Having
delved into the conceptual issues with NPR's list, I move now to the more
profane arena of music criticism. I now get to speak from the gut, engage in pure,
unexpurgated subjectivity, and promote my personal tastes. The fun part,
obviously, but also the most difficult. Listening to dozens of albums, old and
new, continuously for a few months, you descend into what I would call the fog of music, where everything
starts to blend into everything else and the faculty of judgment loses its
grip.
Be that
as it may, I am convinced that better judgments could have been made than what
we see in this list, and plan to argue for some of them, while being well aware
that such things are outside the realm of strict demonstration. In fact, I
shall generally cast aside not only proof or logic but critical consensus, to
say nothing of popularity. I don't really give a squawck if my opinions don't
conform to what professional music critics think; but since they are rarely
univocal in their ratings anyway I guess I stand to risk no more than siding
with a small minority. But I have, at least, reasons for my critical opinions, which I will not be shy about
offering.
Indeed,
this post, which I sincerely hope will be the next to last in the series (I'm a
bit exhausted, and have one or two other things to write about before I die)
will be limited to confronting the critical consensus on the list's #1 artist,
Joni Mitchell. I hasten to say that I have no intention of arguing that she
should not be Number One. A Joni Mitchell fan since her second album, I own
nearly every one from her first, Joni Mitchell (sometimes referred to as Song to a Seagull, words prominently seen on her artwork for
the album cover) through Wild Things Run Fast - somehow For the Roses and Mingus
have eluded me so far. No, if I had created the list a lot more of her albums
would be on it, displacing the numerous questionable choices I will mention in
my next post. My problem is with the particular albums that NPR chose to
represent her. So here goes.
*****
1 (Blue), 121 (Hejira). NPR stuck with the standard
consensus in selecting Blue and Hejira as Joni Mitchell's
greatest achievements. I demur on both accounts. I would demur even if it were
not the case that the list makes a de facto effort to represent an artist's
most important work, even though it
is a putative list of greatest work.
Since I think the two albums selected are neither her greatest nor her most
important work, this fine distinction does not change my point of view. I will
therefore present my heartfelt case that the choices should be Clouds
and The
Hissing of Summer Lawns.
I am aware of the
critical status of Blue – it is the pick of both of the other lists of albums by
women I referred to in previous posts, and consistently gets mentioned as the
album in which she really came into her own; see the album's Wikipedia page
for a long list of the honors it has received in lists of various sorts. Even
as I was writing this, along came the latest New York Review of Books with Mark Ford's review of David Yaffe's new
biography of Joni Mitchell, where Ford states: "The two highest points in
her career, it is generally agreed, are Blue
(1971) and Hejira (1976)..." Now,
to say it is "generally agreed" is not exactly to state a scientific
truth; and even if it were somehow a critical majority opinion, there are other
opinions to consider. Indeed, I think the "critical" praise for these
two albums says more about the critics than about Joni Mitchell's work:
it shows what they were looking for, more than what she was doing. In any case,
there has never been any doubt about what the critics say, selecting Blue
again and again for this type of praise, while her first three albums have not
been similarly recognized even once, to my knowledge. So that is what the
critics say, and now I get to say what I say, and happy to have the
opportunity.
But before I pursue this argument, let
me be clear: I hold Blue in as much reverence as any Joni Mitchell album, nearly
all of which through Don Juan's Reckless Daughter occupy
an emotional place for this singing-songwriting Parrot next to Dylan and hardly
anyone else. (And Shine, her latest 2007 effort which I
am only just familiarizing myself with, may be on track to join that group.) Blue
found its way to my stereo during a particularly melancholy part of my
sophomore year in college, and remains a sort of coronary tattoo,
its cover a kind of visual memory of a time when for me, as for Joni, romance
occupied an essential, and fairly disastrous, part of my existence. Be that as
it may, it would not be my pick as the greatest of her early albums.
Turning to Ford's review again, he
says that it was only with Blue "that Mitchell's voice,
music and words meshed to create a record that people still find they want to
listen to again and again". I don't know which people find that they don't want to listen again and again to Joni
Mitchell, Clouds or Ladies of the Canyon. If there are
such people then they have a very limited appreciation of the idiom in which
she was working at that time. All four of the albums are permanent milestones
and eminently listenable.
What distinguishes Blue
from what came before? It is not the first time she performs some of her songs
on the piano; that would be Ladies of the Canyon, which would be
another fine choice for the list, having several of her most well-known songs
and introducing her keyboard work. But the keyboard arrangements on Blue
are more confident and somewhat more complex; they have a more contemporary
sound (listen to the out-of-key fills in "My Old Man" for example), and hint at what Kate Bush and Tori Amos would be doing many years later. But
while her keyboard work is creative and appealing, Laura Nyro had quite
brilliantly sailed that ship already, so I wouldn't call it pathbreaking.
Moreover, as a kind of side effect perhaps, the guitar arrangements on both Ladies
of the Canyon and Blue do not have quite the poignance
of those on the earlier albums, especially Clouds; the voicings and picking
style sound more standard even if the tunings are not. Of course the dulcimer adds
a nice new sonority, but this would not make the album stand out.
As for her vocals, they seemed to me
quite mature even on Joni Mitchell - say, in "Night
in the City" or "Marcie" - and neither lose nor gain much
subsequently, though they do change. There is a bit more bottom to them on Blue,
but the difference is not dramatic (listen closely to her a Capella vocals on
"The Fiddle and the Drum" on Clouds, they do not lack sonority in
the lower range) and in any case her earlier soprano was clear and strong
enough for her style of music. By comparison, on Kate Bush's 1978 albums she
sounds like a squeaky toy compared with her vocals on 1980's Never
For Ever. I can hear no such qualitative change in Mitchell's voice.
Pointing to her smoking cigarettes as a cause of improvement, as Ford does,
seems to me a bit perverse, aside from lacking evidence – the cause was probably
age and hormones, not tobacco. (On Shine, on the other hand, I suspect
we are hearing the throaty effects of a life of cigarette-smoking, rather than,
as in Dylan's case, the results of poor vocal training.)
There is one very significant musical
difference on Blue, something I would characterize as a new sense of freedom
in how she matches the melodic lines to the lyrics. I suspect that this is part
of what garners the critical attention, though if so it is rarely stated. (In
fact, music critic Stephen Holden seems to interpret it as a defect of her later
work, as we shall see below.) This is an important feature that will only fully
flower by 1975, on The Hissing of Summer Lawns; but the roots are in songs like
"California", "River" and especially "The Last Time I
Saw Richard" on Blue. I think this was an important
and positive development, and one of the strongest arguments for the virtues of
Blue;
but it characterizes only a few of the later songs on the album.
Next, there is the so-called
"confessional" aspect of the songwriting, which Mitchell herself has
questioned, though she does not question the transparency of the emotions it
captures. Oddly, this same emotional transparency is sometimes considered a key
virtue of much later, and different, albums by women, such as Erykah Badu's Baduism
and Beyoncé's Lemonade. I'm not sure if this sort of praise is a
male-sponsored demand for women to shed everything, skin included, or a female-sponsored
cry of "Yeah, she really told them
where it's at". But whatever the basis for this alleged virtue, I am not
convinced that it is in any way better than plain, honest, poetic songwriting,
as found on practically all of Mitchell's work. So, whether you call it
"confessional" or transparent or whatever, I don't buy the idea that
this is some sort of overriding virtue of Blue.
Lastly, there is sometimes an allusion
to technical improvements in the recording techniques. Ford says something about
her having "entered Studio C at A&M Studios in Hollywood to record Blue" as if this had some technical
importance. I don't know what that would be; she used the same engineer as
before, Henry Lewy, and the capabilities of the studio count for very little in
the relatively simple arrangements that she used in those days.
Now let's talk about Clouds
for a minute. Put the record on, and it does not take 30 seconds to hear that
this is something completely new, different, almost revolutionary. Nobody in 1969 was writing acoustic
songs with the dissonant, complex chords that announce the song "Tin Angel"
– unless it was Joni herself, in "I Had a King" on Joni
Mitchell. Nobody was picking a guitar the way she does. It was not
simply the alternate tunings, which she had picked up from David Crosby, though
she immediately puts these to completely different uses than anyone before her.
But the style of guitar picking itself is new. If there is something like a Merle
Travis picking style going on, it is so radically modified that it cannot be
classified as anything but Mitchell-style. After playing the opening arpeggio
of "Tin Angel", she announces the end of a phrase by repeating the
final chord, just for emotional effect; this repetition is ramified throughout
the album, the use of repetition on "Roses Blue" being particular
dramatic. She varies the direction, timing and voicing of the picking, all in
contrast to traditional fingerstyle methods. The combination of a new harmonic vocabulary
and a completely personalized guitar style to match have the effect of ringing
in a new kind of acoustic music. This accomplishment, I believe, is not matched
by anything on Blue.
As for songwriting, Clouds
has two of her best, most famous and most widely covered songs, "Both Sides
Now" and "Chelsea Morning" (the first of which proved quite
important to the career of Judy Collins). While at least half the songs on Blue
have the feel of familiar tunes for Joni Mitchell fans, only "Carey"
is really in the same class as not only poetic and deep but having an irresistible
hook. The lyrics to both the "hits" on Clouds are
extraordinarily poetic and unpretentiously philosophical, as well as
emotionally true; the melodic lines are somehow complex while still having
immediate appeal. Those two songs are in no sense uniquely accessible, as songs
like "I Don't Know Where I Stand" and "The Gallery" leave
nothing to be desired. But it is the sense of innovation, of going outside
normal expectations, that gives the album its unique quality. Not only
"Tin Angel", with its aptly handled dissonances, but "Songs to Aging
Children Come", which adds unusual vocal overdubs, and in particular the
amazing piece of poetry-psychology-social criticism "Roses Blue". The
album as a whole is a major landmark in songwriting.
Mitchell herself has referred to what
she was doing then as a kind of "art song", and while their harmonic
and melodic complexity might not compare with the Lieder of Schubert or Schumann, or even with the jazz inflected
idioms of the Great American Songbook, for the medium of voice and acoustic
guitar it was revolutionary. Her guitar in Clouds speaks through careful
arrangements that are each completely unique and designed to match the rhythms
and emotions of the lyrics. I would say no less of her first album, and it is a slim edge that makes Clouds the better choice.
The song that really decides the day is "Roses Blue", where a
relatively simple melodic line becomes a formal and emotional knockout. The
song takes aim at a trend in the women's movement that tended to legitimize
dubious mystical ideas as if their very unscientific character were somehow a
suppressed feminist narrative. (We can see where the anti-scientific bias manifested
in that ideology leads today.) One of my contentions about the list has been
that albums which have particular resonance (I hate that word, but whatever)
with respect to the liberation of women should have a preferred place - or
rather, that the criteria for including and rating albums should include this
consideration, certainly over ordinary Billboard chart positions, perhaps over
some aesthetic considerations as well. That doesn't mean they have to be
women's liberation anthems, just that they should have a place in the
conversation. "Roses Blue" certainly has it. Though Robert Christgau
mentioned this song as a high point in his review of the album, I worry that
too many people overlook it as just a song about an offbeat friend. It's a
devastating piece of social observation, with a sonority that no one had ever
heard before in an acoustic guitar part. For anyone who wants to listen, this
is a kicker that has no obvious match on Blue or anywhere else.
To put it bluntly, Blue
was a safe choice, not only today but when it came out: a way to recognize Joni
Mitchell's unique contribution to popular music up to that time without having
to deal with the sometimes harsh but seriously innovative aesthetics of Clouds.
I suspect that critics would similarly latch on to Court and Spark, another
gorgeous but relatively safe album, to represent her later style, had not the
intermediate option of Hejira appeared.
*****
Well, enough said about that; I know I
am fighting a tidal wave of critical opinion about Blue, an album I love and
revere anyway, but not as much as Clouds. More
disturbing is the supposedly settled critical consensus on Hejira, which would not
be my pick of later Joni Mitchell albums by a long shot. While I have come to
like it overall, this album has none of my favorite songs of hers. The best
song on the album is the famous "Coyote", but for me, the re-used
metaphor "prisoner of the white lines of the freeway" feels less
sincere than in Merle Haggard's "White Line Fever", written 6 years
earlier. (I don't understand why Ford "was surprised to learn" that
the album was "largely written... while Mitchell was revved up on
cocaine". Did he not get it?)
The second best song is probably "Song
for Sharon", and it succeeds precisely because it re-uses ideas from
"Shades of Scarlet Conquering", which I take to be one of the
greatest recorded compositions in popular music and the high point among the
10,000-foot peaks of The Hissing of Summer Lawns. The
original elements in "Song for Sharon" are not really to my taste,
including some of the chord changes and the chorus of "De de de
de de.."
As for the rest of the songs on Hejira, while they have
something of that Joni Mitchell flair, not one stands up to the best material
on The
Hissing of Summer Lawns: "In France They Kiss on Main
Street", "The Jungle Line", "Edith and the Kingpin",
"Don't Interrupt the Sorrow", the title track and "Harry's
House", as well as the aforementioned masterpiece, are all better than all the other songs on Hejira.
(I will grant, not to be completely one-sided, that the appealing "Blue
Motel Room" is a much better take on the blues than
"Centerpiece", the attachment to "Harry's House"; but the
latter is a cover anyway.) Lastly, allow me as an acoustic guitarist to object
to the general quality of the guitar sound on Hejira; without trying to
research it, I'm going to guess she was using a plugged-in Ovation or else an
acoustic with a cheap pickup rather than miking a good acoustic. This has
worked well on many recordings, but here I find the guitar sound tinny and
lacking in the sparkle a good acoustic guitar can bring to a song.
The Hissing of Summer Lawns sounds
entirely fresh more than 40 years later. Perhaps her incorporation of African
rhythms in "The Jungle Line"
has something to do with that, as artists from the Talking Heads and
Paul Simon to Vampire Weekend and other contemporary groups followed her lead.
The superior work of Tom Scott and the L.A. Express also has to be mentioned as
a virtue of this album. Finally, tracks like "The Jungle Line" and
"Shadows and Light" present her more experimental side, something not
strongly in evidence since Clouds, and especially welcome in
the context of the super-strong set of jazzrock songs.
The devaluing of The Hissing of Summer Lawns
when it first came out was a monumental misjudgment of popular music criticism.
Stephen Holden, after liberally praising Mitchell's lyrics on the album in a Rolling Stone review, represented the
common view when he intoned:
If The
Hissing of Summer Lawns offers substantial literature, it is set to
insubstantial music. There are no tunes to speak of. Since Blue, Mitchell's
interest in melody has become increasingly eccentric, and she has relied more
and more on lyrics and elaborate production...
Four members of Tom Scott's L.A.
Express are featured on Hissing,
but their uninspired jazz-rock style completely opposes Mitchell's romantic
style. Always distinctly modal, Mitchell's tunes for the first time often lack
harmonic focus. They are free-form in the most self-indulgent sense, i.e., they
exist only to carry the lyrics. With the exceptions of "Shades of Scarlet
Conquering" and "Sweet Bird," neither of which boasts a strong
tune but at least have appropriately lovely textures, the arrangements are as
pretentiously chic as they are boring.
A
retraction by Holden would at least mean he wouldn't have to carry the stigma of these
tasteless comments to the grave. As I noted above, there is a newfound sense of freedom,
beginning in the latter part of Blue, in setting the lyrics to
music; that is literally the only grain of truth in the whole absurd diatribe.
It counts as a virtue, not a defect, of this kind of writing that it is relatively
liberated from regular metrical coupling while remaining highly melodic. As for
writing a tune, anybody who can't sing most of the songs on The
Hissing of Summer Lawns while walking down the street does not have an
ear, much less a voice. The fact that she could write tunes, from Blue
on, is sufficiently demonstrated by "Carey", "River",
"Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire", "You Turn Me On I'm a
Radio", "Help Me", "A Free Man in Paris", "Raised
on Robbery", and others if you care to listen. Appreciating the melody of "In
France They Kiss on Main Street", "Shades of Scarlet Conquering"
and other songs from this period requires having an ear that can take in more
than a couple of bars at a time. To say it is not melody is like saying that
Mahler didn't write melodies. Failure to appreciate them is in the ear of the
beholder, not the skill of the composer. As for the putdown of the L.A. Express,
since the album practically invented
"jazzrock" it is worth asking what Holden would take to be
"inspired" jazzrock.
Most critics neither appreciated nor
understood the album any more than Holden. Many reacted to the critical social
portraits in the lyrics as if their bright-eyed Woodstock child had become
jaded, the sensitive lovesick girl of "Help Me" suddenly developed a
backbone – a reaction they never had to Dylan's endless trail of caustic
personal and social criticism. As "Roses Blue" and many other
compositions show, this was the same Joni Mitchell. The new
material speaks of the same type of emotional struggles in the third person as
some of her earlier material does in the first person, which is really just a
poetic choice, not a change of personality.
Moreover, after all she did for
contemporary music, you would think that critics would have noticed that in the
same year she and Steely Dan (Katy Lied, 1975) perfected a new art
form, building on their earlier nascent efforts in jazzrock. The opposite was
sadly the case, as critical opinion shied away from the rich new sonorities; as
if the Crosby, Stills and Nash sound were going to define music forever. In
retrospect, this just was the "rock" side of the fusion experiments
that had been going on in jazz, where critics were not so dismissive of innovation
and new sounds.
While the critics were busy panning
the album, which hit the cutoff racks pretty quickly, my two musician brothers
and I were playing it daily from almost the moment it came out. And among
musicians, at least, we were not alone. Consider the continuation of the first
quote from the Ford review above: "...but for Prince, an early fan and
later ardent friend, it was The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975)
that stood out as her greatest achievement." Okay, glad that that was
preserved for posterity. Next, please read the following from Elvis Costello's
2004 Vanity Fair article and
interview with Mitchell, posted on her web site:
E.C.
...The sophisticated life you wrote about in "Free Man in Paris" and
'People's Parties" was not exactly everyone's experience... The very next
record you did was, in my opinion, the masterpiece of that time.
J.M. What is it?
E.C. The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Suddenly you are talking about the isolation of wealth: "She patrols that fence of his / To a Latin drum…." And for some reason the release of this marvelous record marked a critical fracture and a break in the commercial continuity of your career. However, I think that this accidentally liberated you.
J.M. When you reach that kind of successful pinnacle, it is the nature of the business and the press and everything that they go about tearing you down.
J.M. What is it?
E.C. The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Suddenly you are talking about the isolation of wealth: "She patrols that fence of his / To a Latin drum…." And for some reason the release of this marvelous record marked a critical fracture and a break in the commercial continuity of your career. However, I think that this accidentally liberated you.
J.M. When you reach that kind of successful pinnacle, it is the nature of the business and the press and everything that they go about tearing you down.
So for
at least two musicians whose opinion we would tend to respect, The
Hissing of Summer Lawns outshines Hejira and everything else of that
time. You can also take a look at the Pitchfork review for references to Björk and
Julia Holter praising "The Jungle Line". Seems like quite a few
musicians "get it" about this album.
The British are typically more
attracted than Americans to popular music that contains experimental elements –
witness the comparative popularity of Kate Bush in England and the U.S. Thus in
Alex Macpherson's celebration of Mitchell's 70th birthday in his music blog for The Guardian, after duly referring to Blue as "Mitchell's
1971 masterpiece", he then identifies The Hissing of Summer Lawns as
"my personal favorite of her albums". According to the album's Wikipedia entry, British music journalist Howard
Sounes, in a review from 2006, "has called The Hissing of Summer Lawns
Mitchell's masterpiece, 'an LP to stand alongside Blood on the Tracks'".
Author and music journalist David Bennun begins his 40th-year retrospective
with the line, "Nobody has ever made an album like this," which he
repeats later in the essay. "It doesn’t really matter whether The
Hissing Of Summer Lawns is Mitchell’s best album" he continues. "What
does matter is that anyone who thrills to, say, Blue, as well they
might, may find this even more thrilling if they’ve yet to hear it." My
favorite line from the review, though, is his irreverent characterization of
the irreverence with which Mitchell stepped over the line in the late 1970's: "People
think Bowie, or Prince, were daring. People are right. But Mitchell risked
everything, and lost much of it, and a fuck she did not give." I'm not
absolutely sure that she was unconcerned about the loss of popularity after Mingus,
but I am sure that her departure from the folk-pop mainstream beginning with The
Hissing of Summer Lawns was one of the most courageous turns any
songwriter, male or female, has ever taken; and considering that it was also
one of the most musically successful, more's the pity that NPR chose to
overlook it and stay with the safe choice.
Winston Cook-Wilson, the author of the
Pitchfork review mentioned above, is from Brooklyn, not Britain; he sums up the
album with this oversophisticated comment: "The Hissing of Summer Lawns was one
of the earliest and most high-profile albums by a major pop artist—certainly by
a female one—to theorize what a distinctly avant-garde-informed pop music might
sound like. Its musical vocabulary—as well as its lyrical one—fell
magnificently between acoustic realism and symbolic fantasy." Ahem – I'd
settle for, "It's a great, deep, important album in every possible
way." But he too recognizes its pathbreaking nature. Perhaps American
opinion is glacially moving away from Holden's myopic review.
*****
Now, having said all that, the
question of which two albums were chosen by NPR is perhaps less important than
the fact that at least Joni Mitchell, Clouds, Ladies of the Canyon, Blue,
Court
and Spark, The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira all belong on the list in place of quite
a few of the albums now on it; the choice of two is just a nod in the direction
of "fairness" to lesser artists. Fairness to artists is not what a
"greatest albums" list is about, so the omission of the other Joni
Mitchell albums is inappropriate. (If the "150 greatest albums made by men" includes half a dozen Dylan albums, 10 Beatles albums, 8 Led Zeppelin albums, etc. then tough luck for all those artists with very good albums that just aren't that good.) It would have made more sense to create a
list of "Greatest Female Recording Artists", to be represented by one
album each, but that is not what was done. Taking the list on its own terms,
you could get rid of most of the contemporary singer-songwriter albums (Joanna
Newsom, Gillian Welch, Ani DiFranco, Iris Dement, etc.), to say nothing of a
lot of popular trash, and replace them with any of these and the quality of the
list would be improved.
This ends my effort to correct the
injustices of history with regard to the critical evaluation of Joni Mitchell albums. I agree,
there are more important things to debate in the world, like how to end war and
poverty and racism. But I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to have my say
on this, and post it on the world's bulletin board. In my next installment I
will offer my reactions to the rest of the list, in much less detail (or the
world's bulletin board will run out of space).