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Whether it’s Gwen Stefani’s dancer-posse Harajuku Girls or Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, the way Asian women are portrayed in music culture is no different from how they are stereotyped in the mainstream. The image of us is based on the fantasy of exoticized subservience—a sexualized image wherein we’re simultaneously malleable and unobtrusive in our desires, if we have them at all. This image has its roots in the myth that Asian women have a marked lack of sexual agency. This unimaginative assumption unfortunately results in many people believing that we are one-dimensional sex objects rather than human beings with feelings, needs and the ability to make decisions about sex and relationships for ourselves.
Recently, a long-overdue crop of Asian-American female musicians have been making tangible strides, giving Asian women much needed visibility in genres typically dominated by white men. At the forefront of this are K Rizz and Mitski, two women whose very presence combats this perception of the yielding Asian woman. As Asian women who are vocal about their needs and wants, they confront conventional Western stereotypes through both songs and performance; K Rizz defying the image of the sexually-meek Asian woman or Mitski’s lyrics illustrating us as fully-fleshed out human beings. That there are even a multiplicity of viewpoints is a vast improvement over the traditional media portrayal of Asian women as a breathing body pillow that fulfills your needs without all the hassle of actual communication, courtship, or consideration.
Filipina pop performer K Rizz flaunts her sexuality, performing in assless chaps and asserting that her body is her own vehicle for feeling beautiful; she makes clear that she controls and conceives these expressions of self. Proudly singing in Tagalog, she refers to herself as "Slaysian" and a "Filipina princessa" while wearing next to nothing. Even her core ethos of Salbahe comes from a derisive Tagalog term for "naughty," which she flips on its head in order to show other Asian women that there is nothing to be ashamed of when it comes to expressing their sexuality.
K Rizz grew up in devout, first-generation Filipino household and spent her formative years at Catholic school. She often talks about how difficult it was for her to express herself freely, especially as there were few female Asian icons in the media when she was a young woman; the only narrative for Asian women was the extremely passive "good girl" narrative, which never felt right for her. For these reasons she wanted her K Rizz image to refute all of that. Her image is carefully cultivated through her reappropriation of stripperwear (à la her signature assless chaps and sky-high heels) and confrontational expression of herself as a fully-realized Asian woman, one that marches to the beat of her own drum (machine) and is proud to to be a highly sexual Filipina.
However, the image of the emotional, feeling Asian woman is equally important in terms of representation, especially as a big part of the problem regarding our objectification stems from "othering"—which is tied to centuries-old Orientalism and a marked refusal to understand us as fully-formed, nuanced human beings. Which is why Mitski’s music, as some of the most nuanced, complex and articulate music that’s come from the indiesphere in a while, is so essential. A woman of Japanese descent, she frames us as having sensitivities, needs and wants. Instead of playing the muse, she’s the artistic genius, the one in charge of the show, having created a complex, 10-song story told from her perspective as an Asian-American female. It’s the same sort of sly first-person narrative that has gotten the likes of Sufjan Stevens or Conor Oberst accolades for their emotional vulnerability and astute observations about pain, love, and sadness. And like those sad boy troubadours before her, Mitski has penned an album about "choosing self-pity over feeling nothing at all and finding a kind of pleasurable agency in it." All of this underscores the idea that she has feelings and desires as well as ultimate agency over those emotions and urges.
Crooning lines like "I’m not gonna be what my daddy wants me to be, I wanna be what my body wants me to be" and believing that she deserves "a love that falls as fast as a body from a balcony," Mitski’s an Asian-American woman with a voice, an indie starlet with a different perspective who reframes the Asian female full of needs and human contradictions. She’s a "wild woman" who knows she shouldn’t get the blues, let alone cry about them; a woman unafraid to talk about what she wants (you, baby), when she wants it (now) and admit when she needs to quit you (see "Drunk Walk Home"). Mitski’s power comes from how she’s capable of having the same complicated emotional baggage as the indie auteurs before her. Strength, after all, is finding the courage to open yourself up, letting your heart be ripped to pieces, and then taping it back together to try again, and the entirety of Bury Me at Makeout Creek duly acknowledges this from a distinctly Asian, female perspective.
Both of these women are bringing new aspects of Asian femininity to light, illuminating Asian womanhood to exist outside the space of tired sex-object/geisha-girl fetishization, that we are rightfully the ones with the prerogative to shape our own sexualities and emotional ties. Mitski and K Rizz are showing the world the radical presentation of Asian women as sentient humans with incredible self-determination.