Wine and Cheese: St. Vincent and Mitski
St. Vincent and Mitski, two artists of different minority groups, create music that harnesses their struggles and presents them in a pop form that is both unique and complementary.
It’s your dream collab. The artists you add back-to-back to the queue. The pairing you can’t get enough of. You know they sound good together, but why? Welcome to Wine and Cheese, a series investigating the why and telling you all about it.
Written by Minnah Zaheer
Mitski photo courtesy of Brooklyn Magazine, St. Vincent photo courtesy of Bryan Bedder for Getty Images
Artists that come from minority backgrounds are particularly skilled at and criminally underrated for finding the balance between upbeat music and lyrics that portray emotional turmoil and dissatisfaction with ourselves and the world. Two artists that have mastered this balance have established themselves as forces to be reckoned with throughout their careers. Annie Clark, whose stage name is St. Vincent, is a sapphic musician who won a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album with her self-titled record in 2015. Mitski Miyawaki, known eponymously as Mitski, is a quickly-rising Japanese-American musician whose most recent endeavor Be the Cowboy has garnered massive critical praise. Recently, the pair have both received 2019 Grammy nominations for Best Recording Package, and St. Vincent received additional nominations for Best Rock Song for “Masseduction” and for Best Alternative Album for her album of the same name. But, the two share similarities beyond their well-deserved critical acclaim; they are artists whose approach to music is unique and complementary to each other on both sonic and lyrical levels.
When I discovered St. Vincent, she’d just won her first Grammy, making her the first solo female performer in 20 years to win a Grammy in the alternative music album category. I found myself intrigued by a few songs on the record, but it wasn’t until she released the song “Los Ageless” off 2017’s MASSEDUCTION that I began to really fall in love with her music. Her wailing guitar riffs, her sharp-as-steel voice, and her melancholy lyrics over captivating pop beats made me truly appreciate the level of her genius.
My descent into the world of St. Vincent was gradual and took place over the course of two years. I can’t say the same about my interest in Mitski, which happened in about a day. One of my friends mentioned her in passing earlier this year, and she had such a unique name that I looked up her music as soon as I could. In her song “Two Slow Dancers,” Mitski’s voice grows from quiet pleading to raw desperation and back again over the course of just four minutes. It captivated me immediately, and that night I bought tickets to her Austin show and listened to her discography for the next three weeks, almost non-stop.
Although these experiences may seem disjointed, St. Vincent and Mitski are pretty much the only two artists I’ve listened to this entire semester. Listening to both artists helped me through bad times and amplified the good times. But what sets them above many other artists in the genre of melodramatic alternative pop is their ability to channel their struggles in a subconscious and subdued way, allowing their identities to bleed and diffuse through their music rather than dominate it.
St. Vincent came out as fluid in her gender and sexuality in a Rolling Stone article in 2014. She has publicly dated women, including model and actress Cara Delevingne. On her self-titled record, the song “Prince Johnny” explores the “New York downtown freak, weirdo, queer scene” (in St. Vincent’s own words) through the lens of a character named Johnny whose gender identity and sexuality are purposefully ambiguous. The closing lyrics find St. Vincent switching from third person to first person, embodying the ambiguity in self-reflection.
Mitski, a Japanese-American woman who released her first two records while still enrolled at Purchase College in New York, is also adept at using alternate personas to get her messages across. Promotional images and interviews with Mitski herself reveal that many of the songs on her record Be the Cowboy are about fictional characters she’s invented in her head. The persona of the “cowboy” that led to the title of her album is the embodiment of the idea that despite her status as a Japanese-American woman, she too can participate in the American ideal of fearless exploration of the unknown, much like the stereotypical cowboys of the Wild West.
Both St. Vincent and Mitski explicitly sing about their identities in songs like “Sugarboy” (from St. Vincent, in which she sings about being with a man and a woman as well as blurring the lines between binary gender overall), and “First Love/Late Spring” (from Mitski, in which one verse is in Japanese and roughly translates to “my chest feels like it is going to explode”). However, the similarities in the level of genius of the two artists presents itself in their more subtle approaches to self-exploration. Through the use of fictional personas that feel all too familiar and that embody their struggles as minorities, Mitski and St. Vincent perfect their craft and reaffirm themselves as some of the most innovative artists out there.