Joni Mitchell’s Reckless Drift

People liked it when Joni Mitchell changed. She had always changed. The Hissing of Summer Lawns made sense in that way, as a kind of departure that didn’t feel like escape. It was praised, mostly. Artistic growth. Personal evolution. That sort of thing.Then Hejira came. It was less loved, but still understood. There were broader structures, jazz textures, lyrics that became less declarative. Mitchell was turning inward. That was the signal. The listener had to follow, or not.Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter is the sound of getting lost. Or staying lost. A double album that wanders. The songs are long, some more than ten minutes. There are chords struck and held, left hanging like unsent letters. She sings over them. Not quite melody. Not quite meditation. There is Jaco Pastorius. Wayne Shorter. John Guerin. Their job is to find shape in the murk. Sometimes they almost do.The lyrics are impressionistic. That word is polite. What they really are is scattered. Images with no center. Ideas that don’t argue, just drift past. The poet has rights, they’ll say. Poets can do anything. But this isn't poetry, not really. It is a kind of posture. An affect. Something performed.She touches on things that matter. Weariness. Freedom. Sex and age. But nothing connects. No hooks, no phrases you remember later. No way in. What she offers is not music in the usual sense. It’s art. That’s the claim. The capital-A kind. And the paradox is that she loses the craft in reaching for it.There was a time when she was precise. When she built songs that held. But now the line between artful and arty is crossed and blurred. She’s among those who’ve come to believe their importance entitles them to indulgence. Lennon. Yes. Others.It is not failure. But it is not connection, either.

JONI MITCHELL COMPLAINS TOO MUCH

Brilliant as she can be—let’s not deny Joni Mitchell her due, she’s a prodigy and a provocateur—she’s also responsible for a catalog that, in equal measure, feels half-baked, overwrought, and, yes, pretentious with a capital “P.” You see, she wears that “genius” label like an overzealous badge, brandishing it with a self-consciousness that would make even Dylan wince—Dylan, who’s made a career out of mythologizing himself, yet has the decency to flinch at such a moniker. Mitchell’s notorious complaint about Dylan’s supposed lack of authenticity is a riddle wrapped in irony, since the very concept of “art” is rooted in artifice—let’s not forget, the word “artist” itself stems from “artificer,” the craftsman, the constructor, the one who lends a touch of the unnatural to the natural. But here is Mitchell, bemoaning authenticity as if she’s forgotten that she, Simon, Dylan, and Cohen—the poet-songwriters of the Sixties—were, at their core, fabulists, fabricators, spinning tales from the threads of their own feelings, politics, and personal histories in pursuit of a memorable phrase, a piercing insight, a story worth telling. Authenticity, I submit, has less to do with the artist’s raw emotion than with the effect conjured in the listener. Mitchell’s perennial grousing—her famous crankiness—has become a tiresome refrain, a dirge that plods along with the regularity of a metronome.

She demands—almost pleads—to be taken seriously as a musical artist, issuing albums that seem engineered to pummel the listener into acquiescence. Her excursions into art song, serial music, jazz, and a surrealist strain of feminism yield results as varied and unpredictable as a bowl of leftovers. The fatal defect in these ambitious undertakings is that their most egregious moments are so self-important, so precious, they overshadow any spark of innovation. Mitchell’s persistent arrogance and lingering bitterness leave a metallic tang in the mouth. Still, her fans have admired her restless drive to reinvent herself, so my initial response to The Hissing of Summer Lawns was one of cautious optimism, applauding its bold leap toward personal and artistic evolution. Yet, while Hissing and the less successful Hejira saw Mitchell testing broader song structures, more impressionistic lyrics, and jazz textures, her quest for a distinctive voice gradually erected walls between her and her audience. With Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, a sprawling double album, Mitchell gathers the ground won by her previous records only to scatter it in a jumble of half-realized notions.

The lyrics are impressionistic, yes, but hardly impressive—a collage of images, cryptic allusions, and wan revelations that cry out for editorial mercy. Mitchell comes off like a whispering Imagist draped in the vestments of a Confessional Poet. Perhaps she’s spilled all her secrets in the most evocative language she could muster—or, worse, forgotten what she meant to reveal. Writing that’s elliptical by habit breeds lyrics that even the author may struggle to decipher. The spotlight is fixed on jazz modernism, with some tracks stretching past ten minutes, meandering through Mitchell’s shadowy piano chords. She finds a strident chord and lets it linger, musing aloud as her side men—Jaco Pastorius and Wayne Shorter from Weather Report, plus John Guerin—strive to impose some shape on the proceedings. Her defenders protest: “A poet may speak as she pleases!” But parsing Reckless Daughter for meaning is a fool’s errand. Mitchell touches on themes—spiritual exhaustion, the weight of freedom, sexuality in middle age—that might resonate, but she offers precious few hooks, catchphrases, or familiar footholds. Instead, she serves up “Art,” capital A, indifferent to whether her audience savors it. The paradox: in her pursuit of “Art,” she’s jettisoned craft, evolving from an artful songwriter to someone simply arty—a fate that befalls public figures too enamored of their own legend. In this, Mitchell has joined the company of John Lennon, Yes, and other luminaries who’ve developed a taste for their own mythology.

With Mingus, her next album, we’re left to admire Mitchell’s readiness to stray from the chatty confessionalism that made her famous and reach for something resembling high artistry. “Arty” remains the operative word, as her ambition outstrips her skill. There’s a whiff of the amateur, the dilettante hammering away at the piano, hoping boldness will suffice. But Joni Mitchell is no Mingus—neither as composer, nor musician, nor artist—and one hopes she doesn’t fancy herself his equal, for no one is. I have no quarrel with established artists seeking new terrain to “advance their art,” but I do object to dabbling in genres—like the moody expressionism of jazz—where one is clearly out of depth. To be fair, the music and lyrics cohere somewhat better here than on Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter (that abyss of amorphous atonality and free-associative lyrics that communicate little), but the core issue persists: Mitchell is not a jazz singer. Her voice—thin, reedy, pale—never ignites when it ought to blaze with color. You find yourself yearning for Annie Ross or Patti Waters. As a tribute to the late Charles Mingus, the album falls short. The inter-song snippets—Mingus reflecting on mortality—add scant depth to an already patchwork offering, alternating between brilliance and the half-baked. The whole affair, alas, carries more than a hint of tackiness.

 

Complainer

The Guardian on Facebook:

Brilliant as she has been , Joni Mitchell has also had made nearly as much music that is, shall we say, in equal measures underwritten, bombastic, pretentious, just plain pretentious. She coveted the sobriquet "genius" more conspicuously than any pop star I can remember--even self mythologizer Dylan rejects the
application of the word to his name and has suggested , in a sense, that his
most arde 

Mitchell is an intelligent artist, but she is sorely lacking at times in subtler ways of looking at things; there are some things that are obvious to others that simply hasn't the humility to make note of. She complains of Dylan's lack of authenticity when the whole notion of art and being an artist is based in large part on creating things that are inauthentic; the very words "art" and "artist" are intrinsically linked with the word artificer, a term that means, in general, some designed, made by hand, an unnatural addition to what is already in place. She bemoans the lack of authenticity and forgets, perhaps, that she, Simon, Dylan and Leonard Cohen, poet-songwriters of the Sixties, were storytellers more than anything, fictionalizing their feelings, their politics, their biographies in the interest of a good yard, a good line, a good insight. Authenticity , I would argue , has more to do with feeling that a writer succeeds in creating, not the emotion he or she in fact feels. She is grumpy, to be sure, but this will not suffice as a justification for her ire. She is famous and cranky and frankly it's a tedious dirge she replays every chance she gets.

nt fans should get lives beyond their record collection--and she has produced albums that have tried to force the issue. Her stabs at art song, serial music , jazz material , and feminist surrealist have given us mixed results at best. The fatal flaw in these ambitious efforts were that the worst elements of them were so impossibly precious and self important that they summarily dwarfed what fresh ideas she might have had at the time. Her on going arrogance and bitterness leaves a bad taste.