The only critic that Joni Mitchell has ever tried to impress: “I’m a fine artist working in a commercial arena”
Joni Mitchell lives in a very insular world, and a very public one in others. She has always famously struck a finite balance between these areas, of course, with the aspects of her life that fall into each being entirely up to her.
That’s a descriptive way of essentially saying that Mitchell has firmly always known her own mind and stuck by it, whether that has proven to be a positive or negative at various turns of her life. Every decision she has ever made has been made with her principles at the forefront of her mind, even when that has made her her own worst critic.
Yes, as much as Mitchell has been notoriously picky in the past about people artistically labelling her, there’s something honestly refreshing about her admission of knowing that she’s ultimately a pawn to the cultural world. That’s not a sign of a guilty conscience, to be clear. It’s just a basic fact of life for any musician, no matter who you are.
Naturally, chasing the highs of success is a motivation for anyone in that position, but they equally run the risk of being criticised for it at the same time. In Mitchell’s world, “I don’t know how to sell out,” she once said in 1986. “If I tried to sell out, I don’t think I could.” While that could come across as her trying to gloat that she was in a superior position to other artists, this is actually missing the point she was trying to make.
“By that, I mean to make an attempt to make a commercial record,” Mitchell explained. “I just make them and think, ‘If I was a kid, I would like this song.’ You have to have a certain amount of grab-ability initially, and then something that wears well that you’ll love for years to come. That’s what anything fine is. It’s recognised in painting. It’s not recognised [in music]. I’ve been working in a toss-away industry. I’m a fine artist working in a commercial arena. That’s my cross to bear.”
In a nutshell, Mitchell feels that she has no one else to depend on, disappoint, or delight other than herself with her work. The opinions of others, whether that be fans, critics, or random people who hear her music while passing in the street, do not matter so long as she is satisfied with herself.
If she isn’t happy, that’s a whole different story. There was perhaps a justifiable reason why she came to breed a resentment against the industry at large because of this. “For 20 years I’ve been told I’m not good,” she reflected, many years later. “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.”
These modes of criticism, whether they were aimed at herself or anyone else, were a clear source of the creative zest being sucked out of Mitchell’s soul. Her harshest critic had always been her own voice, but letting that be known to the world was the start of a whole new slippery landslide that she felt she couldn’t come back from.
Mitchell could be a victim of the warped perception that she was grumpy, difficult, and impossible to please in this respect. But does it change things to know that ultimately, this was all coming from inside her own head? A tortured genius laying her mark, this is a woman who can never be mistaken nor unpicked.
