised: a stubborn drum machine begets chuntering percussion, the tentative melody finds its feet, and brash saxophones push everything up a gear. Her kicky, quicksilver guitar evokes St. Vincent‘s Strange Mercy with the barbiturate haze lifted, and every element combines to a powerful, tarnished fanfare that’s neither joyful nor morose, but possessed of a strange confidence that serves as an anchor against slipping into either emotional extreme.
Recent Comments