Joni Mitchell, and lots of others...
I spend a few hours every morning skimming through all my email subscriptions and newsletters, RSS feeds on Feedly, and of course the previous night's traffic on NT. I always hope something will snag my eye, and send me chasing off after ... whatever...
This morning, there was a link to an article about Joni Mitchell, so off I went!
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Getty Images/Ringer Illustration
Joni Mitchell: Fear of a Female Genius is a good bio, and an interesting attempt to situate the artist. Better yet, it's chock full of excellent links to other very good articles, clips, and videos. If you're in the mood, you can get lost for hours! (I did... )
I'm not doing my usual format for these seeds, precisely because of all those included links. They're a pain for me to recopy, so just this once, I'm going to insist that you go hit them in their original setting...
One of those links took me to:
Should Women Make Their Own Pop Music Canon? . Its subhead sets the stage: " I listened to only female singers all summer. Here’s what I learned. "
Janet Jackson in Anaheim, Calif.
Ilona Szwarc for The New York Times
The author is a guy. That's imporant. " Should that be important?" is the question that underlies the article. Anyone who likes music... and thinks about it... must read!
Before canons are handed down, someone has to make them. The atmospherics around that consecration tend to default to masculinity because the mecha-nisms that do the consecrating are overwhelmingly male. Sometimes canons get shaped in favor of great men at the expense of great women. The recent HBO documentary series “The Defiant Ones” is about the conjoined musical legacies of the producers Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre; it includes a few passages about Stevie Nicks. When she was dating Iovine around 1980, anytime Tom Petty came over, Iovine made her hide in the basement. Nicks becomes, in her own description, the “mini baby pizza maker” for the boys in the studio. Maybe she was — and was made to do — these things. But because it’s a movie about the brilliance and tenacity of her ex, we have to live with the depiction of her — the Stevie Nicks — as a cellar-dwelling toaster-oven lady.
We take female musicians just seriously enough not to notice that we don’t actually take them seriously enough. They matter in the present. But posterity is another matter. Posterity is keeping them down in the basement in case Tom Petty comes over.
Finally, Wesley Morris's summer-long female-artist binge followed a list: The 150 Greatest Albums Made By Women .
Oumou Sangare performs at the Africa Music festival
in Delft, Netherlands, in August 1993.
Frans Schellekens/Redferns/Getty Images
Guess what I'm listening to right now...
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Music. Really, really good music.
You like Joni Mitchell, Bob? Maybe you should read this article:
That's a fascinating story, Buzz. It's good to have passionate people for things like music festivals.
I'm not really a Joni Mitchell "fan". I'm too conservative to get into that "really strange tuning", as you said. I was more classical, more Judy Collins. Still... from reading about other musicians, I am aware of Mitchell's importance among them.
Sad truth be told: I don't know much about music. Neither of my parents played anything, nor was particularly interested. So while I've always liked to listen, I've never done anything. I don't use the word "regret" very much, but that is definitely one...
Folk Music was a big part of my life for about a decade from the early 60s to the early 70s, but then I got more involved in charity work and became a director and officer (eventually President) of the Variety Club in Toronto, and then became an International Ambassador of Variety Clubs International (now known as Variety - The Children's Charity). I don't know if you know anything about Variety and the things they do for children with physical or mental challenges.
Women's music...