Mitski's 'Laurel Hell' confronts the wild complexity of feeling

All over the world, every day, people are losing it. It happened to me just last Tuesday, driving onto I-40 on my way back from Trader Joe's. Phoebe Snow's 1974 seduction "Poetry Man" turned up on my playlist and suddenly I was sobbing so aggressively I nearly had to pull over on the freeway on-ramp. That song's a masterpiece of charm becoming desperation, but Snow's entreaties to her married lover weren't what got me. There was no sensible reason, in fact, that on an ordinary day hauling chicken jerky home to my poodle, I suddenly became bereft. My current crises are quotidian and manageable. I process bigger traumas with my shrink. Yet here I was, choking up, endangering the lives of others as my eyes blurred and the snot flowed. Finally the song ended and some sad and dramatic indie ballad came on, but it didn't touch me. Suddenly I couldn't feel anything but fine, maybe a bit chagrined at the intensity of my outburst and the speed of its vanishing – just another emotionally dysregulated human in 2022.

I needed to crank up some Mitski. In the decade since the then-university undergrad released her demo-level debut , her That term might seem specious at first – what music doesn't foreground feelings? — but it captures the earnestness and need to be heard that young women have brought to rock, as well as their dedication to intense self-inquiry. After Mitski came Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, Phoebe Bridgers, Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast, Arlo Parks, Lindsey Jordan of Snail Mail, and Olivia Rodrigo, among many others, all indebted to her groundbreaking decision to accept rock's gift of grandiosity while just as determinedly interrogating its biases and cliches.