“Kiss my ass”: the song Joni Mitchell used to insult Rolling Stone
While Joni Mitchell was known for working socio-political themes into her lyrics and venting her frustrations with society, she rarely appeared to be outright angry in her songs. It’s hard to imagine her going off on a sweary tirade against anyone in her work, considering how deft her work usually is, and having distorted guitars is another thing that feels out of place in her work.
However, it has to be said that pissing off the queen of folk music was not a wise choice either. Because of her way with words, when she chose to lash out at her critics, she did so with a sense of decorum and wit that made it impossible for anyone to come out on top against her. Why anyone would want to rile up Mitchell in the first place is beyond me personally, but when one person slung an insult in her direction, she would make it a lifelong mission of hers to ensure that they didn’t live it down.
In 1971, shortly after the release of her timeless album Blue, Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner made the grave mistake of dubbing Mitchell the ‘Old Lady of the Year’ in an act of disrespect towards her talents. This undeniably misogynistic retort gave Mitchell all the ammunition she needed to launch a vendetta against Wenner, and in a number of interviews afterwards, she would ensure she held him accountable for his remarks.
In a 1978 interview with Mitchell, she said: “I have a personal grudge against mister Jann Wenner. He’s very irresponsible.” While she handled this with the utmost class, Wenner and Rolling Stone wouldn’t stop their salvo against the folk singer and continually slandered her in their publication for several more years. By the 1990s, Mitchell saw fit to end the feud by dealing the fatal blow in this exchange of insults and released a song that attempted to shut him up for good.
While her 1998 album, Taming the Tiger, isn’t exactly a diversion from the jazz-inflected folk she had been known for producing throughout her career, she switches things up a little when she takes aim at Wenner for his years of torment. On the decidedly rock-influenced song ‘Lead Balloon’, she delivers a character assassination so accurate that it would have been tricky for the magazine kingpin to recover from.
Opening with the line “‘Kiss my ass,’ I said / and I threw my drink,” Mitchell finally dishes out the big middle finger she’s been waiting to serve for over two decades to Wenner, and then “An angry man is just an angry man / But an angry woman, bitch,” is a great illustration of how his toxic masculinity has spent so many years being unquestioned. “It’s his town, and that went down like a lead balloon,” Mitchell repeats in the chorus, making fun of how the insults he published in his own publication weren’t well received.
After this act of brutality, Wenner seemingly kept schtum when it came to critiquing Mitchell ever again – and rightly so. While not her best song musically, it is undoubtedly one of her finest lyrical efforts and definitive proof that Mitchell isn’t someone you ever want to fuck with in a war of words.
