Joni Mitchell Seldom Lies

Her recollections of Miles Davis, Mingus, and Tony Williams

I was always a painter, I was always an artist… people would commission me to do this and that.. and frequently they would pay me in jazz records.

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If you truly have the calling to be a musician as opposed to wanting it for mercenary reasons, for fame and fortune, what 99.9 percent of the music made today is motivated by… it’s not motivated by the muse. Miles was motivated by a muse, Mingus was motivated by a muse. Some are some aren’t…

Whether or not there’s a link between the Joni Mitchell who went on the record to divulge her inner black man, or the sense she had that the animus within her was a black man, and the adolescent Joni with a square trumpeter father whose acts of defiance included being paid for casually commissioned paintings and murals in jazz lps, knowing this about her past makes the revelation a little easier to understand. It’s not just that she claimed or embellished her intimacy and enmeshment with blackness, it’s that blackness in many cases reciprocated her claims, to such an extent that by the time she wore a bebop style blackface costume on-the-record, proudly, it was too late to dissuade her. She had helped Charles Mingus compose his requiem, she had recorded secret sessions with Tony Williams, she had been seduced by a sound that, although it evoked an androgynous erotics in her, caused her singing and lyricism to lag indulgently in the margins of arrangements in ways that before it had bloomed and commanded all of our attention. Joni is not a jazz singer in any traditional sense and her proximity to the best jazzmen proves it. She did not aim to be their lead vocalist however, she aimed to be them. Nor does this aberration change the fact that she’s one of the best songwriters and interpreters of the 20th and 21st centuries. I wonder if she’s aware of the dilemma her adopted identity presents. If Nina Simone had walked around telling people to treat her like a white man, what might they call her? One of the “Four Women” she invented, or madwoman. On a metaphysical level she deserved as much or more respect, but what if she had decided to pretend her way toward it like her peer? The way Simone is still derided for interrupting herself during a live performance to ask if David Bowie had arrived, tells us the level of patience audiences have for black women being playful or breaking character at a show. Suppose instead she had proclaimed ‘I am David Bowie.’ Why be outlandish when you can be deadpan and accomplish more, put on a better show with real bonafide hallucination? I think of Serge Gainsbourg’s “Bonnie and Clyde,” of any persona piece that survives its bluff.

Some of my second hand embarrassment for Joni’s need to change her identity to love or engage or attempt to perform black music, to be an honorary black man, (aside from the seeming smugness of her stance) is that I see some of this same delusion in my own mother. Her relationship to my father means that every once in a while I get an effusive text message about how much she loves him, or Dick Gregory or any number of black men, how good and solid and unforgettable they are, how proud of them she is. She means this with all her heart, with a level of sincerity that verges on dangerous because it cannot be corrected or tempered, its energy has to clear and sober like a raging fire in a dry forrest that needed to burn to grow verdurous and virginal again. And on some level it feels like vigilanteism reborn and impersonating romance, to observe a demographic outside of you so intently and with such reverence and preoccupation with its virtues that not being of it feels like a cruel punishment. It feels like exile. Yet the alternative, joining the demographic in any way possible, merging, calling a state of emergency on segregation so you can legally unite with your muse which you also must become in these cases, is both palliative to western racism and xenophobia, and essential to the libidinal colonial impulse that is their subconscious vision. War could never be as effective as lust and love and mating dances can in altering and conquering a culture. But this admiration that refuses to be quiet about itself is not honest. And how to tell your mother that as she worships at the altar of your dead father for penance, with child-bride innocence?

All I really, really want our love to do… a lyric that in Joni’s voice sounds like a promise, an edict, something that’s come over you and becomes exuberant penumbra, the partial shadow exposing the perfect shadow. No shade, nowhere to go but deeper into the shared complexes of yearning to be the other’s ideal and erase the other— to become one even if that means you both disappear, as if love is trading souls. Of course we forgive these women, who understand their limits so well they assume alter-egos to transcend them, they try on another’s oppression and swagger-jack it just enough to feel seen. It does something to the nervous system, instills an ecstatic paranoia that I see here in Joni and still see in my mom, a looking over one’s shoulder for the ghosts you’ve invoked or borrowed, with both thrill and dread. They might contradict you, overshadow you, deny you, or take you up on your wish and become you, steal all your comfort and make it theirs while you adopt their struggle in homage or kinship. Are you sure, the ghost whispers, a perverse love call. And even if they are uncertain of the transference they’ve unleashed, they really don’t get to be purely white women once they’ve been this unabashed about their muses and greatest loves, and they will never become black men; they are marooned somewhere between privileged lady and provocateur. In their self-inflicted marronage, unable to move forward or back, they self-actualize, a new breed of tortured souls and their perfect torch songs and text messages. I can’t say I blame them. It’s a bleak era for the human soul, get it where you can.

I’d play my CD edition of Blue at the highest volume in my high school bedroom, rather than having another blunt conversation about wanting to be left alone to study verse, begging someone to turn off the nonstop television in the living room, those endless after-school afternoons when I awaited escape to Berkeley or anywhere new, but it never occurred to me that I could borrow Joni’s touching, pastoral lines and impersonate their spirit to dampen my own moods indigo, that she, or they, could be the spooks at my door.