“Make me sick”: The writers Joni Mitchell hated being compared to
Joni Mitchell would hate me – that’s a bitter pill to swallow. Without a doubt, I have described the artist as ‘confessional’, in the same way that music journalists for decades have. It has been the Joni Mitchell buzzword for as long as she’s been putting music out, littering her songs with codified personal images, feelings, and experiences plucked from her life. But despite that fact, Mitchell resents the idea of being deemed ‘confessional,’ and she resents the other creatives she’s lumped in with.
A lot of Mitchell’s most famous bust-ups have come down to how she and her art are spoken about. She once threw a drink at Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner after he dubbed her ‘Old Lady Of The Year’ and mocked her work. She’s taken to her music again and again to blast the music industry and specifically the ways in which it limits artists, especially female artists.
To her, the label ‘confessional’ is part of that. She sees it as a lazy prison and a limiting view of her creativity. “When I read ‘confessional style’ in print, there’s something in the tone of the way it is delivered that is kind of insulting, like you’ve flashed in a public place or something, when in fact you are attempting to illuminate the human condition,” she said, putting it so articulately.
She resents how the idea of ‘confessional’ seems to cheapen her work to a mere diary entry or a public revelation, rather than seeing it for what it is: a work of art. “I feel when somebody calls me a confessional songwriter that they’ve missed the point,” she continued. To her, it feels like shining a spotlight on the wrong side of things. Suddenly, it becomes less about her talent and skill, and more about the gossip she might be spreading. She said, “There’s too much emphasis put on the artist and not enough on the art. I prefer to be like the Wizard of Oz, where you just see what I’ve created and I’m invisible.”
But overwhelmingly, Mitchell not only doesn’t see herself as a ‘confessional artist’, but she also simply doesn’t really like ‘confessional’ work. Just as that description is tagged onto her name over and over, she always found herself thrown in with the same group of artists with whom she felt she had nothing to do. “Augustine, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are confessional writers and all three make me sick,” she said as harsh words towards the women that so many would consider her peers or creative kin.
She doesn’t see that at all. “I have nothing in common with them,” she said plainly, desperately trying to cut the ties that other people have bound around them. She resents the fact that she’s been tethered to other creatives she feels no connection to, but she would even go as far as not liking, in the case of Sexton. “Sexton was a whopping liar. She didn’t even tell the truth to her shrink. All of her confessions, as far as I can determine, seem to be contrived,” she said in a classic savage Mitchell takedown. Even Sylvia Plath was on the receiving end of a dig; “Plath, I don’t know that well, but I don’t think suicide is chic. I’m not suicidal.”
So please take this as my formal apology, Joni Mitchell, I will never again call you ‘confessional’. Please forgive me.
