The one genre Joni Mitchell thought no one should hear: “Contrived, false sexualness”
Joni Mitchell wasn’t the kind of artist that’s meant to fit into a specific box whenever she put out a new record.
She only wanted to play the kind of music that she loved, and even though there were tons of people willing to put her in the same category as the Bob Dylans and the Leonard Cohens of the world, she wasn’t going to be playing folk for the rest of her life. She had a lot more musical colours, but she knew when she needed to steer clear of the other shades that her contemporaries were doing.
Because when you look through a lot of her greatest moments onstage, it was never about following the same trends that everyone else was. She was happy to make the best music that she could and have her audience seek it out on their own, but even when she did have some major hits, ‘Help Me’ was on an album that didn’t exactly cater to whatever the pop market wanted in the 1970s.
She felt that the singles game wasn’t really relevant to her, and while she did find her own niche, it didn’t come without a bit of blowback. Her music wasn’t going to find the same audience as it did on Blue and Court and Spark once she started working with jazz musicians, and while Mingus was one of the finest records she ever made, she did it knowing that there was no one at the record company who would even bother caring about it.
But when the 1980s came in, pop music had already begun changing for the worse in Mitchell’s eyes. The flashiness of MTV did give everyone a lot of opportunities to make great art, but when she started seeing Madonna prancing around the stage when she sang ‘Like A Virgin’ at the MTV Awards for the first time, it wasn’t like she was hopeful for where the pop market was going.
Even when the superficial side of MTV died down, Mitchell was still a bit wary about anyone who primarily listened to pop music, saying, “Pop music in particular, but music in general, is full of falseness, just loaded with it. Blessedly, most people don’t hear it, otherwise none of the stuff would be popular. It’s contrived, false sexualness in the voice, false sorrow in the voice.” But that doesn’t mean that you have to throw out every single piece of the pop market because of what everyone else does.
Yes, there are bound to be superficial artists every single time that you look at the charts, but that doesn’t demean the actual musicians that are there as well. Steely Dan may have had their own niche, but the fact that they could put together the kind of record that could sound great on the radio and still push music forward was absolutely incredible, especially with so much jazz harmony on their records.
And when Mitchell did have kind things to say about the pop landscape, it was always from people who were doing something different. She didn’t have to care about the new kids coming out of the woodwork in the 1990s, but the fact that she loved ‘You Get What You Give’ by New Radicals was thanks to the kind of writer that Gregg Alexander was. He always kept people guessing, and that’s what Mitchell’s music was all about as well.
She loved the idea of making songs that might have an opportunity to sell well, but before she put out any record, she wanted to make it for herself. Art was too sacred to be glossed over like it was nothing, and if she was spending time with every instrument in the studio, she wasn’t going to sacrifice her greatest tunes for the sake of getting airplay.
