Can we please talk about Mitski's "Star" music video?
And a weird reflection on guilt and the two wolves(?) I feed within me
A list of things I have told myself lately:
Jeffrey, you haven’t been writing much lately. It has been nearly a month since you last posted on Substack.
Don’t you think you need to be consistent to grow a platform? Of readers who want to engage with your work?
You haven’t been writing a whole lot…
Yes, but I also am only a week and a half out from a 4 week work trip, where I will be under a large amount of duress. I think it is reasonable to want to not burn oneself out before the real challenge begins. Besides, we knew contract work would ebb and flow with the amount of time available to write. If anything, I’ve found out that having my time restricted for writing has made me feel more motivated to write more than ever.
Jeffrey, big boy writers work so much harder than you. Plus, you just finished a short story that took you waaaay too long to finish editing. Who knows if it will get published. Plus, that one about the deer and the girl wasn’t all great.
But dad liked it.
Jeffrey, it also made mom uncomfortable.
Touche.
Some people imagine a demon and an angel on their shoulder to personify their internal struggles. Or two wolves. I, on the other hand, have two bickering nannies. One nannie wags her fist at me and tells me to grow up and get a real job, while the other coaxes me into oversleeping by two hours because those four extra games I played of League of Legends last night were just! too! difficult! Rest!
Despite this nauseating level of self-awareness, I don’t have many strategies to SND (shut the nannies down). But, I just came up with one. It is “what if I wrote about something that I am currently feeling inspired by that won’t take very long?”
That, right there is the music video. Now lets talk about the music video. Can we talk about the music video, please, Mac? I’ve dying to talk about the music video with you all day, OK?
Mitski is an artist I am late to jumping on the bandwagon for. Much like Hozier, I tried out her older albums multiple times, but never could get behind them. I liked a few songs off of Bury Me At Make Out Creek, but that was about it. Then, lightning struck.
I was deep in my folk/americana conversion when Mitski release a folk album!
One of my favorite songs from the album was “Star.” I was drawn to this song because, in my opinion, the lyrics are so poetic, that it feels like the song, hell the album, could stand entirely alone as a collection of poetry. “Star” especially so, as it doesn’t really occupy the form we typically expect from a song. It is rather asymmetrical. Most songs would go verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus. However, this song has very small verse-to-chorus transitions. This song feels like one continuous flow, rather than having a more traditional structure. It especially feels this way sonically.
The song starts droning, then swells, and swells, until poof! Her love bursts, then we lull, then we swell, and swell again, until poof once more!
This makes sense if we consider the lyrics. The song is all about love. Perhaps a first love. Mitski uses a star to describe this love. Though we may view a star in the sky, that is only the light being sent over thousand of miles away. In fact, most of the stars we see in the night sky are already dead, but their dying light travels to us anyway. When applying this notion to the context of a relationship, the light Mitski talks about is the reminiscing of the fondest time of those bright memories. Though it may be dead, its light still hangs over our head, so that we may look up and gaze upon it fondly.
I think the music video captures this perfectly. Mitski, in a boat, rows across misty waters. Then, she looks up, and is stunned by the sight of a star. She seems enraptured by its beauty, but we are only showed her stunned expression. Only through the reflection in her eyes do we see the tantalizing star, her love, that captures her heart. This love reveals things to her that she may have never known about herself before.
“You know I'd always been alone
'Til you taught me
To live for somebody”
The starlight illuminates her briefly, although it seems to make her forlorn. Then, it vanishes, and Mitski continues to row. As she rows, Mitski says the following.
“That love is like a star
It's gone, we just see it shinin'
It's traveled very far…”
On that line— “It’s gone”— Mitski acknowledges that the love is dead. She does a harsh bow of her head, as if affronted by the pain of the loss and of no longer being illuminated by the starlight.
But as the music swells a second time, Mitski drops her oar and opens her arms wide to the sky. She reaches high into the sky, but the light does not come. The star is dead, after all. But, there is some light. Light from the water.
The water from around her boat shines bright, as if the sky has become inverted, and her star is now at the bottom of the water she crosses.
I interpret this inversion to represent the somewhat “wrong” reason this love was founded upon. Mitski teases that this relationship may have been created for the wrong reasons earlier in the song:
“Remember when we met?
We acted like two fools
We were so glad
So glad to have found it”
Rather than be actually in love with the other, true love seems to be misconstrued by the titillation of finding new love, rather than something deeper. Or something that could burn for as long as a star can.
This is the quite literal upside notion of love that this relationship was founded upon. This inversion of the starlight shows as much. This is particularly poignant considering Mitski’s fate at the end of the video.
After the light from the water becomes blinding, images— perhaps memories from this love— flash before us. Or, for Mitski, her life flashes before her, as she finds her final fate, drowned in the starlight filled water.
Perhaps Mitski indulged in the light too much. Maybe she knew that basking in those memories could bring the worst for her. But she did it anyways.
To me, this music video is the completion of a perfect music trifecta. Mitski has written a 1.) great song with 2.) great lyrics and 3.) a great music video. Each of which complement the other perfectly, and only enhance one another when paired together. I loved the song, so studied the lyrics. This made me understand better the unique musical structure of the song. Then I watched the music video, and again, my experience was enhanced.
Much like Mitski was dumbstruck by her starlight, I was very much dumbstruck in a similar way by this music video. I , as the TV’s light shown over me in a dimly lit room, was left speechless for several minutes afterward. I still chase that powerful feeling again when I rewatch the video, much like how Mitski sought out her starlight after it disappeared. No matter how much we both try, I doubt we will ever feel satiated by the mere memory of experiencing it for the first time. But, we can still long for it just the same.