Japanese-American artist Mitski is a stunning talent of this generation; she has such a beautiful sound and her music, although tragically devastating, is incredibly well-written. As a huge fan of her work and someone who adores poetry, I’ve analyzed a personal favorite of her latest album “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We” called “The Deal.”
This song begins in the first two lines of the first stanza with a figurative device: personification. Uniquely, instead of an inanimate object, a concept is personified. She describes a deal one can make when walking alone at midnight, and she tells the listener to “look around” and “listen close” while giving this deal human characteristics by saying it ”falls” from above and speaks to her. This deal is a simple and general transaction, trading one thing for another. There are no further rules for this deal; the possibilities are limitless. However, out of everything the speaker could ask for, she practically begs this “deal” to take her soul– completely free of charge. The speaker says she “can’t bear to keep it,” implying that the responsibility of having a human soul is far too agonizing to withstand.
A large theme of “The Deal” and the album it derives from is the bitter beauty of being human. Possessing a soul is a blessing and a curse, burdening its owner with such violent
and painful emotions. She says “And all I will take are the consequences,” showing her pure desperation in wanting to give it away. Despite this, in the following stanza, the speaker makes a complete turn-around and discredits her plead to the dark. She states, “Then of course, nothing replied, nothing speaks to you in the night,” as if she knew from the beginning that this deal was a complete fantasy she created to cope with her humanity. She virtually scoffs at the idea to the listener. The speaker then wanders home, surrounded by no one except a lonely bird perched upon a streetlight. Instead of looking around, the bird strangely focuses on the speaker and watches her, even when she stops walking. Soon enough, the bird starts speaking. This initiates a compelling declaration between the speaker and her soul.
It is now revealed that despite the speaker previously denying the existence of a deal, the bird now embodies the speaker’s soul. It sings, "Now I'm taken, the night has me / You won't hear me singin' / You're a cage without me.” The bird uses a metaphor to compare the
speaker to a “cage,” now empty without a soul inside her. Opposing her previous idea of the
soul being her restricting cage causing her suffering, the speaker now faces the reality that she was the cage all along. The following line, “Your pain is eased, but you'll never be free” is
a personal favorite, as it explicitly asserts the idea of a human soul having two sides. The speaker’s direct pain from the heartache of having a soul is now gone, but now she will never be able to feel the joy and love of life again, which explains “you’ll never be free”. Mitski ends the song with artistic repetition, reciting, “There's a deal that I made” multiple times over in an echoed haze, likely signaling the downward spiral after losing her soul to the deal– a dangerous double-edged sword.
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