The generation of Lennon/McCarthney? Dylan? Paul Simon? Or John Prine? Leonard Cohen? Neil Young? (I'm trying to compare apples to apples here; pick others if you like. And yes, I should be able to think of other female songwriters, so additions are gratefully accepted.)Men often wanted Joni Mitchell to be a wife, a muse, a siren, or a star. Instead they got a genius. https://t.co/IJcTfjdnZK
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) June 22, 2021
And I'd kinda hoped we'd used up "Genius" by now. The Romantics brought it to the fore, and it should have been wrung out of meaning by the time the Victorians were center-stage in British literature. That word alone is the mark of a tyro.
I won't have it. I won't have it. I love some of Ms. Mitchell's music; and the mark of her quality is the covers of her work (especially the ones that are better than her originals). But "genius"? Greatest of her generation?
Not even close.
*The occassion for this seems to be the release of "demos and outtakes" from her album "Blue," now 50 years old (is it possible?). I was playing "River" as a modern Christmas classic long before anyone else realized it was one; but she's just a good writer of her era. My appreciation of her music is almost all personal and sentimental (easy to be sentimental about things familiar from 50 years ago). Does she transcend her age? I think maybe Dylan does. Maybe. Still too soon to tell.
One of the ironies of how she's seen is that her lyrics are like second-wave feminism never happened, all those love-lorn gals moaning about the creeps they're in love with and even when they're rotten or leave them they would take them back in a second. I looked up this Dan Chiasson, Catholic-school to "little Ivy" to Harvard PhD into the academic and scribbling life, writing poems that few read and almost certainly will never read once he's no longer around (look at all of the "geniuses" of their time in old anthologies of "new" poets).
ReplyDeleteSome of her songs might last, most of them won't. Who knows whose work will last or who will fade never to be revived. Certainly this kind of New Yorker article is over-selling its subject matter.
Oh, and that "siren" in the hype is pretty silly seeing that it's seldom or never the man's the one who ends up on the rocks in her songs.
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