#414: Joni Mitchell, "the Jungle Line" (1975)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF2_1Jfgo4I

For most of the 20th century, songwriting innovation in the Western world was an extremely male enterprise. This is, of course, a way of saying that there was only half as much musical innovation as a saner society would have allowed. Or at least, judging by *my* studies, the modern history of pop music, through the end of the 1960s, featured women largely in roles as singers, and as mainstream or genre songwriters (Patsy Cline, Carole King, Loretta Lynn, Judy Collins -- all except King were more noted as interpreters than writers anyway, although at least King stood out, according to Joe Queenan, as the harbinger of the Yuppie Apocalypse).

Joni Mitchell first came to attention writing folk songs. She wrote strong, unconventional melodies and strikingly well-observed lyrical details,
but was nonetheless conservative in her arrangements, her music easy to process as "pretty" (although as Tim Walters argues in comments, by For the Roses, the follow-up to her mega-hit Blue, there were already signs of change). Then, with 1974's Hejira and 1975's the Hissing of Summer Lawns, she turned unmistakably weird, incorporating non-mainstream jazz tunings and phrasings and strange chords into her music. Because she was already famous from albums like Blue and Court and Spark, people bought her records anyway, just as if she was a dude and had some sort of right to enrich the pop/rock vocabulary. Women had only recently started to get away with this even in the musical avant-garde -- Carla Bley's avant-jazz-pop triple-LP Escalator over the Hill (1972) is a plausible Best Jazz Album Ever nominee, and Delia Derbyshire's arrangement of the Doctor Who theme music (1962) was a landmark in pre-synthesizer electronic music -- so this took a fair amount of nerve.

Maybe Joni Mitchell was a turning point, maybe she wasn't; the 1970s were an adventurous decade in gender relations regardless. But in her wake came adventurous female songwriter/ arrangers from -- in approximate most-to-least-Hejira-like order -- Rickie Lee Jones to Joan Armatrading to Kate Bush to Laurie Anderson to Jane Siberry to Patti Smith to the Slits and X-Ray Spex and Essential Logic, and then ever more until the present. Although, not to overstate the case, this has been my teacher side talking. *My* musical exploration of the world began in 1990, and as I wasn't quite ready to make heads or tails of Anderson's Mister Heartbreak or Siberry's No Borders Here, despite my friend Heather's efforts, it took until 1994 for any women more musically daring than Natalie Merchant to join my permanent collection. Or, indeed, for me to notice the gender imbalance.

As for Joni's the Hissing of Summer Lawns, I got my copy in January 2017. It's excellent. You probably guessed that. Joni didn't like affluent suburbs (or their NYC-borough equivalents) at all, I gather from the lyrics. In its own way Hissing has the attitude of a punk album, if punk rock happened to be smooth and elegantly contoured.

While none of Hissing is conventional -- the melodies reach, and sometimes the song structures flex and warp -- "the Jungle Line" is the album's deeply, overtly weird song, with tribal drums, Atari-bloop synthesizer, and a murmuring dialogue of sinister plots between bassoon and oboe. The lyrics, a madly jumbled mise-en-scene of "I-bars and girders", "jails and gospel pews", "a cellar full of ferns and orchid vines", "valves and smoke" rhymed with "chanting slave boats", talk of Rousseau. I first assumed Jean-Jacques, father of glib libertarianism, who complained that "Man is born free, and everywhere he in chains", and who fathered five wild-and-free babies he donated to orphanages with 90%+ death rates (because man is born without even the glimmering of any of the basic life skills he might use his hypothesized freedom to exercise). "Those cannibals of shuck and jive, they'll eat a girl like her alive": certainly, certainly, one's freedom to seduce is another's freedom to be trapped forever.

I then learned "the Jungle Line" meant Henri Rousseau, the 19th-century "primitivist" artist, who painted gloriously colorful if oddly flat jungle scenes despite never leaving France. It's about joyous imagination rising above circumstance; yet it's also about the exoticizing of the Other, and the consequences when people with money "drift on the air conditioned wind, and drool for a taste of something smuggled in". The words are subtle, the music is too. But they both loudly blare the fact that there's something intricate worth investigating here. On me, at least, it worked.