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An erudite tangle of history, criticism and memoir, ripe for debate. By Grayson Haver Currin.
Travelling: On The Path Of Joni Mitchell ★★★★
Ann Powers
HARPER COLLINS. £25
SOMETHING ASTONISHING happens about three-quarters through Travelling, the informed and argumentative new examination of the life, career and legacy of Joni Mitchell. Ann Powers – one of the United States’ most commanding music critics, ever-ready with thoughtful appraisals of difficult questions – hands over 10 pages to another writer. Powers has been wrestling with the infamous cover of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter and its oft-forgiven image of Mitchell in blackface, a black man she dubbed “Art Nouveau”. She is considering the assorted contexts: Mitchell’s other appropriations, her black collaborators, works that might have motivated her, the power struggles of a white woman.
She hits a wall: “Confronting Mitchell’s racist moves… required me to check my own.”
And so Powers prints her interview with Miles Grier, a fellow Mitchell scholar who has persuasively written about unexpected intersections of race and culture. “To really accept how fucked up her racial politics are does cost you something,” Grier tells Powers. Yet, Grier acquiesces, the art remains great.
That is the only time Powers cedes pages in Travelling. It is a telling moment for how she wrestles with Mitchell at large – completely and without apology, upending myths to look for truth beneath them and questioning accepted narratives about so-called genius and the genesis thereof. She mines Mitchell’s contradictions like veins of unknown riches; you will not agree with everything, a lesson of Mitchell’s oeuvre as of this book.
Powers fastidiously digs into both lyrics and music here, looking for traces of truth in the stories Mitchell sang and following her stepwise quest as a restless bandleader. Hoping not to fall under her subject’s fabled spell, Powers did not attempt to interview Mitchell, but candid talks with a dozen other witnesses – Graham Nash, Larry Klein, James Taylor, et cetera – offer fresh exposition. More important than biography, though, is the way that Powers connects decades of Mitchell’s work to the wider world, from feminist ebbtides and complicated racial barriers to demographic trends and cultural lodestars, all things Mitchell pulled from and pushed against.
Powers is fond of a third-hand concept called “the broken middle,” where some novel movement creates a rupture in the moment and, so, the possibility of something new. She successfully applies that concept not just to Mitchell’s fusion but her life at large. Travelling
