Why did Joni Mitchell say she “didn’t like music”?
Malka Marom, the musician and journalist, first stumbled upon Joni Mitchell’s music in a late night cafe in Canada. Mitchell sat on stage, tuning her guitar, tapping into a sound exclusive only to her.
Marom knew the moment that Mitchell started playing she was going to be something special. Her music was laced with both pain and beauty, as she seemed to reconcile with feelings of despair but also provide hope. Not to mention, her use of vocal pitch and time signatures was unlike anything that people had heard prior.
Marom was such a fan that she persuaded one of her friends from a record label to come and watch Mitchell. He turned up to the same cafe a few weeks later, but didn’t seem to hear what Mitchell was trying to play (and what moved Marom so deeply). The record label executive got up to leave before Mitchell had even finished, deciding the evening had been a waste of time and Mitchell was never going to be a famous musician.
“By the time Joni played ‘Night in the City’, he had no ears to hear her,” said Marom. “’This singer has no stage presence, she’ll amount to nothing’, he declared in a whisper, then left in the middle of her set.”
While we now recognise Joni Mitchell as one of the greatest musical and lyrical talents in the world, her career has been laced with pushback comparable to this record label executive who came to the cafe that night. Her unique style of playing is what makes her so special, people struggle to tap into the same versatility and exciting musical style that she brandished so easily. When talking of her sonic majesty, David Crosby highlighted her talent, saying she was an artist completely separate from everyone else in her brilliance.
“[She was] like a band in the way you approach a chord and string the melody along. She was so new and fresh with how she approached it,” he said, “It’s these odd tunings that have tripped up thousands of artists trying to figure out how to get ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ to sound like her ‘Big Yellow Taxi’.”
While Joni Mitchell was able to display her exciting style of music, it didn’t come without receiving a lot of pushback from the record labels she was working with first. Mitchell grew tired of labels and music executives constantly trying to change art to be more chart friendly, and it led to her developing a real disdain towards music. When Mitchell said that she didn’t like music, she didn’t literally mean that the sound of it disgusted her, rather, she hated the fact that a lot of the finished products we wind up hearing is different from what the artist originally intended. Which, in essence, nullifies the point of art.
“For 20 years I’ve been told I’m not good,” she said, “You deliver a project with great enthusiasm and then you run into a hostile press, a stupid press… Once they found out I didn’t like music, then, to their delight, all they wanted out of me was to diss on everybody.”
Mitchell continued, talking about how the relationship that an artist has with their art has changed in the face of corporations crunching numbers and chasing trends. “The relationship between the musician and their muse has been usurped by an intermediary who is calculating demographics and polls,” she said, “I saw one girl, a 14-year-old with a brand new bosom, and she shoved it at the camera and said ‘I want to get my music to the world’ and I thought, there is no muse in this…These are not creative people, these are created people.”
When Joni Mitchell said she didn’t like music, it was more a reflection on the manipulation of music as opposed to the art form itself. This is a problem which has persistently pissed off creatives for decades and continues to be an issue in the modern age.
