After 17 years of professional music-reviewing, Noel Murray is taking time off from all new music, and is revisiting his record collection in alphabetical order, to take stock of what he's amassed, and consider what he still needs.
"Free Man In Paris" by Joni Mitchell
Is it possible to find terms like "chick flick," "chick lit" and "chick rock"—as well as more kindly phrased equivalents like "femme-friendly" and "gynocentric"—at once mildly offensive and somewhat useful? Yes, everyone's an individual, irreducible to their gender, et cetera et cetera. But it's hardly unenlightened to say that there are generalized differences between the way women feel, perceive and behave, and the way men feel, perceive and behave, even if only some of those differences are related to chemistry and biology, while others are merely social (and therefore vary from culture to culture). Whatever the reasons behind the gender gap, if an artist writes a song or tells a story that speaks to that gap, or merely presents a perspective from the distaff side, there shouldn't be anything wrong with slapping on a label that identifies their work accurately.
That said, the problem with the various "chick" classifications is that they're usually used pejoratively—and when used by women, even apologetically. Last week, when the Sex And The City movie was released, there were a number of male critics and commentators groaning about how wives and girlfriends were going to be dragging their guys to see this chick flick piece of crap, and most of then seemed more concerned about the "chick flick" part than the "piece of crap" part. It's true that movies like Sex And The City, 27 Dresses and P.S. I Love You can be annoying even to women for the way they pitch a version of feminine life that's simplistic and somewhat vulgar. But the same can be said about the version of manliness in action movies and gross-out comedies, yet many movie buffs will excuse a dopey adventure if it has a few good action sequences, or a slovenly comedy if it contains a few laugh-out-loud jokes. An effective tearjerker, though? Not as easily forgiven.
This elevation of the macho over the feminine extends to music fandom, where acts that are harder-edged or patience-testing are often considered superior to acts that are softer, more melodic, or more sentimental. And those acts don't have to be female, either. There's sometimes a knee-jerk reaction by male music fans against male musicians that women like. Those musicians may get their share of critical praise in the early going, but as the backlash starts building among fans, critics are all too eager to join the fray. Perhaps it's because so many male critics are basically nerds: doughy, bespectacled, balding guys who spend a lot of time indoors. If we can't prove ourselves in feats of physical strength, we can least tap out a few words about why Sufjan Stevens is for pussies.
I know a lot of women—my wife, for one—have a love-hate relationship with "chick" culture, and I feel the same about "guy" culture, frankly. I like sports, poker, beer, explosions and crude jokes. But when I hang out exclusively with my male friends I often find I say things I don't mean, or give tacit approval to ideas I don't share, in an almost unconscious attempt to fit in. I've never been big on cut-down wars, pranks, wrestling around, or any of the other ways that guys jockey for position when we're left to our own devices. Throughout most of my post-adolescent life, I've had as many close female friends as close male friends, and even now I find I'm often more comfortable talking with the women in my social circle than with the men. (Being a stay-at-home dad may be part of the reason for that.) And yet, I seem hard-wired to go along with the crowd when everyone in the room is a man.
One of my all-time favorite songs is Joni Mitchell's "Free Man In Paris," reportedly written about her friend David Geffen. It's mostly about getting away from the pressures of show business, but the references to the protagonist finding "that very good friend of mine" implies that part of the appeal of Paris to Geffen is that he can be openly gay there, and won't have to worry about being perceived as weak. I think that's a fantasy that appeals to a lot of us: this idea that there may be a place where we can be wholly ourselves, unrestrained by concerns that we'll be judged for our tastes, our preferences, our political views, or even the way we look, talk and act.
I'd imagine that idea also resonated with Mitchell, who spent much of her career in the '60s and '70s fighting against the perceptions of who she was and who she should be. Was she too aloof, too pretentious, too open, too careerist, too promiscuous? A lot of those perceptions were tied to her gender, because while hippie dudes loved that their old ladies felt free enough to get high and ball, a surprising number of them still expected to retain the old hierarchies when it came to cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the kids. Mitchell's label Reprise understood this, and marketed her with teases about her simultaneous sexual dynamism and wholesomeness. The rock press seized on this angle, and made casual mention of her sexual affairs during write-ups of her records and concerts. Mitchell found that kind of publicity distasteful and disheartening, but it didn't stop her from writing songs about her own conflicted feelings of desire, or about the men she'd argued with, laughed with, and bedded.
So, is Mitchell "chick rock?" Part of me thinks it would be an insult to Mitchell to tag her as such, and part of me thinks it would be an insult not to. (According to what I've read, Mitchell's pretty touchy…there's really no way you can't insult her.) Certainly, she's an inspiration to any woman who takes up an instrument and looks for a way to express what she's seen and understood—and likely an inspiration to a lot of men, too. But a song like Mitchell's "Song For Sharon," in which she tries to explain her restless romantic life to a girlhood friend who's settled down back in Canada, is so specific about wedding fantasies and feminine empathy that to ignore the song's gender origins would be disingenuous.
It would also be stupid for men to presume that because "Song For Sharon" was written by a woman and is about being a woman, that there's nothing they can glean from it. Yes, Mitchell's take on relationships, politics and music is at once fully human, fully feminine, and fully her own, and just because a man connects with Mitchell's music, that doesn't necessarily make him any more "enlightened." But like the man said about chicken soup and common cold, it sure couldn't hurt either.
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Pieces Of The Puzzle
Joni Mitchell
Years Of Operation 1967-present
Fits Between Joan Baez and Tim Buckley
"This Place" by Joni Mitchell
Personal Correspondence The first time I heard Court & Spark, I had a new benchmark for a number of different genres: singer-songwriter confessionals, jazz-informed pop, and '70s AM, among others. Mitchell's earlier albums each have their considerable merits—especially Blue, which helped move folk music away from the stridently political and trippy and towards the personal—but Court & Spark is a real level-jumper. Mitchell's lyrics are so pared-down and precise—and Mitchell's growing interest in jazz and pop so well-integrated into the mix—that the whole record feels preordained, like this set of songs and this sound had been hanging in the air forever, waiting for someone to pluck them down when they were ripe. In the years that followed, Mitchell headed further into jazzy abstraction, and the stark character sketches—more like slivers, really—gave way to songs packed tight with allusion. But she made two more great records along the way: 1975's The Hissing Of Summer Lawns, and the one true rival to Court & Spark in her catalog, 1976's Hejira. I wrote up Hejira for The A.V. Club's now-defunct "Permanent Records column, saying, "Opening with the sprightly, catchy 'Coyote'—with its haunting lines about the 'prisoner of the white lines on the freeway'—Hejira announces itself as an album about how being rootless can be its own kind of trap. Throughout the record, Jaco Pastorius' fretless bass chases Mitchell's lilting voice around open arrangements, as she sings rambling sketches of the tired old friends and dying musicians that she sees in her own tour-bus mirror. 'I'm traveling in some vehicle,' Mitchell sings in the moody title track, a paean to the pleasurable anonymity of driving through the night and letting thoughts wander. At once tuneless and arrestingly beautiful, 'Hejira' proves Mitchell's lyrical contention that 'there's comfort in melancholy.'"
Enduring presence? I'm so enamored of Mitchell's run from 1974-76—and of scattered tracks from her first five albums—that I've tried at times to make sense of her odd '80s records. There's a lot to like about 1982's Wild Things Run Fast, but the rest, I hate to say, are a mishmash of incompatible recording techniques and relatively graceless lyrics. Still, while Mitchell has developed a reputation for being cranky and unwilling to entertain, over the past decade she's been making a stealthy comeback. I thought her 2002 collection Travelogue—orchestral covers of her old songs, sung in a deeper, smokier voice—was astonishingly beautiful, and last year's Shine should've been a bigger event than the media treated it as, given that it was Mitchell's first collection of new songs in nine years, and her first top-to-bottom good record in over 30. Mitchell's legacy is fully secure, since nearly every chanteuse who sits in front of a piano is compared to her. But I hope people recognize that she's not a museum piece. She's a going concern.
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