User:Jenniferpeterson12/Mitski

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'''On September 9th, 2019 at a show in Central Park, Mitski announced it would be her last show indefinitely. Her devoted fanbase was upset, and took to social media to express their distress '''. '''The reaction online to this announcement prompted her to tell her fans she was not going to quit music, however, at the time, she did intend to quit music for good.  She has stated her main reason for quitting was that she had a difficult time grappling with new-found indie stardom when her 2018 album Be the Cowboy hit the mainstream.  She said the music industry felt like a "super-saturated version of consumerism" , and that in the industry "you have to be a product that’s being bought and sold and consumed" . She regrets using her actual name to release music because it not longer felt like it belonged to her, and she felt like "a foreigner" to herself. She feared that by continuing to make music, eventually she would begin to produce music she didn't care about. In 2019, despite her intention to quit music for good, Mitski wrote a new single, Working For the Knife, where she describes her "reluctance to return to the stage"  . In February, 2022, Mitski released a new record Laurel Hell, returning to the music industry. '''

Mitski has stated in interviews that she has an uneasy relationship with her fans because she finds their relationship to her and her music overwhelming. She found the "worshipful commentary" about herself online damaging to her self-image . Her fanbase has been described as both “extremely online”, "cultish" , and as rivaling “Taylor Swift and BTS in intensity, if not size.” In an interview in 2022 she described the audience at one of her shows as “unrelenting. Everyone needed a piece of me… I was so overwhelmed by hands grabbing at me that I was crying.” In February 2022, Mitski tweeted out a statement regarding her feelings about fans using their phones at shows to record entire songs and sets. Watching fans record her shows, she felt "as though those of us on stage are being taken from and consumed as content".

Mitski is often described as a private person. In interviews, she has declined to give specific details about her family and share the names of her two cats. '''She has explained that the choice to be private has made some people angry, because she has not held up her side of the bargain as a public figure.  As an Asian-American woman, she felt pressure to represent her community. She expressed discomfort at the idea of people looking to her for guidance and seeing her as a leader of change in a white male-dominated industry.'''

Mitski is not active on social media, but the accounts under her name are run by a manager. '''Mitski left social media in 2019, around the same time she quit music, because she felt it was unhealthy for her self-image.  However, she has gained massive popularity on social media. Over 2.5 million videos on TikTok have been created using her music. President Barack Obama added her song The Only Heartbreaker to his list of top songs of 2021 which he tweets out every year. '''