Mitski / Be the Cowboy / 2018
Nobody
manic, desperate cheerfulness masking despair
A disco groove wraps around one of Mitski's bleakest lyrics, turning isolation into something you can dance to. The song tracks a narrator so starved for contact that she'd settle for the smallest, most performative gesture of affection, just to quiet the loneliness for a moment.
loneliness self-erasure longing for touch over love cosmic insignificance body image and self-worth denial through performance
Who's speaking
First-person confessional narrator speaking to no one in particular, possibly an absent or imagined lover; she's unreliable in the sense that her upbeat delivery contradicts the content of what she's saying
What happens
The song opens with an admission of loneliness so acute the narrator opens a window just to hear other humans exist. She widens the lens to a dying planet, drawing a parallel between personal and planetary self-destruction through wanting too much. She retreats from grand desires to a minimal, almost pathetic request: not love, not salvation, just physical contact. The chorus collapses into a chant of the word describing her isolation, repeated until it loses meaning. The second verse reveals a history of fluctuating self-image and rejection, and the plea narrows further, from a real kiss to a cinematic, unreal one. The song ends mid-word, as if cut off or swallowed by its own repetition.
How it's built
Verse-chorus form built on escalating specificity followed by collapse into repetition. Each verse narrows the request (from company, to a kiss, to a 'movie' kiss) while the chorus function as an emotional flatline, the word for her condition repeated until it becomes pure sound. The song trails off unfinished at the end rather than resolving, mirroring the unresolved need it describes.
Section by section
Opening verse
“so I open the window”
The image is small and physical: a woman alone in a room seeking secondhand proof that other people exist. It sets the tone of loneliness as something almost involuntary, a reflex rather than a choice.
Venus verse
The pivot to a destroyed planet functions as a distancing device, letting the narrator ask an uncomfortable question about her own desires by projecting it onto something impersonal and cosmic. It also flirts with self-blame, suggesting she suspects her own loneliness might be self-inflicted by wanting too much from life or from others.
Pre-chorus
“I just want somebody near me”
The narrator explicitly rejects sympathy in favor of presence, revealing that what she craves isn't emotional validation but literal physical nearness. Calling herself a coward suggests she's aware this need feels smaller or less noble than wanting real love.
First chorus
The word describing her isolation is repeated so many times it stops functioning as language and starts functioning as texture, almost like a drumbeat. This mirrors how prolonged loneliness can become a kind of background static rather than a sharp pain.
Second verse
“I've been big and small and big and small”
This line gestures toward body image and self-worth fluctuating over time, framed as a cycle that hasn't changed the outcome: continued rejection. It broadens the loneliness from a single night's ache into a chronic condition.
Final refrain
The escalating repetition, eventually cutting off mid-word, suggests exhaustion or collapse — the song doesn't resolve so much as run out of energy, leaving the emotional state unresolved rather than comforted.
Craft
- cosmic metaphor
- The comparison to a planet destroyed by wanting too much projects personal shame outward onto a planetary scale, making self-blame feel simultaneously enormous and absurd.
- repetition as emotional device
- The chorus's single repeated word starts as description and turns into incantation, dramatizing how isolation can become numbing and self-perpetuating rather than acute.
- irony between form and content
- The upbeat, danceable arrangement contradicts the despairing lyric, creating a tension where celebration and collapse happen simultaneously.
- diminishing request
- The narrator's ask shrinks across the song, from human contact broadly to a kiss to a fictionalized, movie version of a kiss, showing how desperation settles for imitation when the real thing feels unreachable.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a portrait of loneliness so total that even authentic intimacy feels unreachable, leaving the narrator to ask for a diminished, almost theatrical substitute (a kiss modeled on movies) rather than real connection. The disco production isn't ironic detachment so much as a coping mechanism, dancing through despair because sitting still with it is unbearable. An alternative reading emphasizes self-aware performance: the narrator knows her request is small and even embarrassing, and the song is partly about the shame of loneliness as much as the loneliness itself, especially in the swipe at wanting too much.
Context
Be the Cowboy was written and recorded during a period when Mitski has described feeling professionally successful but personally isolated from constant touring; she has spoken about the album's characters as often performing normalcy or contentment while feeling otherwise, though I don't have a direct quote specifically tying that context to this song. The song's holiday-set music video, filmed in a decorated, artificial domestic space, reinforces themes of performed happiness masking isolation.
Listen for
- The contrast between the upbeat, danceable instrumentation and the bleakness of the lyric
- How the repeated word in the chorus shifts from meaningful to almost abstract through sheer repetition
- The narrowing of what the narrator asks for across the two verses
- The unresolved, cut-off ending rather than a clean resolution
- The parallel drawn between a destroyed planet and personal self-destruction
About Mitski
Mitski Miyawaki, known professionally as Mitski, is an American musician and singer-songwriter. She self-released her first two albums, Lush (2012), and Retired from Sad, New Career in Business (2013), while studying composition at Purchase College's Conservatory of Music.
b. 1990 / United States
Full biography and catalogue