The first pop artists Joni Mitchell fell in love with: “Something else”
Having experienced the musical landscape at some of its more pivotal moments, Joni Mitchell has learned a thing or two about perspective. As she once said, “If I experience any frustration, it’s the frustration of being misunderstood. But that’s what stardom is: a glamorous misunderstanding.”
As someone who has always followed her own instinct and vision, and disregarded everything it means to pander to commercial expectations, Mitchell’s sense of perspective has come from the countless times she’s been dismissed or misunderstood by her own audience or her peers, a reality that has taught her that, no matter the consequence, authenticity is always the best route to take.
For instance, once, during an interview with Cameron Crowe, she responded to an anecdote about two people in a record store passing up a purchase of her live record Miles of Ailes because it was too “jazz”. They bought a Cheap Trick album instead, and Mitchell once again reiterated her thoughts and views on authenticity and being misunderstood.
In her view, she explained, there are two options: you can stay in the same place and repurpose your own formula – the one that made you successful to begin with, or you can change, but people will still “crucify” you whichever route you take, so, all things considered, it’s best to change and stay true to yourself, because the outcome might be the same, but your dignity remains intact.
Mitchell has been misunderstood a fair few times throughout her career. After all, jazz ventures aside, a few people only realised the genius of masterpieces like Blue a hefty amount of years later, by which point it was easier to understand its legacy and impact because it was easier to connect it with its own societal and cultural contexts.
However, to understand Mitchell, to truly understand the mastermind behind the music, you have to understand what makes her tick, which includes digging into some of the heroes that inspired her before she was a pivotal figure in her own right, and when you get under the skin of those who shaped Mitchell’s voice and sound, that’s when you can experience her music the way it was intended.
In the same interview with Crowe, Mitchell shared some of these influences and the first records she ever bought. The first she ever bought was a classical piece called The Story of Three Loves, which she said used to “drive me crazy” every time it would come on the radio. However, the first pop music she fell in love with wasn’t what we’d call pop now, but that’s how she viewed them at the time.
“You see, pop music was something else in that time,” she said, recalling the times when she would dance to Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, Elvis Presley, and the Everly Brothers. However, she also said that this was before the landscape went through a “dumb vanilla” period that allowed folk to flourish – by which point, she bought an instrument and started to sing again.
Mitchell never intended to become the voice of a generation; she’d actually wanted to return to art school, but music became a different kind of sanctuary, one that eventually gave her her name and positioning as one of the most important voices in music history. Her main frustrations might have been being misunderstood, but sometimes those are the best artists: the ones whose art can be interpreted any which way, a breeding ground for endless exploration.
