When I embarked upon this project, I knew that there would be albums on the list I wouldn’t like all that much, and Joni Mitchell’s Blue loomed large as the most likely contender. I’ve never been a fan of soft, female-vocaled adult contemporary music. I prefer something with a little more edge. Still, this whole experience is about broadening my musical horizons, so I tried to approach the record with as open a mind as possible.
On the first listen, it didn’t really do much for me. I found the songs meandering, the lyrics difficult to relate to. “Maybe you have to be a woman to get it,” I thought. Undeterred, I kept listening. You can’t evaluate an album in one hearing. Time would surely reveal hidden depths. But as I repeated the experience again and again, I came to realize something. I don’t just dislike this album; I hate it.
It seems odd to describe an album of stripped down folk-pop as “pretentious”, but that’s exactly what Blue is. In the Pitchfork review, Mitchell is compared to Bob Dylan, but Dylan was always honest (at least after the protest years) even when he was singing with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek. He didn’t put on airs or pretend to be anything that he was not. He just did what he wanted to do. He wasn’t worried about impressing anybody.
The college I went to was attached to a music conservatory, and there were a lot of opera singers around. Everyone hated the opera singers. These were kids who had always been praised for their voices, and remained acutely and constantly aware of the fact that they could sing better than almost everyone else. This led to an intolerable personality of smug superiority. At first I couldn’t figure out what bothered me about Joni Mitchell’s singing, but this is it. She’s like that person who feels the need to insert harmony parts into Happy Birthday when sung at an office birthday party, just to show how clever and talented she is. There’s not a note on Blue that isn’t torturously subjected to vibrato and arbitrary leaps into the high soprano range. Mitchell knows she has a good voice, and by God she’s not going to let you forget it.
A couple of years after Blue, Bruce Springsteen would find fame singing anthems for the working class, kids stuck in dead end jobs in dying, midwestern towns with no futures and no options. When Joni Mitchell runs into trouble, she unhesitatingly jets off to Paris or Spain (I count at least six European countries mentioned in the lyrics), where she can rent a spacious loft apartment decorated with a grand piano and plenty of natural light. There she can pout about being misunderstood while basking in a Bohemian community brimming with praise for her talent and joie de vivre. Must be nice.
There’s no trace of real vulnerability on the album. Every attempt at self-deprecation is undercut by an unsubtle humblebrag (which I think would be a good alternate title for the album). In “River,” ostensibly a song about needing to escape, she doesn’t even make it out of the first verse before gloating “I’m gonna make a lot of money”. It’s hard to feel sympathy for someone claiming they feel trapped when a plane trip to Europe or California is within such easy reach.
The only thing I found myself really able to appreciate on the album was Stephen Stills providing a rhythmic anchor to Carey in the form of a lively bass line, preventing that song from drifting off into the aimless navel gazing that dominates the rest of the record. Unfortunately, he disappears after that one track and is not seen again.
I hate to be uncharitable, but I find Blue to be nothing more than the self-satisfied musings of a flakey, “free spirited”, white girl with no real problems except how boring it all is.
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