“Don’t wait for me, I can’t come” announces Mitski, “Your Mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me, But I do, I think I do, You’re an All-American boy but I guess I couldn’t help trying to be your best American girl”. So goes the haunting chorus of ‘Your Best American Girl’, Mitski’s 2016 hit indie ballad dealing with longing and isolation that found recent fame on TikTok. 

Born to a Japanese Mother and an American diplomat father, Mitski Miyawaki lived a nomadic life briefly settling in Japan, Malaysia, Congo, Turkey, Czeck Republic, Alabama and Virginia. Living with no fixed national identity and occupying a racialised body, Mitski recognised her position as the outsider and the act of assimilation as performance.  

Notions of exclusion, performance and identity inform her artistic practice – ‘Your best American Girl’ embodying her artistic praxis. Throughout the chorus, Mitski yearns for the beloved for her beloved who exists in a world inaccessible to her, one that she “wouldn’t” and “couldn’t” reach.  

Despite the personal nature of the song, white creators on TikTok continue to express empathy with the song to the vocal dismay of many commentators. This poses the question of whether White listeners could relate and how far they could relate to this song.  

In his seminal essay ‘The Death of the Author’, Rowland Barthes posits that authorial meaning is lost upon the act of reading, as you are instead being shaped by language and the reader’s own interpretation. Bridled with authorial intent, Mitski’s song likens her isolated upbringing to post-Edenic expulsion. Comparing her beloved to the Sun, Mitski professes “you have never seen the night.” Excluded from the worldly Sun, Moon and stars of her beloved, Mitski is left “singing to the birds.” 

Despite Barthe’s assertion against authorial intent, Mitski’s song is tied to the artist’s own lived experiences, exposing the limits of solitary reader interaction. Removing the author from the text reduces the song to an expression of empty yearning and an otherness undefined.  

Interestingly, considering authorial intent complicates the act of interpretation further. When the artistic self threads the cultural text of otherness and exclusion – how Mitski defines this otherness. I would argue that Mitski defines this otherness through the racial and national dimensions of her corporeal body.  

Lamenting her post-Edenic expulsion, Mitski excludes herself from the solar bodies and the night which her beloved cannot comprehend. Occupying a perceived space between existence and non-existence, Mitski becomes the discarded other to her “all American” beloved, embodying what Karen Shimakawa defines as the abject to the (White) American self. Throughout the repeating chorus, Mitski laments “trying to be your best American girl”, in her labour to embody Americanness, Mitski abandons her Asian otherness and becomes a synthetic replica of Americana.  

In ‘National Abjection, The Asian American Body On Stage’, Shimakawa notes that Asian Americanness is defined by the social and bodily contradictions of being Asian and American. Being Asian American means to exist in an unfixed social space that renders you citizen/immigrant, foreign/assimilated. Existing in this unfixed space allows the national (US) subject to assign value in the valueless, rendering Asian Americans as the ‘China Virus’, ‘Dragon Lady’, the ‘Lotus Blossom’ or the ‘Model Minority’.  

Throughout ‘Your Best American Girl’ Mitski displays national identity as a binary, through assimilation via performing Americanness, she sacrifices her Asianness only to still be perceived as foreign. Despite the artifice of performance, Shimakawa adds that performance allows Asian Americans to question their abject status and challenge stereotypes imposed upon them. 

Mitski reveals that she understands herself “as an object that’s looked at” as a racialised woman on the global music stage. Her choreography seeks to deal with her lived contradictions as a borderless body with no national belonging. Her poetic lyricism belongs to the same artistic paradigm that seeks to voice her experience of racialised and borderless exclusion.  

To relate to the racialised experiences of Mitski would be to listen to the song through the lens of whiteness contributing to larger systems of cultural and legal exclusion. While authorial intent dies upon commercialised readership, the creation of art is a process of self-exploration, to deny an integral aspect of the artist would be to deny their lived humanity.