The singer who killed music, according to Joni Mitchell: “Knocked the importance of talent out of the arena”
The music industry has completely transformed since Joni Mitchell first ventured into it in the 1960s.
Somewhere between the birth of MTV and the advent of social media, marketing became almost as important as the music itself. Being a talented songwriter isn’t quite enough anymore, if it ever was. Now, you have to maintain an online presence and master the TikTok algorithm, pitch to Spotify for playlisting and put up with minimal payment in return.
You have to forge networks in hopes that an industry professional will take notice. And on and on. Alas, this was coming from a mile off, as Hunter S Thompson joked long before social media, “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”
The situation for budding musicians is dire, and Mitchell saw this moment on the horizon like a weather reporter on the international date line sees tomorrow’s forecast. The songwriter largely managed to escape the increasing commercialisation of the industry, even quitting for a short while due to her dislike for it, but she was still outspoken about the issues she saw ensuing.
She penned songs about the increasing superficiality of show business and littered her interviews with comments about record labels prioritising sales over talent. In fact, she was so firm in her stance on all this, she was even able to pinpoint the one sorry artist who she saw as the sordid tipping point.
In one interview, Mitchell took aim at one artist in particular who she saw as knocking “the importance of talent out of the arena”: Madonna. The folk songwriter described the popstar as “manufactured” while speaking with W Magazine in 2002, suggesting that she had “made a lot of money and become the biggest star in the world by hiring the right people.”
Madonna certainly prioritised her accompanying visuals and image far more than Mitchell ever saw necessary. From her elaborate on-stage costumes to her ambitious music videos, Madonna’s success didn’t spawn just from the quality of her music but from the genius marketing strategies she surrounded it with. She caused a stir with the controversial music video for ‘Like A Prayer’ in the late 1980s, for example. In fact, Paul McCartney compared them to “a fairly average porn movie”.
Yet, Mitchell may well have taken her criticism to a troubling extreme when she said, “She’s got that whore-Madonna thing built-in [laughs]. She’s like a living Barbie doll but a little bit on the blue side. There’s always been that type of female. There’s always been a market for it, but the danger is that she thinks she’s a role model. And it’s a terrible role model. It’s death to all things real.”
While many audiences and critics were stunned by Madonna’s catchy music and the visuals that surrounded them, Mitchell was less than impressed. Madonna’s artistic interests were completely unaligned with her own. While Mitchell looked to prioritise the original and the authentic, penning vulnerable folk songs straight from the heart, Madonna made herself into a cultural icon.
Mitchell often criticised the popstar, usually concerning her manufactured image and her take on feminism, some of it justified and some of it verging on downright nasty. The popstar certainly serves as an example of the commodification of music, a star born out of the music video era who, perhaps, achieved more success as a result of “hiring the right people,” but she wasn’t necessarily undermining talent in the industry.
Her creations were certainly at odds with the emotional folk meanderings penned by Mitchell, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t talented. Beneath the excessive visuals and production, Madonna had an undeniable talent for penning captivating pop tracks. Tracks like ‘Hung Up’ and ‘Material Girl’ remain some of the most iconic and influential works in the genre, while her accompanying marketing techniques set the standards for the industry that would follow.
Mitchell’s complaints about the changing industry are certainly valid. Perhaps it was a better place before the advent of MTV and social media, and perhaps talent has taken a backseat to profits in recent decades, but Madonna didn’t necessarily drive this rhetoric.
She certainly had an impact on music marketing with her innovative approaches to music videos, but she was still a talented performer, as is proven by her longevity and legacy in the industry. Perhaps it was simply inevitable that the ‘industry’ side of the music industry would begin to eclipse the ‘music’ because that’s happened everywhere else, too. And maybe Madonna is just the guady scapegoat?
