Mitski – Where’s My Phone?

Not a Lizzo cover…

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[7.43]Julian Axelrod: A very normal Mitski song that everyone will hopefully be very normal about.
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Claire Davidson: I’m a big fan of 2018’s Be the Cowboy, but in the years that have passed since its release, I’ve been increasingly worried that Mitski’s plays toward conventional pop gloss were causing her to lose her edge, sabotaging the direct yearning that had defined her work via pedestrian production choices. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that “Where’s My Phone?” hewed more toward projects like Bury Me at Makeout Creek and Puberty 2, soundtracking her frenzied musings to a familiar set of rollicking guitars and placing her voice further back in the mix, which mirrors the struggle to convey vulnerability that has become her lyrical signature. Yet there’s something about the song that feels too obvious. Nearly everyone under the age of 50 can relate to the impulse to use their smartphones to ameliorate their anxieties, and little of Mitski’s depiction of this urge feels novel or even poetic. (The song’s most distinctive lyric, ,”If night is like you punched a hole into tomorrow / I would fuck the hole all night long” is only really notable for the jarring bleep that censors the word “fuck” — otherwise, its hallucinatory analogy is clumsy at best.) Even Mitski’s usual sonic tricks feel tired, as she spends the final minute of the song taunting her audience with menacing, multitracked vocals before the track descends into a flurry of bells and distorted guitars, all of which feels less impactful in the absence of a stronger hook or lyrical meter. That outro is deliberate, at least, intended to symbolize the looming dread that Mitski knows she can’t escape — but none of these narrative swerves will surprise Mitski’s target audience of very-online devotees. If anything, given how many of her listeners likely first encountered this track on an app, I can’t imagine how a song about phone addiction could read as anything but schematic in this day and age.
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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: The brainrot zeitgeist personified.
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Katherine St. Asaph: More self-indicting than the standard Phones Bad song, more ambivalent than the standard Phones Metaphor song. The connection seems obvious to me in retrospect, but the way this charts a distorted thrill-ride path through chaotic chords and psychic fog reminds me of Throwing Muses, or at least Throwing Muses if you removed all traces of Southern rock. (Haven’t pinpointed the exact song I’m thinking of — “Mania“?) When the music is pleasant, the words present oblivion. When the words are gone, like the purposefully insipid ba-ba-ba bridge, the music sounds like oblivion. Oblivion is everywhere, and yet you’re always only half in it. That feeling, not of despair exactly but of incomplete decline, not “head empty” but lowered head capacity, is, uh, relatable to me. Maybe not just me. It’s too obvious, as a general rule and especially with this song, to reach for “this speaks to our times.” (And it’s also probably cope.) But be honest with yourself: Can you say, for certain, with the evidence presented to you via living out your life, that you have not declined over the last decade: cognitively, volitionally, spiritually if you’re into that? If you focus real hard, can you perceive it happening in real time? (Can you focus real hard?) Ask yourself again for every time you’ve listened to this.
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Jel Bugle: An ode to brain-fog. Mitski understands life!
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Nortey Dowuona: Welcome back, Rita Andrade. We are delighted this busy, blurry mix allows you and your viola a brief bit of space with which to stretch. However, the mix is suffused with both guitar and drums, forcing the bass and piano to overshadow your work and that of the many other talents involved in this. Of course the producer had to fill the mix with his ugly, mangled attempt at a solo then push you all to the fringes as he mixed it. Where did their ability to blend many pieces into one go? A shame, since Mitski herself is vibrant and would’ve sounded fantastic over your handiwork. Still, you all persevered, and for that, we thank you. This song wouldn’t be successful without you.
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Tim de Reuse: Through cacophonous chord progressions, Mitski sings lilting triplets, calling on only a few piercing images — clear glass, clear wax, a fucked hole into tomorrow — until she cuts herself off and is overpowered by a sludge of ba-ba-bas and a gory guitar solo. It’s hard to write a tune about being overwhelmed that doesn’t sound like a thousand things we’ve already heard, because, like, we’ve all felt like this for a decade already. I like the strategy of using “Where’s my phone?” as an emotional hook because it’s the most obvious possible symbol of modern malaise (something we’ve all muttered in the morning when we’re about to roast our brains before we have to get out of bed), and so it needs no elaboration, no development, just a few flat, dead-behind-the-eyes statements before the song collapses under its own shaky legs. A less confident songwriter would have added a bunch more faff to push the metaphor; Mitski keeps her lyrics short, as usual, and the result is surgically precise, heavy, and desperate.
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