Thursday, April 13, 2017

#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.

8 comments:

  1. "Joni Mitchell came to attention writing folk songs ... musically conservative."

    I don't have time to explain at the moment why I disagree with this so strongly, but fortunately someone else has done a lot of the work for me:

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  2. Take 2 on that link: http://jonimitchell.com/library/view.cfm?id=1056

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  3. Tim: Looks convincing, in terms of her being melodically unusual from the get-go -- as my piece says, far from a Joni expert, I'm a recent convert. Her *arrangements* were conservative in the beginning, and did not remain so, but I'll rewrite the sentence to incorporate your point.

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  4. While I'd agree that "The Jungle Line"'s arrangement is weirder than anything she had done earlier, more subtly innovative instrumentation starts showing up as early as "Ladies of the Canyon." Then there's the way she uses dulcimer on "Blue", the lyricon on "Cold Blue Steel", the wild chamber-jazz of "Judgment of the Moon and Stars", the overdubbed vocal harmonies throughout "Court and Spark"... a lot of this has been absorbed so thoroughly that it's hard to realize how unusual it was at the time. She's similar to Stevie Wonder in that regard.

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  5. Anyway, sorry to be arguing when I should be agreeing with you on how great "The Jungle Line" is!

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  6. No, I'm glad you're speaking up, and thank you -- between the facts that you're a skilled musician, and that you know her music far better than I do yet, I'm happy to assume you're right (and that I'll be pointing the same things out to people with equal indignation by 2022 or so).

    Still, the story I'm telling is the conventional one, and in a social-history context, that has importance even if it's wrong. 'Hejira' and 'Hissing' were when people were forced to *notice* she'd gotten weird. And while her career suffered a little for it, it was well within the usual bounds of how weirdness cuts into the sales of male artists. As far as I can tell, that was new. If 'Court & Spark' was already subtly preparing the way, that's to its credit, I have to agree.

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  7. All true--but there's a flip side to that. I'm sure most of the people who hummed along to "Wouldn't It Be Nice" and "Sloop John B" didn't think of them as particularly weird, but Brian Wilson has since been recognized as a pop genius, not really doing the same thing as Jan & Dean despite some superficial similarities. I am arguing that, at least as early as For The Roses, Mitchell be similarly thought of as a pop genius, not really doing the same thing as James Taylor--and perhaps more controversially, I think that if she were a man that would already be a more common view. You are absolutely correct about her influence on female pop artists--I just don't think you go quite far enough, because I think all of pop music would have been different without her. We have testimony from Prince and Brian Eno, if nothing else.

    I'll try to stop ranting now...

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  8. That makes sense. In the same way, a few years later, that 'the Kick Inside' and 'Lionheart' were remarkably odd albums, but Kate Bush had to get radical and make 'the Dreaming' before the critical consensus fully admitted she was much more than a flighty piano girl wearing strange costumes.

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