"The subject of her citizenship became part of a larger cultural conversation in April this year..."

"...when The New York Times created a list of 'the 30 greatest living American songwriters.' Ms. Mitchell was not included. 'We elected not to steal that honor from Canada,' The Times wrote in an article about its selection process. (Just a month before, the Juno Awards, Canada’s equivalent to the Grammys, had honored Ms. Mitchell in Ontario with a lifetime achievement award.) The Times’s reasoning did not sit well with fans and cultural commentators who felt that she... should nevertheless have been included."

Says the New York Times, in "Joni Mitchell Is Now an American, After 60 Years of Living in the U.S./On Tuesday, she announced the news of her U.S. citizenship on social media with a video and a photo of herself at the ceremony."

"But from the start of her career as a cartoonist, she said she felt shut out by her male peers, who excluded her from parties as well as comic anthologies..."

"... that helped draw wider attention to their work. 'There are very few fields as heavily male,' she once told the Los Angeles Times. 'Maybe the only equivalent is the fire department.' Ms. Robbins became a fierce critic of peers such as Crumb, calling out pieces like a three-page 1970 story in which Crumb imagined himself strangling a female television interviewer. 'I think that a lot of these guys simply were misogynist,' she told the pop culture website Vulture in 2018. 'It turned out what a lot of these guys, what they had in their head was very vicious stuff, very violent stuff.'"

From "Trina Robbins, cartoonist who elevated women’s stories, dies at 85/She put out the first American comic book created entirely by women. Years later, she chronicled the history of female comics artists, writing books that excavated the stories of overlooked writers and illustrators" (WaPo).

Trina Robbins was also a clothes designer of the very coolest kind: "For much of her 20s, she designed clothes in Los Angeles and New York, where she befriended Jim Morrison, dressed folk and rock musicians including Donovan, Cass Elliot and David Crosby, and inspired a verse in Joni Mitchell’s song 'Ladies of the Canyon.'" It's the first verse. Listen here.

And here's some video of Robbins, talking about women comic artists:

"150 Greatest Rock Lists Ever: Q Special Edition (July 2004)."

Saved by the Wayback Machine, here. I got up to list #49 before noticing there were 150 lists. 

I stumbled upon that compilation of compilations while reading a 2021 article, "How Led Zeppelin's 'Going to California' Crushed on Joni Mitchell." 

"They shake their heads and say Joni, you've changed."

Last night at the Grammys. I've never cared at all about the Grammys, but this was Joni Mitchell performing last night.

Was the choice of "Both Sides Now" intended to provide insight into the passage of time — Joni is 80 — or was it playing the odds and maximizing the chance that the audience would recognize the tune?

"On one hand, Luke Combs is an amazing artist, and it’s great to see that someone in country music is influenced by a Black queer woman — that’s really exciting."

"But at the same time, it’s hard to really lean into that excitement knowing that Tracy Chapman would not be celebrated in the industry without that kind of middleman being a White man."

 
Said Holly G, "founder of the Black Opry, an organization for Black country music singers and fans," quoted in in "Tracy Chapman, Luke Combs and the complicated response to ‘Fast Car’/Combs’s remake of Chapman’s 1988 hit now dominates the country charts, renewing difficult conversations about diversity in Nashville" (WaPo). 

[According to] Tanner Davenport, a Nashville native and co-director of the Black Opry: White country singers struck gold this past decade releasing songs heavily influenced by R&B and hip-hop, but few Black artists are even signed to major Nashville labels.... 

The immediate success of Combs’s “Fast Car,” Davenport said, “kind of just proves that when you put a White face on Black art, it seems to be consumed a lot easier.... This genre needs to expand their boardrooms and let marginalized people be in these rooms and make a bigger bet on these artists.”...

There are 2 very different issues here. 1. How is the country music genre defined and enforced (and to what extent does it exclude black artists who want to present themselves as within the country genre)? and 2. Should white artists cover songs that were originally written by/for black singers? 

[T]he song has always had a particular significance in the Black and LGBTQ+ communities, Davenport said; the Black Opry performed a group singalong of “Fast Car” when it closed out its first show. (Chapman does not discuss her personal life, but writer Alice Walker has disclosed their relationship, which occurred in the 1990s.) “I think the song in general is pretty reflective for a lot of people who do identify as queer, and also for a person of color — the song almost seems like an anthem for us,” Davenport said. “It’s been pretty monumental in our lives, and I think it made us feel like we weren’t alone.”

So, actually, there are 4 issues here. Take the 2 spelled out above and replace "black" with "LGBTQ+."

Another issue is that there's a big difference between covering a new hit by a black/LGBTQ+ artist and covering an old song like "Fast Car." Tracy Chapman had her big hit 35 years ago. It is vastly in her interest for another artist to have a big hit covering it today. To convince straight white people not to cover the songs of songwriters who are not straight and white is to restrict the income of black/LGBTQ+ songwriters.

The author of the article, Emily Yahr, quotes an English professor who declares that "Fast Car," with its dream of driving a car away from painful circumstances, appeals to a wide audience:

Francesca Royster, author of “Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions” and an English professor at DePaul University, said the song’s story of the narrator feeling trapped and trying to escape is “a really American iconography” about cars holding the promise of freedom. “This is something country music is very invested in, too: invested in, too: the American dream of reinvention and finding happiness after a life of struggle,” Royster said....

And yet: 

... as someone who lived in Oakland, Calif., when “Fast Car” came out and saw how it connected to the queer community, she said, it’s difficult to see the success of Combs’s cover knowing that country music, with its historic emphasis on “tradition,” has generally shied away from highlighting LGBTQ+ artists and their stories — which is all part of the complexity of the current life of the song.

But there's nothing LGBTQ+ about the lyrics of that song. That's why the article has to say "part of the complexity of the current life of the song." Some people who like the original recording have a personal bond with it that connects it to things that drop out of the picture when it's sung by a straight white man. But the song stands apart from the original recording and from the artist most closely associated with it. A great song deserves multiple versions and it would be horribly unfair if black/LGBTQ+ songwriters were put in a separate category and protected from covers. 

CORRECTION: In the first draft of this post, I wrote that the song is "clearly about a woman dissatisfied with a no-good man, just like so many country songs." It was only listening to the Combs version that I realized that "my old man" refers to the singer's father. I noticed that Combs hadn't changed the lyrics to fit the heterosexual man's point of view and wondered whether he was just, as some singers do, adopting the voice of the opposite sex. That seemed interesting, and I paid more attention to the lyrics of Verse 3:

See, my old man's got a problem
He lives with a bottle, that's the way it is
He says his body's too old for working
His body's too young to look like his

At this point, I'm convinced I'm hearing about a sexual relationship. The singer, originally a woman, is unhappy with the man who won't work and doesn't even look good anymore. But then there's this: 

When mama went off and left him
She wanted more from life than he could give
I said, "Somebody's gotta take care of him"
So I quit school and that's what I did

Oh, it's dad. Deadbeat dad. Bleh. Sure. Leave him. I always thought she was leaving an inadequate sex partner. "My old man"... in my head, those words resonate with Joni Mitchell: 

That's not about daddy. 

Thank you, Gordon Lightfoot.

ADDED: Here's the NYT obituary, which says he wrote his first song when he was in high school, during the hula hoop craze. It contained the line: "I guess I’m just a slob and I’m gonna lose my job, ’cause I’m Hula-Hula-Hoopin’ all the time."

At Facebook, my son John wrote: "Here’s a live performance of his beautiful song 'If You Could Read My Mind' (1970), which he wrote about his divorce. In this video he sings, 'I’m just trying to understand the feelings that you lack,' which is in the original recording too. Later on when he played it live, he changed one word at his daughter’s request, instead singing '…the feelings that we lack.' He realized that the deeply personal subject matter had prevented him from being objective enough to think of that improvement."

Should a man run his writings past a woman to benefit from insight about what might offend women? We were just talking about a woman who gave a draft of her writing to her ex-husband and then rejected all his suggestions about how to soften the harshness toward him. The editor said his corrections would weaken the story. 

The song was "If You Could Read My Mind," so I don't know why it's a problem to be "prevented... from being objective." And why is subjectivity ever a problem for a singer? Imagine if Bob Dylan submitted "Positively 4th Street" to whoever the hell that song is about? Bob sticks to his point of view, which includes a wish that the person he's talking about could read his mind and know what a drag it is to see him.

Joni Mitchell said: "There came a point when I heard a Dylan song called 'Positively Fourth Street' and I thought 'oh my God, you can write about anything in songs.' It was like a revelation to me."

Here are 7 TikTok videos I've selected as right for just now. Let me know what you like best.

1. The "squirrel" is crazy about the trampoline.

2. Yeah, I'll back you up on that.

3. Joni Mitchell, in 1970, telling the audience they're "really a drag."

4. Orson Welles saying he puts loyalty to friends above art.

5. He just happened to find everything he was looking for at World Market.

6. The rigors of Chinese womanhood.

7. How to write about characters who are not autistic.

Joni Mitchell sings at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival.

 

This happened last night. See: "Joni Mitchell Performs at Length for First Time in 22 Years at Surprise Newport Folk Festival Appearance/Another artist who is largely retired from public performance, Paul Simon, also made a surprise appearance at the festival" (Variety).

Here's Paul Simon:

Joni at the Grammys.

 

It's a long walk across the stage with a cane, but she finds a way to dance.

Neil Young is back on Spotify!

 

Joni too: 

"So 'Joni Mitchell music' is a genre of its own?"

Said Lurker21, in the comments to this morning's post about Joe Rogan, which included appreciation of Joe's line, "I love Joni Mitchell, I love her music, 'Chuck E.'s in Love' is a great song"  ("Chuck E.'s in Love" being a Rickie Lee Jones song).

Since we're talking about Spotify, I'd just like to say that on Spotify, anybody's music is a genre of its own. You search the artist's name and, from among the results, choose the icon with the artist's name followed by radio. Thus, for Joni Mitchell, I find "Joni Mitchell Radio" — with varied artists along with Joni:

 

It works, as I say, with any artist. Just to pick someone I like who was obscure to me until recently: 

Joe Rogan: This podcast is "nothing that I've prepared for." It's become "some out-of-control juggernaut I barely have control of."

He never even had the idea of becoming this successful with the podcast. It started with him "just fucking around with my friends and having fun and talking, and then, when it became popular, other people wanted to come on," he says in this 10-minute message to the world.

He says he's going to "do my best, in the future, to balance things out." 

"But my point of doing this is just to create interesting conversations.... So, if I've pissed you off, I'm sorry. If you enjoy the podcast, thank you... Thank you to all the supporters, and even thank you to the haters, because it's good to have some haters. It makes you reassess what you're doing and put things into perspective... Thank you and, uh, I'm going to do my best."

He says multiple times that he has no hard feelings against Neil Young, that he loves Neil Young. He tells a story of working as a security guard at an outdoor amphitheater when he was a teenager and quitting the night Neil Young played — not because he didn't like Neil Young but because people in the audience were making bonfires to keep warm and not taking kindly to the security guards who were required to put out the fires. Joe put a regular shirt over his security guard shirt and walked away.

***

Hey, Neil Young, go on Joe Rogan's podcast. He's offered you love. Return the gesture. 

***

ADD: Rogan has offered Young a graceful way out of the hole he climbed down into and that only Joni Mitchell and Nils Lofgren jumped in after. It wasn't the lemmingfest he might have hoped for. 

This is apt:

There are a ton of tweets out here claiming that Willie Nelson, Bruce Springsteen, Barbra Streisand, Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Dave Grohl, and others have left Spotify.

It's BULLSHIT.

You don't fight misinformation with more crazy misinformation. PLEASE STOP.

— BrooklynDad_Defiant! (@mmpadellan) January 31, 2022

OR: Do you think Joe is trying to con us? Are you thinking all the thank yous and love and me and my friends were just fooling around are some kind of trick?
 

IN THE COMMENTS: Lucien says (correctly quoting Rogan, who I'm sure was doing it on purpose): 

When Rogan says: "I love Joni Mitchell, I love her music, 'Chuck E.'s in Love' is a great song" I hope he's doing that on purpose.

"River."

The first official video of the old song — from Joni Mitchell, released yesterday.

"Now there’s a lot of fuss being made over it, but there wasn’t initially. The most feedback that I got was that I had gone too far and was exposing too much of myself."

"I couldn’t tell what I had created, really. The initial response I got was critical, mostly from the male singer-songwriters. It was kind of like Dylan going electric. They were afraid. Is this contagious? Do we all have to get this honest now? That’s what the boys were telling me. 'Save something of yourself, Joni. Nobody’s ever gonna cover these songs. They’re too personal.'"

From "Joni Mitchell opens up to Cameron Crowe about singing again, lost loves and 50 years of ‘Blue’" (L.A. Times). 

Much more at the link — where I was able to read without a subscription by putting my browser in "reader view." There's the backstory on Cary ("Carey") (was he really "a mean old daddy"?) and the snuggliness of her relationship with Graham Nash ("Sometimes I get sensitive or worried, and it might bother the man I was with. But not Graham. He just said, 'Come over here to the couch; you need a 15-minute cool-out.' And then we would snuggle" (very much not a mean old daddy)).

Who breaks up with you by telegram?

I'm reading "50 Reasons to Love Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’/The singer-songwriter questioned everything on her fourth album. Twenty-five musicians speak about the LP’s enduring power on its 50th anniversary" (NYT), and there's this, from Graham Nash:

Obviously there are a couple of songs on the record that I recognize, from when she would write them in the house, that involved me. “My Old Man,” “River.” She finished the album after we parted, but for many months I saw her there writing this stuff. It was a fascinating process to see, I must confess. It’s as if she tore her skin off and just released all her nerves into music. I was repairing the house in Laurel Canyon, I was actually laying the kitchen floor when I got a telegram from Joan saying that our affair was over, officially. And she put it in a very interesting way. She said, “If you squeeze sand in your hand, it will run through your fingers.” I thought, got it. And that was it.

When was the age of telegraphy? I'm 70 years old, and I've never sent or received a telegram. I remember telegrams only as a way of communicating that someone had died. Maybe there's some poetry in using a telegram to convey the information that the relationship has died.

The snowhead.

 

ADDED: The "puns" tag is for something Meade says. I make a remark that presumes familiarity with a song that I'm just going to make sure everyone is familiar with:

"'Teaching,' for figures of her calibre, is often a word that means giving scripted lectures and then fleeing into the wings, or charging mega-dollars for a sun-drenched guru experience at a resort."

"Glück is a classroom teacher, at home in a small group, around a table. Dozens of great books, winners of awards, were shaped by her vigilant editing in the classroom, which often continues in her apartment and garden in Cambridge. This is part of why so many people seemed to feel that their own lives had somehow been recognized by the announcement of the Nobel. When I was growing up in Vermont, a few mountains over from her, Glück’s work was everywhere; she still feels to me like a seventies figure, something in the key of Joni Mitchell, because of all the bookshelves and coffee tables of that era where her books were found. She was 'our' poet. Now I think of all the waiters and cheesemongers and cabbies and neighborhood people in Cambridge who know her, and think of her as 'their' poet.... When I told her how a friend was courting his new, young wife by reading aloud poems from her book 'The Wild Iris,' she laughed and said something like 'that book is very useful for people who prefer to view their carnal needs in spiritual terms.'"

Writes Dan Chiasson, in "How Louise Glück, Nobel Laureate, Became Our Poet For decades, she has taught us the contours of our own inner lives" (The New Yorker).

The way Chiasson talks about the 70s, I thought he should be approximately my age, but he was born in 1971, 20 years after me, so "something in the key of Joni Mitchell" doesn't mean that period of young adulthood that I lived through, but — perhaps — that place out there where other people had the advantage of adulthood. I'm thinking the way he feels about 1970s Joni Mitchel — ladies of the canyon? — is about how I felt about beatniks... 

"Beat Generation" sold books, sold black turtleneck sweaters and bongos, berets and dark glasses, sold a way of life that seemed like dangerous fun—thus to be either condemned or imitated. Suburban couples could have beatnik parties on Saturday nights and drink too much and fondle each other's wives....

Which reminds me — here, you can buy "Wild Iris," if you'd like to view your carnal needs in spiritual terms.

"'Damsel in Distress' is an homage to Joni Mitchell in some ways, particularly the structure."

"My husband and I now live in Laurel Canyon. I wasn’t that familiar with Joni’s music but Jörn became obsessed and took me on a journey into her music. We ended up hanging out with her and I get now why she’s one of the greats. So it’s part Laurel Canyon, part a song about a personal relationship that I’m trying to come to terms with, but mostly my Mitchell virginity being broken."

Said Rufus Wainwright, quoted in "Rufus Wainwright Announces New Album Unfollow the Rules, Shares New Song: Listen/‘Damsel in Distress’ is an homage to Joni Mitchell in some ways, particularly the structure" (Pitchfork).

Here's the song:



I got there via my son John's Facebook post, where someone brings up this post of mine from 2007 — about the time I sat at a table next to Rufus Wainwright in a restaurant in SoHo — and I reread my own old post, which ends:

I think about whether I'm excited to sit for so long so near a person whose music I have so much feeling for. But no, I feel normal, as usual. I remember the time, more than 30 years ago, when I sat in a restaurant at a table next to John Lennon. The feeling was overwhelming. I am so much older now, but is it that I fell in love with Rufus's music as an older person or that I'm sitting near him as an older person? I could find out if some day I'm sitting in a restaurant and, at the next table, it's Ray Davies. Maybe Bob Dylan. But no. I think it's a theory that can only be tested on Ray Davies.

Then, at Facebook, I say:

I realize I don't understand that last part... Why can't the theory be tested on Bob Dylan? I'm sure I meant that to be enigmatic at the time, but now I've excluded even myself!

At the Coyote Café...

... you can howl (and hoot) all night.

And please, remember the Althouse Portal to Amazon. And let me recommend something specific, which I have tested, these microwaveable slippers.

"Do I again go in search of lost time with Marcel Proust, or am I to attempt yet another rereading of Alice Walker’s stirring denunciation of all males, black and white?"

"My former students, many of them now stars of the School of Resentment, proclaim that they teach social selflessness, which begins in learning how to read selflessly. The author has no self, the literary character has no self, and the reader has no self. Shall we gather at the river with these generous ghosts, free of the guilt of past self-assertions, and be baptized in the waters of Lethe? What shall we do to be saved? The study of literature, however it is conducted, will not save any individual, any more than it will improve any society. Shakespeare will not make us better, and he will not make us worse, but he may teach us how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves."

Wrote Harold Bloom, in "The Western Canon."

That jumped out at me this morning, because I've been thinking about the idea of forgetting oneself.

Last night, I was reading the story, "Kleist in Thun" (from this collection by Robert Walser), and I was struck by this passage: