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Mitski arrived without much fanfare at the Greek Theatre Monday. That was by design.
Flanked by her seven-piece band, she blended in as she ambled onto an elevated ring center-stage, concealed by a massive curtain. She sang a large chunk of opening number “Everyone” unseen by the crowd. Then, a spotlight beamed up from behind the curtain; at once, Mitski was larger-than-life and imperceptible to the rest of the crowd. Then, the curtain fell. There she was.
If the litany of profiles in the last few years is anything to go by, Mitski has spent a lot of time considering her relationship to celebrity and performance. The singer occupies a paradoxical space in pop culture: She is one of the biggest, most listened-to artists in the world — her single “My Love Mine All Mine,” reached the upper throngs of the Billboard charts last November, topping a billion streams on Spotify in June — and yet many of her adoring fans feel deeply possessive of her. Much of that has to do with her intense, big-hearted songwriting, which works best for solitary listening. She is singing for you, not to you.
As such, many of her fans crave intimate connections to her. People call out the word “mother” during quiet pauses in between songs (a practice she does not much care for, stopping shows over it), or launch into tirades when she asks fans to stop recording her shows on their phones. Chappell Roan, an artist who has developed a similarly obsessive parasocial fandom, told Rolling Stone in a recent profile that Mitski had reached out in the wake of her stratospheric rise to welcome her to “the shittiest exclusive club in the world, the club where strangers think you belong to them.”
Mitski’s performance at the Greek serves to create distance between herself and the audience. Gone is the intimacy of her early tours, when she embraced the traditionally cozy singer-songwriter stance of singing while playing her guitar.
The new show is both odd and compelling, flitting between cabaret, absurdist performance art, and big-time pop act. During “The Frost,” she faithfully played air guitar, moving her hand across an imaginary fretboard. She got on all fours for “I Bet on Losing Dogs,” pawing and sticking her tongue out. And during a weirdly upbeat rendition of morose fan-favorite “Happy,” she went full Fosse, complete with jazz hands and a whole lot of razzle-dazzle.
She even turned “I Don’t Smoke,” a heart-rending song about taking and compartmentalizing your partner’s sadness and cruelties, into something approaching a polka arrangement, with appropriately honky-tonk choreography. A line like “You can lean on my arm / As you break my heart” feels a whole lot less devastating when Mitski is line-dancing to it. Her voice, though, was just as lovely as when I saw her for the first time a decade ago, rich and sonorous and suffused with intense feeling.
The most beguiling parts of the performance relied on the spotlight. At the end of “Working for the Knife,” she looked up at the light above her, spinning and spinning until she collapsed to the ground. Later in the evening, during “Heaven,” light beams flash on her in rapid succession, before coalescing into a single spotlight that she appeared to be waltzing with. There’s a big, glaring metaphor here in how she has grappled with — and eventually succumbed — to her growing fame.
Most fans seemed to have gotten the memo to behave — in deference to the artist, but also to not be corny and go viral for being corny. Throughout the show, the audience stayed seated, put their phones away (mostly), and, aside from a couple of folks who didn’t get the memo, didn’t yell that Mitski was mother. (One person who yelled “I love you, mommy Mitski” during the set got a series of quiet groans lobbed at them.)
We were rewarded for our good behavior with a few incredibly endearing, rambling monologues, including one where she thanked the parents who were dragged along by their adolescent-age kids.
“You know, maybe this wasn’t your first choice on how to spend your night, but your kid will remember this forever and they appreciate it,” she said.
By the time the encore rolled around — “Nobody” and “Washing Machine Heart,” undoubtedly two of the most beloved cuts in her oeuvre — she played it totally straight. No extended performance art, no revisions to the instrumentation or arrangement. She extended the mic out to the crowd for a singalong, and a brief moment of collective effervescence. She lapped the stage exuberantly, every bit going pop. She ran to one side, waved, then to the other, and waved; the crowd whooped and hollered in kind.
As she spread love to her adoring crowd, it became clear that Mitski really can do the whole pop star thing. But she’ll only do it on her terms.
Mitski is playing again at the Greek Theatre Tuesday, and is playing Stanford’s Frost Amphitheatre Wednesday.
