The 1950s genre Joni Mitchell said is gone forever: “A certain joy went out”
Joni Mitchell wasn’t a fan of being pigeonholed every time she made a new record.
The entire point of being an artist was to keep changing with the times, and every time Mitchell released a new record, her fans were seeing a different side of her than the mild-mannered guitarist who gave everyone ‘Both Sides Now’. She lived to move on to bigger and better things, and she was happy to leave some of the biggest genres of all time in the dust if it meant following her bliss on every record.
Because, as much as Mitchell is known as one of the queens of folk rock, that’s not exactly what she wanted out of life. She had the ability to craft some beautiful melodies and even write the kind of songs that wouldn’t have felt out of place being sung by members of Crosby, Stills, and Nash, but she felt that that version of her sound had been played out way too much by the time the 1960s ended.
The idealistic feeling of that decade had to face reality at some point, and when Mitchell started venturing outside of her wheelhouse, there were countless more interesting musicians for her to jam with every time she made a record. The LA Express knew exactly what she wanted whenever she made a new record, and by the time that she ventured into the jazz world, it was as if she had finally found the right kind of people who understood her.
She was the first to say that she wasn’t going to be as perfect as someone like Miles Davis, but she could at least find a way to make music that was a bit more complicated. She loved the idea of working with fusion artists whenever she could, and if her audience happened to have a problem with her becoming a bit more refined as she got older, she wasn’t about to roll over and apologise.
Everyone may have been looking at her to come back to rock and roll, but Mitchell was actually happy to see the genre fall by the wayside, saying, “People keep writing songs about how rock ‘n’ roll will never die. Well, rock ‘n’ roll died a long time ago. It never even made it into the ’60s. The roll went out of it. What died was the push beat, the remnant from swing and boogle-woogle. And when it died what was left was just rock—a more vertical beat. A certain joy went out of rock ‘n’ roll.”
That might sound sacrilegious for most rock and roll fans, but she does have a small point. The entire point of rock and roll was about still having that upbeat, danceable groove to everything, and even if there were many artists that were trying to bring that back in the 1970s, a lot of those were simple pastiches of what people like Little Richard and Elvis Presley had already done years before.
And she could definitely stand behind that mentality every time she talked about some of her favourite rock artists. She could still point out when she loved a great pop song like ‘You Get What You Give’, but when she talked about the greatest musicians in rock history, it always still came back to people like Chuck Berry kicking down the door for everyone, rather than the heaviness that Led Zeppelin were always working with.
Mitchell was never going to go back to traditional rock and roll, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, either. She could only make the music that was authentic to her before anyone else, and when you look at the way that she sang ‘Both Sides Now’ years after the fact, she seemed content with reinterpreting her songs through a more sophisticated lens than what traditional rock was supposed to be.
