class of 2013 - npr tiny desk

mitski's mother issue anthem has never been so heartbreaking

For her last 2 tours (for Laurel Hell and This Land is Inhospitable and So Are We), Mitski has utilized choreographed movement and carefully constructed visuals, including a door and a chair as props) to create breathtaking live performances supplemented by her angelic voice. But before all that, she was just a small artist taking on NPR’s Tiny Desk in 2015. Just a girl and her jet-black electric guitar.

As part of her Tiny Desk set, she performed “Class of 2013” from Retired from Sad, New Career in Business, which was her student project in college. This song is about Mitski’s relationship with her mother as a struggling artist about to graduate.

There’s an added layer of the fact that she’s singing to her Asian mother, who likely has expressed disapproval of Mitski’s desire to be a musician. This is implied through the lines where Mitski considers quitting her dream of music to make her mother happy: “And I’ll leave what I’m chasing / For the other girls to pursue.”

This song, despite being just under 2 minutes, packs a punch to the gut. While the recorded version of “Class of 2013” is a piano ballad that reads as a desperate cry, the same spirit is preserved in Mitski’s Tiny Desk performance.

Unlike many Tiny Desk performances nowadays, often complete with backup singers and a full backing band, Mitski’s Tiny Desk performance is simply her and her guitar. She wears a plain black shirt and minimal makeup, bringing a refreshing rawness to her performance that puts all the focus solely on the music.

Instead of continually strumming or picking a melody, Mitski strums a couple of chords in between lyrics and lets the notes ring out as she sings, slowly fading over time with a haunting sound. Slowly, over the course of the song, the strums become more sure, and her voice crescendoes too.

The peak of her performance is during the third voice, when she strums her guitar, picks it up, and screams into the guitar strings: “Mom, will you wash my back? / This once, and then we can forget.” The microphone is completely forgotten at that moment as she yells into the body of her guitar.

Suddenly, Mitski isn’t just singing to her mother anymore, but to the sound—the music—she’s created. She’s desperate for someone to provide comfort and knowing that she’s singing to someone who won’t answer her back, at least not in the way she wants to, she begins to beg her own creation and method of survival to save her.

Her voice echoes and amplifies with reverb, ringing evocatively throughout the studio (or, I suppose the Tiny Desk area). For her last verse, she puts her guitar back and sings into the microphone: “Mom, am I still young? / Can I dream for a few months more?” Having no answer from the sound, she returns to asking her mother for reassurance and for permission to continue dreaming.

Considering that Mitski’s mother is an immigrant, the clash of her mother’s expectations against her dreams of being an artist is painful, a conflict that arises from love being lost in translation. At its core, “Class of 2013” is about Mitski struggling to understand how she can make her mother proud without giving up her dream, an impossibility that renders her childlike and naive for wondering how she can make it happen when these two desires are at complete odds with each other.

Still, she has hope that her dream will work out: “I’ll leave once I figure out / How to pay for my own life too.”