America is an Inhospitable Land: Awakenings from Mitski’s Spotify Page
(Published on December 11, 2023 on The Daily Californian Weekender)
By the time the world had realized the American Dream was long shattered, those of us in America had already had our hearts broken by this land a million times over. Decaying remains of a hope that were never meant to be alive in the first place was all we had. Growing up as a Vietnamese-American had built a cycle of grieving into me long before my body was made. I mourn for a land that had never existed: a land that allows me to hold all my identities, and all its contradictions and intersections. I’ve been predetermined as a visitor of my own identities long before I could make the choice myself.
Of course, laced in all of this exists a level of privilege that I will not separate from my experiences. The fact that I have the time to contemplate and articulate my existence in America is a privilege in itself. Still, there is something to be said about the collective struggle in a white, capitalist America that forces racialized people to exert their bodies, somehow and in some way, to keep the American Dream alive. We are forced into systems built to exclude us from social mobility, education, and possibility - yet this system hides behind the American Dream, placing the responsibility on our bodies and minds to achieve it all. The American Dream acts as a body that was never put to rest, giving the illusion of life when there never was any to give. Thus we keep exerting, grinding ourselves on the teeth of a gluttonous land that spits us out and demands to chew us in again and again.
Mitski’s album, The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We, has been self-described as her “most American album.” Prior to its release, Mitski teased “Bug Like An Angel,” “Star” and “Heaven” some singles from the album. In this trifecta of releases, Mitski transcends through a journey of acceptance, keeping themes of love within its orbit. She plays a wise man, stuck between teaching and learning a lesson, finding the most blessed life in the most unknowing on — a bug. She croons to a faraway star, the kind that one admires in the sky, feeling both the beauty it holds and its permanent distance. She cries of a warm note so painful, yet so affective, so palpable, it must be from heaven.
Individually, it isn’t glaringly apparent how these songs encapsulate “American.” Mitski has long (to her expressed dismay) been subject to the categorization of “sad girl music.” It isn’t surprising to hear interpretations of these songs as simple expressions of love and regret.
American playwright, Will Arbery, who wrote the About the Artist Spotify page for Mitski, finds love in Mitski’s songs existing beyond the sake of love. In this album, Arbery finds love operating in tandem with the American experience.
“Listening to it, that’s precisely how it feels: like a love that’s haunting the land. ‘This is my most American album,’ Mitski says about her seventh record, and the music feels like a profound act of witnessing this country, in all of its private sorrows and painful contradictions.”
This equation between love and the American experience that Arbery describes in Mitski’s album bears a truth that I, as a second generation Vietnamese-American, hold. To be born here means my very birth is marred with histories of colonization and destruction, including the fall of Saigon — the event that changed the trajectory of my parents’ lives for better or for worse. With its violent hands, the war brought me to America. Yet to have been born here means that I constantly live with the reality that I was never brought here because I was wanted. I am displaced, with nowhere to alleviate this feeling. I felt akin to a casualty to the war, without having lived through it.
There’s a love that still presides in the face of America in spite of its violence, its veiled glory and its imminent demise. However, in the state of this love, I find uncertainty. Perhaps I attempt to believe in the existence of love in America as a means to grasp something, anything, to understand my existence in America. When I constantly negotiate my identities in this country, I never find a proper familiarity with myself in its entirety. There is never space to hold all of what I am. In the eyes of the Americans, I am Vietnamese, and in the eyes of the Vietnamese, I am American. Although I am not wanted in this land, I have nowhere else to go.
Mitski, due to her father’s work in the U.S. government growing up, is no stranger to moving from country to country, attempting to root herself again and again - only to be uprooted once more. When familiarity has never been guaranteed, where can you find love? What is love supposed to be? Love in this way, seems to exist in its most difficult form: a love that operates from loss and its contradictions. In spite of myself, I remain in America, my family remains in America, my community attempts to find its roots in America - even when it openly rejects us. I can’t help but wonder if the collective labor of staying, and the pain of such work for my community, makes me find this love.
It’s a love that hurts you again and again, but won’t leave because it has nowhere else to be. I love because we all are hurting, and must love one another, because with no way out, we together must only go through. The love that exists in America is akin to the remains of a body that had passed long before I was alive. It remains there, haunting, reminding me that this might just be all that I have left to keep me here.
“Here, love is time-traveling to bless our tender days, like the light from a distant star. The album is full of the ache of the grown-up, seemingly mundane heartbreaks and joys that are often unsung but feel enormous. It’s a tiny epic… it feels like everything and everyone is crying out in pain, arching towards love.”
The love that Arbery is describing is not a love that is passionate, idealistic, or fantastical. Where The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We takes form to become what Mitski calls her “most American” album resides in its articulation of love as the last choice. Arguably this is when love has the most life. Love is something worn out, tired, and full of feeling - to the point where it’s hard to even discern that it’s love. In past albums of Mitski’s, love is explosive, contemplative, lost and unknowing. Yet, it still felt like something fantastic and wondrous, in spite of its disappointments, anger, and sadness.
Perhaps this is her “most American” album because love is there, with all of its disappointments. Love becomes a decision, where all of its shortcomings will still remain. As the Little Saigon neighborhood I grew up in finds its footing, all of us that reside there hurt. We hurt because Saigon is gone, and we live in Little Saigon in constant memory and pain. My community replants its roots clumsily, because this land never allowed us the grace to do so. We run for office, we build libraries, we make restaurants and bars, and we gossip and we have our own trivial qualms with each other. We do all of this because we are all we have, and we still stand on the land that rejects us so viciously, trying to build love with all of this rejection. This is a love that you endeavor towards, because it is the only path. But it’s the path we were all placed on, and we must walk together, even at its most difficult.
“To love this place — this earth, this America, this body — takes active work. It might be impossible. The best things are.”
This America takes us in and pushes us out, all at the same time. This constant absorption and rejection refuses to allow for us to find our footing. It proves a challenge to find familiarity in such uncertainty. This America leaves myself and my communities with love as the last option. But this love is exhausted, chewed up, and worn. It is easier to refuse to find love in this America, so easy that it feels as though that is how this land wants me to operate - refusing to find connection in my community. The work it takes to love through this America, side by side with my family and my community, is not work that anyone asks for, but it’s the work that allows us to face this inhospitable land. With Mitski’s album, she might ask us to continue holding love, even if this land is uncertain, and even if we are uncertain.
