Joni Mitchell honestly reviews every decade she’s lived through and how it impacted her
Some people underestimate the impact that the world can have on music. Joni Mitchell isn’t one of these people, as she fully understands how life and art mirror one another.
Art follows culture like a shadow. No matter what happens in the world, you will find that the music surrounding these instances will be a reflection of it. This has always been the case, as even now, when you look at the frustration that a lot of people feel towards societal and political problems, that feeling is perfectly reflected in how people make and perform music.
During an exclusive interview with Far Out, Graham Nash spoke about how he felt it was important for musicians to always be a reflection of the times that they live in. This means that art and culture have to work hand in hand because one has to be the perfect reflection of the other.
“I really still think every day about a quote by Nina Simone,” Nash reflected, “Who said ‘Every artist, whether you’re a songwriter or a piano player or a sculptor or a painter, you have to reflect the times in which we live’.”
He also said that he believes an artist’s ability to reflect the times in which they live is under threat. “Unfortunately, the Trump administration is trying to destroy that ability to be able to reflect the times in which we live,” he said, “because the times in which we live now, politically, is a huge part of our lives, and is gunna rule our lives for a long, long time.”
Joni Mitchell is another artist who has always been willing to write about politics and culture through her music. Every period of time that she has lived through, she has studied it and used the emotions she’s drawn from it when writing her lyrics. Whether things were good, a recession had hit, or presidents had been assassinated, the music that Mitchell was putting together conveyed the emotions she was experiencing and those that were being felt around the world.
Her life as an artist has given her interesting insight into different decades. She was on the frontline of culture and, therefore, developed a great understanding of how people felt and coped during different periods of time.
“The dirty ‘30s were hard times where I came from; it was the Dust Bowl. The ‘40s, they went straight from that into war,” said Mitchell, setting the stage for why people were so quick to celebrate and have fun in the ‘50s.
Things had been difficult for a lot of people, so the moment rock ‘n’ roll came into play, people were willing to latch onto it: “’50s was peace and prosperity and Leave It to Beaver and everything was nice, and I was an anti-intellectual, you know? It was like, let’s party, you know, let’s dance, let’s have fun. It was a kind of mindless free parade in a certain way,” she noted.
She spoke about how the ’60s, despite being a period of innovative music, were also confusing politically, as Kennedy was assassinated and a lot of people were turning to hallucinogens as escapism.
“Certainly, I would be surprised that people who took it, you know, even if you were urban born, did not come away from it with some kind of ecological feeling,” she said, adding, “In that way, the ‘60s I would say influenced me. There was a lot of phoniness, too. You know, under the banner of ‘We are all egoless and we love everybody’, this was not necessarily true, but at least it was a positive fad.”
Mitchell was incredibly critical of the ‘80s, most of all, as she said that this was her least favourite decade to live through, given that it represented a period when people stopped trying to be good and instead started trying to get rich. “In the ‘60s, we thought we could change the world, we were young, youth tends to think that. In the ‘70s we realised we couldn’t so we said okay let’s change ourselves,” she said.
She traced the change in attitude from the ’70s to the ’80s as a selfish turn, remarking, “By the end of the ‘70s, everybody realised they couldn’t do much about themselves either, so they said ‘Okay, we can’t change the world, we can’t change ourselves, let’s get rich’. So everybody just screwed the other guy for capital gain, and we had a horrible decade. The ‘80s were the worst decade I’ve ever lived through.”
Where culture goes, art follows like a shadow, heavy with the opinions and feelings of the people surrounding it. Nobody understands that better than generational musicians like Joni Mitchell.
