Sometimes when I perform, and it’s obvious the audience is just there to party, or if I feel a wall between me and the audience, I get existential about it.
MITSKII think it’s our responsibility as artists to not only fight for our art but fight for the communities that are the reason we’re able to continue making art, especially since, in Brooklyn’s case, we as artists somehow made it ‘cool’ enough for the bigger money-making industries to start taking over.
More Mitski Quotes
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I could never enter that dream. That all-American white culture is something that is inherited instead of attained.
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All I want to do at karaoke is sing Mariah Carey.
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A lot of musicians talk about how they were into music from the start; they always wanted to be musicians. It wasn’t like that for me. I didn’t think of it as a job or a career – it was just something that was constant.
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I really just care about making music and how I can make it next.
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Pop artists work really hard, and they might not work for the same things that indie artists do, but they’re still musicians, and they’re still making art.
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Growing up, I never really felt like anything was my own. I moved a lot, and I never belonged anywhere.
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I tend to not want to do that anymore. It’s not even that I don’t like it anymore: it’s that I keep trying to find ways for people to dislike me.
MITSKI -
If I have a song where I hit some really high notes, I want to try to bring in equivalently low notes somewhere in there.
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I don’t care about making anything new. I make music to express an emotion, and if the emotion is nostalgic, so be it.
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People started calling me that, and I started being treated in a specific way.
MITSKI -
The whole ‘grunge-girl’ comparisons certainly are the easiest to pick out, and I appreciate that music journalists are rushed.
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I discovered I was an Asian American when I arrived in the U.S. I didn’t identify as that before I came here.
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Then you start to realise, ‘Oh, I’m bending a lot,’ and they’re just standing there existing, and I’m bending around them. But you can’t blame them: they don’t realise it; that’s just how they already existed. It’s hard.
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In my first few years of being in New York, I had a major identity crisis because I’d never stayed in one place for so long.
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I tend to kind of try to use what’s in my environment to the best of my ability rather than seek out things that I don’t already have.
MITSKI