Mitski – Your Best American Girl
That would be Felicity, right?
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[6.60]
Jonathan Bogart: God, I miss 1993.
[7]
Juana Giaimo: If a good single is one that has the potential to appeal audiences, then it seems that Mitski and her label had everything wrong. “Your Best American Girl” is noisy, has nearly unintelligible vocals and although it’s three minutes and a half long, it leaves an unfinished feeling. You’d expect that the chorus would maybe become epic, that she would scream one important line or that violins would transform it into a celestial song. But nothing like that happens. Instead, it finishes as quietly as it began. However, for that reason, the explosion of the chorus works as a revelation of secret emotions. As listeners, we are drawn to it and we want to hear it again, and every time it happens, it has the same striking effect it had the first time, because this could be our own secret, too.
[7]
Alfred Soto: A power ballad with power — dig that guitar. It sounds like Sky Ferreira backing Pains of Being Pure at Heart.
[6]
Jer Fairall: Classic-era Smashing Pumpkins guitar dynamics are an undervalued property ever since alt.rock has gotten progressively ornate, so I should be cheering Mitski as her captivating (if lyrically clumsy) verses build to a storming crescendo, but the balance is off. The noise drowns out her vocal, and the intended catharsis is similarly lost in the murk.
[5]
Cassy Gress: I used to lurk on artofthemix.org a long time ago, and this reminds me of a lot of the songs I got from there: wobbly and almost mournful, full of feedback and reverb. It’s not something I particularly liked; it all sounded sort of camo-colored. But she’s a Japanese-American, angrily mourning the poor connection she has made with an all-American boy while learning to love her own heritage, and it’s an appropriate sound for that.
[5]
Leonel Manzanares de la Rosa: The dazzling guitar/strings crescendo this song is built upon is a thing of wonder; it’s meant to reference classic 90’s indie rock, but it feels more like a visceral take on the sound of recent groups like Cymbals Eat Guitars. It’s a perfect fit for the turmoil in the lyrics. No other instrumentation could support a message this powerful. “Your Best American Girl” speaks to so many of us: Those who have fallen in love with someone from a completely different world, those who feel crushed by the weight of expectations and want desperately to fit in, those who have everything against them but don’t want to let go. When her voice goes from that reverberated pre-chorus to the enormous, distorted hook, and she goes, “Your mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me / But I do, I think I do,” it feels like the earth beneath your feet is shifting. It’s the sound of shit getting real.
[8]
Micha Cavaseno: Musically, it’s little more than a generic grunge ballad in 2016, so I can’t rate this incredibly highly. But Mitski’s gone out of her way to say something much realer than most of the people wasting their time with a 20 year redundant rock style, so she also isn’t worth tarnishing. This indicates a tragedy of the modern era though; “Your Best American Girl” deals with powerful issues, and demonstrates a specific sort of pain that resonates with a specific sort of listener. But she rides a dead horse, flogged to death and stripped of flesh by sloppy self-indulgent morons before her. And it’s not her fault for working with a barren rock wasteland she’s been dealt, but it’s damned pointless to fail to consider reworking the music, to take the sounds, and push them in the same way she’s pushed herself.
[5]
Iain Mew: Wanting to be something for the benefit of someone else is its own kind of pressure, and Mitski subtly builds to a fittingly overwhelming sound. It’s catharsis strong enough to leave ears ringing.
[7]
Brad Shoup: “I Don’t Smoke” wrecked me because Mitski unwound this gutting, kinked line of reasoning. The narrator of “Your Best American Girl” bows out pretty quickly, but her goodbye sounds like an apartment getting demolished. The distortion she gives her vocal results in something like lightning coated in aluminum.
[8]
Will Adams: The best kind of slow-burning candle song, moving modestly, sadly down the wick until it reaches the bottom and ignites the entire room.
[8]
Felicity was my American Girl. A week after I got her (for my golden birthday) my little sister cut all her hair off. fuck you whichever editor drudged this memory up.
:,(
oh sorry will, i forgot which day of the week it is
I’m sorry for the painful memory! my sister had Felicity so that’s who I chose
Ahem Addie escaped from goddamn slavery
(in truth I have no dog in this fight, having grown up with the My Friend dolls, but the fact that AG not only produced a Jewish immigrant doll and created a ridiculous little Shabbat set for her but also basically set up her story to all but guarantee she’d grow up to be a labor organizer flirting with the Party and making dark jokes about Harry Hopkins — that throws my bias a bit)
This is the type of song with the power to change lives. If I had heard it at age 15, I would probably be in a much better place than I am now.
It carries the weight of generations without buckling under; it evokes the familiar question of “what does America even mean?” without surrendering to any pre-written discourse. With a single word change in the chorus, it places the model minority myth on life support. It’s the soundtrack to a July Saturday night, for a generation who can only hear Springsteen’s music as the embodiment of impossible distance rather than down-home realism. It’s also, purely by accident, emo as heck.
I don’t know about this song as a single or whatever, but I will say Mitski makes me really excited about the future of “women with guitars” music. I saw her at SXSW and immediately thought “this is the type of band Our Band Could Be Your Life was written about.”
Verse is Perfect Disaster, chorus is Breeders