How Joni Mitchell’s “major heroes” shaped her music while being “monsters”
Separating the art from the artist is a conversation that gets heated. At each and every turn, it seems that idols always let us down with bad, or even downright evil, behaviour, and Joni Mitchell felt that.
The problem is, what do we do when those disappointing people always happen to be historically important? Even when we learn that the people we admire have done or said terrible things, it unfortunately doesn’t wipe away their impact. It can make you cut off any future connection, deciding to stop listening to their music or supporting their work, but it can’t instantly wipe the influence they might have had on you, your art or on the work of countless other artists.
Someone like Michael Jackson is a good example of this, as the horrific stories about his personal life undeniably taint his reputation, but they can’t erase the huge impact a record like Thriller has had on pop music ever since. Or when considering someone like Woody Allen, his disgusting behaviour and the call to boycott his career can’t go back in time and undo the way that something like Annie Hall altered comedy.
In those cases, the best we can do is be aware. If it is impossible to separate the art and the artist, or if the art’s impact is too looming to ignore, being aware of the moral lines is essential, or at least that’s what Joni Mitchell thought.
The confrontation that your hero might not be a good person is something she came up against over and over. “Most of my heroes are monsters, unfortunately, and they are men,” she said, owning up to the fact and stomaching it.
But again, that doesn’t erase the impact her heroes have had on her, not just with their own artwork inspiring hers, but helping shape her mindset as a creative. “If you separate their personalities from their art, Miles Davis and Picasso have always been my major heroes, because we have this one thing in common: They were restless,” she said.
In both cases, her examples were certainly not stand-up guys, or guys that the average person would ever admire if it wasn’t for their art. Picasso was a known and outright misogynist who claimed, “Women are machines for suffering”. He saw them as nothing but either “goddesses and doormats”, and only granted women he found attractive the tiniest amount of respect or even human decency. Miles Davis was a violent, abusive man who brutalised several partners. So on both counts, Mitchell’s biggest heroes and two of the biggest influences on her career were in no way role models.
However, both were artists who evolved, and for someone like Mitchell, that was hugely impactful. “Picasso was constantly searching and searching and changing and changing,” she said, adding, “Even I have favourite periods of Miles, but I would always go to see him, in any incarnation. Because he’s managed to keep alive.”
Following in their footsteps regarding creativity, and hopefully not morality, Mitchell’s career clearly took major pointers from that ever-changing mindset. Moving from tender folk into more experimental projects, including her own jazz phase to honour the influence of Davis and her favourite jazz artists, she too would be characterised as “restless”, but even she wishes that inspiration had come from more upstanding sources.
