TS: Joni Mitchell - 'Hissing of Summer Lawns' vs 'Hejira'

Perhaps Blue has to hit you all at once. It hit me when I was 14 or so, and I can't be objective about it.

If I needed a second I'd sooner look to Ladies of the Canyon or even Both Sides Now.

Further proof that Joan Didion and Joni Mitchell are actually the same person.

Some day we will have to have a thread about author/musician doppelganginess like that.

These two women are so closely linked in my mind that they shall ne'er be separated.

evoke rooms with heavy curtains shielding them from the harsh mid afternoon California sun...

Nice one. That's what I really love about Joni's music. I need to check out Didion's stuff (I only read "Slouching..." so far)

i really like "the jungle line." i don't know about the title track.

i've been listening to a lot of joni lately. i'm venturing, tentatively, into her 80s and 90s stuff. i'm not sure what i think, yet.

Hejira: Coyote is sensational. Full of the specificity someone above said her post-Blue work lacked (as is Song for Sharon, and Furry). Amelia is one of the prettiest songs she wrote. The whole Jaco emphasis and the thematic consistency make it stand out and give it heft. "Blue Motel Room" > "Centerpiece" as the obligatory faux-jazz blues song. Except for Refuge of the Roads, the lesser songs all have something musically or lyrically to recommend them. The album cover art is 50 times better than the cheesy Hissing cover. Hejira really defined Mitchell's deepening interest in jazz and non-linear forms; it is the critical hinge between her classic period and the rest of her career; it is her Blood on the Tracks.
It just isn't any contest.

Also, Amazon tells us that Hejira is more popular today than Hissing. It tells us that Blue is the most popular of Mitchells original albums, followed by a close grouping of Hejira, Court, and Ladies, all of which have ranks within about 800 places of each other (around #2000). Hissing is next, but is ranked in the 8,000s overall. Obviously a cheap argument, but in this case the public is right.

I love the most decadent-sounding tracks best, and the way they're married to lyrics of stasis and boredom - the title track and 'Harry's House/Centrepiece'.

To illustrate, I think the following, sung over loops of African drumming with occasional throaty yells, is a somewhat embarassingly Heart of Darkness in its association of Africa with The Primal, The Lawless, The Primitive, etc., in contrast to repressed Civilized white people in New York:

The jungle line, the jungle line
Screaming in a ritual of sound and time
Floating, drifting on the air-conditioned wind
And drooling for a taste of something smuggled in
Pretty women funneled through valves and smoke
Coy and bitchy, wild and fine
And charging elephants and chanting slaving boats
Charging, chanting down the jungle line

Which is not to say I don't respond to it (as I do to Conrad, or to Riefenstahl), or that I don't think it's a pretty good, subtle lyric, especially in the parallels it draws between Henri Rousseau's painting and jazz and (implicitly) Mitchell's own music. And the drumming is very cool, and this was to my knowledge the first significant use of a looped sample in pop music. When it came out, this was my favorite song on Hissing, for sure, although even then I thought it went a couple of clicks beyond good taste. My reference to Riefenstahl above is pertinent; when Hissing first appeared, the exhibition and then publication of Leni Riefenstahl's The People of Kau had made a huge splash and provoked a lot of debate about the representation of Africans in Western art. Whether or not Mitchell was consciously influenced by Riefenstahl when she did "Jungle Line" (maybe so, maybe no), I thought and think that there is a fair amount of Riefenstahl's aesthetic in that song. Which makes me ambivalent -- not condemnatory, ambivalent.

There's a lot of songs on the album that set up an idealisation/reality split, where the music is at least nominally on the side of the idealisation.

Hejira is also my favorite. 'Coyote' may be my favorite Joni Mitchell song. Jaco's bassline is something else on that tune.

I took her to a hockey game, too.

Yeah.

Good times.