02 May 2010

Joni Bitchell?

Joni Mitchell has always bugged me as some sort of self-important artist.  I remember seeing her in Rochester, maybe with Bob Dylan, and she was getting pissed off that the crowd (the nerve!) was still finding their seats when she was performing.  Last week she came out and called Bob Dylan a phony in an interview with the L.A. Times:

LA Times: As well, you've had experience becoming a character outside yourself [Mitchell caused controversy when she appeared as an African American male on the cover of her 1977 album, "Don Juan's Reckless Daughter"].The folk scene you came out of had fun creating personas. You were born Roberta Joan Anderson, and someone named Bobby Zimmerman became Bob Dylan.


Joni Mitchell: Bob is not authentic at all. He's a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I.

So everything about Joni is truly original and Bob (it's not even his real last name!) Dylan is a phony.  Interesting.  This article questions what plagiarism actually is.  Dylan, with no apologies to anyone, lifted the melody for "Blowing In The Wind" in 1962 from the old folk song "No More Auction Block," a song that had long passed into the public domain.  Dylan copped Woody Guthrie's persona for years before he moved to Greenwich Village from Minnesota.  The genius of Dylan, the turns of phrases that he collected, was that he made much of the stuff his own.  There is a snippet of vocal on the Bob Dylan Bootleg album where he is a dead ringer for Woody, not just in tone, but the remark and the words themselves.  The folk scene of the 1960's, not that I am any sort of expert, was artists doing old, standard folk songs.  It's what folk songs are.  You might as well bust Joseph Campbell for writing about mythology or George Lucas for writing Star Wars

If you've read my blog beyond this post you will see lots of stuff lifted from somewhere or someone else.  "Are You There, Vodka?"  The Pop Culture thing I like to do towards the end of the week is not an original idea.  What is an original idea?   Is Willie Nelson's Red Headed Stranger not truly his?  He didn't write all those songs, but look what he turned them into:  something truly unique with his signature on it.   Sometimes I think that Neil Young could be the only true original artist alive today (with, I suppose, apologies to her Heiness Joni Mitchell - who's real name is Roberta Joan Anderson - but I guess that's okay).  He's the only guy weird enough to come up with the stuff he comes up with.  So Joni (if that is your real name): gfy!

11 comments:

  1. yeah, you're right!
    picasso already said "Good artists copy, great artists steal”

    I always thought Roberta Joan Anderson was fake & now we know why ;-)

    a bobfan

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  2. Joni Mitchell, in the late '70s, got into a rather oafish "jazzer" pretentiousness, both in her music and her persona. She's got no call to call other people fake. Let's face it, though, Bob pisses people off. He's a brat and always will be.

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  3. Joni, Joni, Joni . . . get over yourself. I agree that you and Dylan are like night and day . . . but, perhaps, not in the way you meant it.

    Let your music speak for itself and leave the name calling to critics.

    BTW isn't spelling your name in that odd way kind of . . . how shall I put this . . . pretentious?

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  4. Yep, Bob has always been a brat, that is true. He calls himself a song and dance man now and with the Victoria's Secret commercial and all that Alicia Keyes talk, I don't know how seriously the guy takes himself anymore. Unlike some people. The phrasing of "He and I..." kinda cracked me up too.

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  5. Yeah, except Neil Young keeps copying himself which is fine with me. Find a great thing and stick with it. Dylan though, call him what you like, he keeps us guessing, so that makes him very interesting and his theft brings a lot of these great forgotten works by others to the publics attention again. He was on the ball back in the day when he said that he did more for Dylan Thomas than Dylan Thomas ever did for him. The same goes for everything else Love, Theft, History. Dylan revisits and reinvents. A True Artist!!

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  6. Hey Anonymous - that's a hilarious quote about Dylan Thomas! Never knew that. And Neil DOES copy himself. Also never thought about that. And now that I think about it the opening chords to Neil's "Mr. Soul" is the Satisfaction rift from the Stones. I think Neil said something like "I just really liked it and had to use it."

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  7. Joni Mitchell seems to kind of have a chip on her shoulder re: her popularity. You can't force someone to like your music! The sense of entitlement I feel from reading her comments through the years is insulting to me - she has way more fame/wealth than most the of the poor working stiffs who buy CD's and go to concerts. Get a grip.

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  8. Neil has appropriated a number of Dylan melodies (that Dylan himself probably took from somewhere else)... the folk-rock process?... all folk music and all rock and roll builds on what came before... there are few... if any truly original melodies... the same is true of much "classical" music... it's what an artist does with it that counts...

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  9. There are only 12 notes and 26 letters to choose from (a quote simi-borrowed from Quincy Jones) Isn't Joni Mitchell's "Sparkle on the Ocean" eerily reminiscent of Bob's "Spirit on the Water" The latter is a much better song, in my opinion, and more "original", too.

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  10. I hate women SO MUCH! Joni Mitchell probably needs psychiatric help and is a huge bitch. Obviously she's the problem, not Dylan's sycophantic, overly protective and eyebrow-raisingly misogynistic fans!

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  11. If Dylan is a plagiarist, why is it that NO ONE has ever sounded like him or witten songs like his? If you are absolutely unique, you are not a plagiarist.

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