“I don’t know why”: Joni Mitchell on the artist that wanted to break her legs
Music was never meant to be a competition between artists. Any people can find inspiration in their fellow artists and try to make something that’s on the exact same level, but the entire industry gets far too interested in pitting two people against each other rather than hearing about what their songs actually have to say. And while Joni Mitchell never cared for the sense of one-upmanship that came with her job, that didn’t mean that she didn’t get clapback from the other singer-songwriters on the scene.
Even though some competition makes sense in the context of genres like metal, it makes negative sense among singer-songwriters. Metal at least gives bands a target to aim at by seeing who can play the fastest or who has the biggest lung capacity to scream for the longest amount of time, but all great singer-songwriters are about telling a story, and there’s no point in trying to see who tells a story better if everyone’s individual experience is being measured.
And, realistically, was there anyone looking to compete with what Joni Mitchell could do with her songs? There’s no way to properly cover one of her songs because of how singular they are, and judging by the different open tunings that she was working with, it was more of a case of her trying to find new avenues to work in when she played rather than seeing it as a massive race between artists.
That kind of endless searching didn’t even have to be tied to strictly rock and roll. Mitchell never wanted to be in one musical category for the rest of her life, and her decision to move away from folk and into the realm of jazz on her later albums was one of the best decisions that she could have made, giving herself a much greater avenue to work in rather than having to be forced to play ‘Both Sides Now’ and ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ for the rest of her life.
“I always thought the women of song don’t get along…”
Joni Mitchell
However, the problem with most female artists is the need for them to be pitted against each other. The practice itself is usually a bit misogynistic when the bigwigs insist on there being only one female rocker for every generation, but looking at the other great artists who came out during the late 1960s, Mitchell felt a lot more ridicule when she was stepping into the same arena as Joan Baez.
Baez certainly had her fair share of credibility as one of the best folk singers on the scene and her ties to Bob Dylan, but when Mitchell talked about her own ascent, she remembered Baez looking at her with nothing but disdain, saying, “I always thought the women of song don’t get along, and I don’t know why that is. Joan Baez would have broken my leg if she could, or at least that’s the way it felt as a person coming out. I never felt that same sense of competition from men.”
Then again, that can also come down to the misogynistic practices at play when only a handful of female artists break through. The window of opportunity for the same tired, rebellious male figure in rock and roll is never going to go out of style, so when there are only limited options for the opposite sex, people like Baez, Mitchell, and Laura Nyro had to really go above and beyond in order to get noticed in any major capacity.
It’s not fair by any means, but it did turn Mitchell into one of the finest artists of her generation. While Baez may have been working alongside Dylan during his early years, Mitchell had the artistic depth and musical complexity to go far beyond anything that Mr Zimmerman could hope to do.
