Joni Mitchell

Back when Joni Mitchell first began to make a name for herself as a singer and songwriter,
what appeared to matter most about her music was the words. Sure, the melodies were
important – she was a songwriter, after all, not a poet – but they always seemed
secondary, merely a framework for her energies and the ideas of her lyrics. As Mitchell
has grown older, however, the assumed priority of words over music has slowly... More >

Dreaming, fabulizing, playing the ingenue, speaking for the displaced Native American, preaching about materialism and ecocatastrophe and the engines of war (and abortion, though not so's you can tell where she stands), she's matured into a sententious liberal. Give me the Poet of the Me Decade any day. At least Joan Baez is a sententious radical. (Grade: C)