The indelible protest anthem Joni Mitchell wrote about a provocative license plate
A riot in Los Angeles feels like an oxymoron to imagine. To the world, LA is the beacon of beauty. It’s Hollywood starlets, world-famous hotties, and plastic surgery-perfected housewives. While obviously not the reality for the huge communities of ‘normal people’ living in the city, the city of Angels is often thought of as the height of affluence and attractiveness – the hottest people living the best lives. But in 1992, when civil rest broke out, Joni Mitchell saw a splinter in its sexiness.
Decades before the Black Lives Matter protest of the 2020s, the Los Angeles riots in 1992 also sparked up as a reaction to racial injustice. In April, four police officers accused of using excessive force as they arrested and beat up Rodney King were acquitted despite openly joking about their violence. In response, unrest broke out. Outraged by the outcome, widespread looting, assault, and arson broke out that the police struggled to control.
It’s a destructive but also somewhat alluring scene. In Los Angeles, a city associated with riches, the image of communities rising up and fighting against institutional injustice is not only powerful, but attractive, magnetic almost. It feels like a movie scene of the people rising up against the power, and in LA, it would be a movie made right there and then.
Driving around her adopted home, preparing to relaunch her career as she continued to move between experimental eras, Joni Mitchell was fixated on the scenes she was seeing. As her work has always been made up of a series of real-life images from her world, codified with richer meaning, the images of these impassioned riots were deeply inspiring.
But what was especially inspiring, and especially attractive at that moment in time, was the idea printed on a car license plate in front of her. “I pulled up behind a car which had a license plate JUST ICE which was very provocative to me,” she said on the BBC’s The Late Show in 1994. At a time when her city was rioting and breaking out in violence all around in response to obvious racism, the desire for justice was hot and high and spelt out in front of her like that, on the perfectly American image of a car license plate on a Cadillac, there it was.
“I asked a lot of people what justice was – nobody seemed to know. This is a song about America and, in particular, Los Angeles at this particular time,” she explained, as the very idea of justice felt like a sexy and alluring mystery.
“I pulled up behind a Cadillac / We were waiting for the light / And I took a look at his license plate / It said “Just Ice” / Is justice just ice?” she sings on ‘Sex Kills’ as the image not only found its way into the song but prompted a whole spiral. The idea of justice was this gorgeous thing, but wasn’t that the problem? Wasn’t LA, America, the whole world simply being blinded by gorgeous things and ignoring the ugliness of evil under it? Caught up under the spell of ‘sex sells’ and being hypnotised by the marketing of beauty as a way to ignore the riot under it – Mitchell’s draw to this license plate seemed to represent all of that, breaking the spell as she snapped back to reality and to her burning, battling city.
“And the gas leaks / And the oil spills / And sex sells everything / And sex kills,” she sings, peeling back those layers as she endeavoured to look beyond what was provocative and see what was real instead.
