Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell (22 page)

The content of Nietzsche's work is woven into Mitchell's oeuvre—from the diction of the lyrics to the use of imagery and metaphor. In fact, once you start combing through Mitchell's work looking for Nietzschean nits to pick, they are everywhere. The god-killer lurks in every corner and crevice of Mitchell's creative odyssey because, like Zarathustra, she learned to chastise her own god—and her own rise to pop goddess status.

We can start with a song that Mitchell herself has discussed at length: “The Three Great Stimulants,” which is a direct reference to Nietzsche's
The Birth of Tragedy
. As Mitchell told Elvis Costello in
Vanity Fair
, she wrote the song for the next generation struggling to deal with an increasingly vapid value structure. She says she had already gone through the dislocating effects of being worshipped and idolized, of being simultaneously famous and misunderstood, and figured she could look back on the phenomenon to squeeze meaning from it.

“The three great stimulants of the exhausted ones are artifice, brutality, and innocence,” she explains. “The more decadent a culture gets, the more they have a need for what they don't have at all, which is innocence, so you end up with kiddie porn and a perverse obsession with youth.” Costello seems to agree but points out the obvious: “You can point at them in the length of a song, but even with all your skill, you run the risk of people pointing the finger at you.” Mitchell accepts the responsibility: “But you have to. It's just too serious.”
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Except for the ever-earnest Bono, “too serious” is a sentence fragment you don't hear from the mouths of most pop idols. But as a true creator, Mitchell feels the responsibility of her calling, where critical and financial success is second to seeking truth. These are the themes Nietzsche addressed at the age of twenty-seven in
The Birth of Tragedy
as he attempted to issue the wake-up call to the enlightened, who recognize the need for something deeper—but often end up lost in the candy store of pleasant intellectual distraction: “One is chained by the Socratic love of knowledge and the delusion of being able thereby to heal the eternal wound of existence,” he says. “Another is ensnared by art's seductive veil of beauty fluttering before his eyes. Still another by the metaphysical comfort that beneath the whirl of phenomena eternal life flows on indestructibly.”
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These three stages of illusion, Nietzsche concludes, stall growth.

Mitchell translated these elements into “artifice, brutality and innocence.” “The Three Great Stimulants” confused a lot of people when it came out in 1985 on
Dog Eat Dog
, but Mitchell was unfazed. As she tells the
Vancouver Sun
's John Mackie in January 2010, in one of her last interviews:

People go “we don't know what she's talking about and we don't care.” Especially “The Three Great Stimulants,” which was never understood... well that's Nietzsche the philosopher talking about Germany rotting. Well, we're rotting just like Germany. So I borrowed that concept. What do you do when you're in a state of moral and ethical decay? You call to the three great stimulants of the exhausted ones. Artifice, you escape through entertainment. Brutality, our generation produced the most sadistic art in the history of film, anyway. And comedy, everything lost its heart and became brutal. And innocence of course should be corruption of innocence, that's why all this pedophilism and sexual tourism is on the increase, because what do rotten decadent pigs like best but to pervert innocence.
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In the same breath as Mitchell attempted to decrypt “The Three Great Stimulants” for interviewers, she often found herself explaining another tune with Nietzschean threads: “The Reoccurring Dream” from 1988's
Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm
. Nietzsche wrote about “eternal recurrence” as the essential fact of existence because life is a cycle, a great big circle game of being and not being. He made Zarathustra its central icon. “I, Zarathustra, the advocate of life, the advocate of suffering, the advocate of the circle—I call you,” Zarathustra says in the chapter “The Convalescent.” “I hear you! My abyss speaks, I have turned my ultimate depth into the light!” Merging the beginning with the end is an act of recreation because it redefines all notions of time and space: it can make the night day, and day night. The image Nietzsche associates with this dynamic process of constant rebirth is the Ouroboros—a snake biting its own tail. “Everything goes, everything returns; the wheel of existence rolls for ever,” he says. “Everything departs, everything meets again; the ring of existence is true to itself for ever.”
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Mitchell's “Reoccurring Dream” highlights our shallow quest for pleasurable repetition and distraction—“This is the reoccurring dream / Born in the dreary gap between / What we have now / And what we wish we could have”—and condemns its commercial exploitation: “Glamorous picture people rise / Radiant! / Gleaming down from screens and pages / Ooh glamour before your very eyes!... If you had this / If you had that / Wouldn't it be fabulous... Order your youth secrets of the stars / Call now just $9.99.”

Yet again, no one understood the arrow Mitchell launched from her bow, even though it landed in the blood-red bull's eye and nailed our consumerist culture as the culprit that is forever pulling us away from our core selves and the creative essence. As she told Costello: “So nobody understood ‘The Reoccurring Dream,' but after September 11, when we were coerced to do a national duty and go out and shop, surely people could begin to see what I was getting at.”

Mitchell poked at the same pompous posers in
Dog Eat Dog
's “Fiction”—a song that points out various levels of communal denial:

Fiction of the moralist
Fiction of the nihilist
Fiction of the innovator and the stylist
Fiction of the killjoy
Fiction of the charmer
Fiction of the clay feet and the shining armour
Fiction of the declaimers
Fiction of the rebukers
Fiction of the pro and the no nukers
Fiction of the gizmo
Fiction of the data
Fiction of the this is this and that is that ahh!

The song contains some tantalizing Nietzschean content, from “the nihilist”—a term synonymous with Nietzsche—to the running theme of fact vs. fiction, what is and what could be—and the very notion of absolutes, which Nietzsche perceived as a sign of intellectual decrepitude. Unfortunately for us, the state has enshrined these notions of good and evil and sold us the lie of creative realization through consumption—as Nietzsche's Zarathustra observes, “The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. This lie creeps from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.' It is a lie!” he protests. “It was creators who created peoples and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life. It is destroyers who set snares for many and call it the state.”
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Nietzsche's words weren't understood in their day, and Mitchell's “Fiction” met a similar fate. Few understood the song that contained a cameo from Rod Steiger as a holy roller and the electronically rendered “voice of truth” that sounded like it was coming from a bullhorn. “Fiction” and “The Reoccurring Dream” were frequently cited as examples of Mitchell losing her way. She expresses her frustration about these misperceptions to Costello with an anecdote about how one radio host listed a variety of Joni clones (from Rickie Lee Jones and Suzanne Vega to Tracy Chapman and Sarah McLachlan), only to conclude the imitators were better than the original. “The commentator said, ‘There are all these young women coming up and they have all listened to Joni Mitchell. You can even tell what records that they are listening to,'” Mitchell explains. “And they played this song with the first three chords you learn on the guitar, insipid lyrics, no depth, no clarity, no metaphor, nothing. Then at the end of the show they said. ‘All of these girls are beating Joni at her own game. Look how she's lost perspective,'” Mitchell laments. “And they played ‘The Reoccurring Dream.'”

In several interviews, Mitchell defends the song and tries to explain why it's misunderstood. “[‘The Reoccurring Dream'] is a beautiful piece of music, but melody is not the point of it. It's textural and there are snippets of melody,” she told Jody Denberg. “One of the hardest things for me to bear is to be told again and again that I have no melodic sense or that there's no melody here. My argument is... does Marvin Gaye have melody? I try to sing the words and give them their proper inflection. Every time I sing it, I sing it different.”
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The red circles Mr. Kratzman drew on her school-assignment poems must have danced in Mitchell's head, because she resisted cliché at every turn, even at the cost of her commercial success. She sings things differently every time. This immersion in Nietzschean philosophy bubbles up on just about every album, sometimes directly.
Dog Eat Dog
contains the lines: “Money is the road to justice / and power walks it on crooked legs / Prime Time Crime/ Holy hope in the hands of / Snakebite evangelists and racketeers / and big wig financiers.” The skepticism about organized religion and hate-peddlers is Nietzschean in feeling, but the actual words “power walks... on crooked legs” are taken directly from Nietzsche's “Of the Chairs of Virtue” in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
: “Honour and obedience to the authorities, and even to the crooked authorities! Thus good sleep will have it. How can I help it that power likes to walk on crooked legs?”
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There's more. Mitchell's lyrics frequently allude to lions and dragons, which have Nietzschean resonance: the lion is the beast with enough courage to rise up and growl in the face of the status quo; the dragon is the fire-breathing dogma of the old god. The song “Trouble Child” describes a “dragon shining with all values known / dazzling you—keeping you from your own / where is the lion in you to defy him?” and “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” includes the lines, “Shaped like a lion / It has the head of a man / With a gaze as blank / And pitiless as the sun / And it's moving its slow thighs / Across the desert sands.”

“Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is a reference to W.B. Yeats's poem, “The Second Coming,” written after the First World War. As Mitchell writes in an explanatory note for
The Fiddle and the Drum
, the Alberta Ballet production inspired by her music, “I've included two new songs in the ballet but most of the material comes from an album called
Dog Eat Dog
, which was poorly received in the '80s, and was almost immediately repressed for more than 20 years. The set also includes two poems, which I set to music but did not write. One is Rudyard Kipling's ‘If,' and the other a song I call ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem,' which was adapted from Yeats's poem ‘The Second Coming.'”

Yeats was a huge fan of Nietzsche—a fact well chronicled in academic circles and in his bookcase, which contained a copy of
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
, given to him in 1902 by the American lawyer John Quinn.
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“But in the loneliest desert the second metamorphosis occurs: The spirit becomes a lion; it wants to capture freedom and be lord in its own desert. It will be an enemy to its ultimate God, it will struggle for victory with the great dragon,” writes Nietzsche. “The great dragon is called ‘Thou shalt.' But the spirit of the lion says ‘I Will!'” Joni Mitchell was fluent in all these different philosophical stances because she dramatizes the metaphysical struggle in songs such as “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” “The Sire of Sorrow,” and “The Priest.” More importantly, she questions fundamental Judeo-Christian concepts. “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” for instance, probes our relationship to the god concept and the so-called “ultimate creator” above us: “Surely some revelation is at hand / Surely it's the second coming / And the wrath has finally taken form / For what is this rough beast / Its hour come at last / Slouching toward Bethlehem to be born... Raging and raging / It rises from the deep / Opening its eyes / After twenty centuries / Vexed to a nightmare / Out of a stony sleep / By a rocking cradle / By the Sea of Galilee.”

This raging beast, rising from the deep, is the repressed spirit of man—the one with the power to recreate the world through the gift of creation. Weak faith won't heal and release us. Only creation can. In a 1997 interview with music theorist Daniel Levitin in
Grammy
magazine, Mitchell discusses how the creative experience realigns the creator-creation dynamic by making it internal and self-exploratory. Levitin says, “You said ‘great singing is between the singer and God.' Are you actually singing to God?” Mitchell replies, “I don't really call in spirits or deities, or anything. I just quietly centre myself; I sober myself... I hardly ever use the word ‘God.' As a matter of fact I asked Dylan one time: ‘What do you mean by God, 'cause if you read the Bible, I can't tell God from the devil half the time! They seem to me to act very similarly.' And Dylan said, ‘Well, it's just a word that people use.' I said, ‘yeah, but when you use it, what do you mean?' And he never answered me.”
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But later, when Dylan went through his Christian phase, Mitchell says, “He came up to me and said, ‘remember that time you asked me about God and the devil? Well I'll tell you now.' And he launched into this fundamentalist crap, and I said ‘Bobby, be careful. All of that was written by poets like us; but this interpretation of yours seems a little brainwashed.' ‘Poets like us...' he said. He kind of snickered at that. But there certainly is a creative spark whether or not it has gender or personification.”

Mitchell's isolation of the “creative spark” proves her awareness of something pulsing in the spheres—she just refuses to call it god. She'd prefer to take responsibility for the creative power within her. She says she could call some of what happens “divine inspiration,” but she'd rather not. She sees herself as a secular humanist—and that can be a risky place to occupy in the increasingly dogmatic dogpatch of the U.S. “If you're a fundamental Baptist or a Catholic, these are really dangerous thoughts,” she tells Levitin. “I am forbidden literature on a lot of church lists because I raise doubt, and because I'm opposed to blind faith. I know the power of blind faith and it's a beautiful power. Don Juan in the Castaneda books has a beautiful, unifying line: I believe, not because I care, but because I must.”