{"id":4685,"date":"2009-06-01T12:01:10","date_gmt":"2009-06-01T17:01:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4685"},"modified":"2012-03-16T21:10:14","modified_gmt":"2012-03-17T02:10:14","slug":"things-im-supposed-to-love-but-cant-stand-joni-mitchell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4685","title":{"rendered":"Things I’m Supposed To Love, But Can’t Stand: Joni Mitchell"},"content":{"rendered":"

My whole musical life, from the mid-seventies on, whenever someone has wanted to portray themselves as the kind of hip that transcends mere temporal hipness, they’ll claim to be Joni Mitchell fans.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Joni Mitchell fandom has gone through a couple of phases; its original stretch in the late sixties through the mid-seventies, when Mitchell was putting out albums that got all sorts of attention, of course.\u00a0 And then in the late eighties, when Prince confessed to being a huge Mitchell fan.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And today, in an era where quirky art-school girls with guitars is a booming genre, I’m hearing more would-be hypstrz claiming to be huge Joni Mitchell fans.<\/p>\n

She always bugged me.<\/p>\n

No, no – I know she’s an iconic songwriter, an amazing singer, and had been for almost forty years the leading voice of her particular genre.\u00a0 She’s a spectacular talent with four decades of great material.<\/p>\n

It\u00a0 just happens to be a genre, and material, that leave me utterly cold.<\/p>\n

Part of it is the whole “folk-jazz” thing.\u00a0 Folk music is a form that I go hot and cold on, depending on the singer and the subject material.<\/p>\n

And jazz?\u00a0 Well, to paraphrase the Supreme Court wag, “I don’t know how to define what jazz I like, but I know it when I hear it”.<\/p>\n

And while I know deep down inside that it’s wrong, and that I probably need to reset my internal musical CPU, I also have to cop to it; whenever Mitchell starts singing, I shut down a little inside.\u00a0 “Oh, goodie; another overly ornamented pseudo-jazz reflection on romantic ambiguity, delivered via lovely-yet-grating high-alto warble that just grates the desire to sit still and analyze the deadeningly-oblique lyrics right out of me”.<\/p>\n

I know.\u00a0 It’s wrong.\u00a0 Maybe I’ll work on it when time permits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My whole musical life, from the mid-seventies on, whenever someone has wanted to portray themselves as the kind of hip that transcends mere temporal hipness, they’ll claim to be Joni Mitchell fans. Joni Mitchell fandom has gone through a couple of phases; its original stretch in the late sixties through the mid-seventies, when Mitchell was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,14],"tags":[211],"class_list":["post-4685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mitch","category-music","tag-love-and-hate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4685"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26897,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4685\/revisions\/26897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}