Speculations on Joni Mitchell’s Blue and universality

Today’s Music Historian’s Corner examines a classic album forever associated with confessional songwriting, Joni Mitchell’s 1971 masterpiece, Blue. I want to show that Blue and its reception reveal how ideas of universality are often, paradoxically, culturally specific–that is, they are not universal at all and are often determined by privilege. Still, at least in its lyrics about love and heartbreak, Blue could be universal in its appeal. But the lyrics about travel suggest privilege in the situations described.

So, given frequent constructions of Blue as “universal,” I speculate that with its heavy travel imagery marked by class and race privilege, the album and its reception highlight how issues of race and class deserve greater attention in discussions of universality–including in mainstream music criticism and scholarship, and especially when artists come from privileged positions via race and class. I do not mean to suggest that race and class matter more than gender, as Blue is often discussed in studies of popular music and gender due to Mitchell’s status as marginalized by gender. However, the act of naming privilege is an important component to undermining systems of privilege and oppression, and the intersections between race and class privilege and gender oppression might point to important connections for studies of popular music.

Cable television channel VH1 once called Blue “a chronicle of love gone wrong,” but as one scholar, Sheila Whiteley, notes, for such a seemingly linear “chronicle,” the album “is like a cycle of songs that has no real beginning, no real end.” The album’s apparent formlessness despite form–seeming unresolved yet cohesive–is reinforced by Mitchell’s heavy use of travel imagery in the lyrics of “Carey,” “All I Want,” and “California,” among others, as well as in the original guitar tunings and chords that Whiteley and author Michelle Mercer note. These unique lyrics and guitar arrangements make for a deeply personal album, and yet Blue has been called “universal.” Why?

Take a look at these quotations:

• Katherine Monk, in Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell, calls Blue “arguably the best album of all time: Blue speaks to the artistic soul in everyone because it comes from an undeniably true place.… Blue is the classic it is because it was so truthful that it nailed the universal.”

• Joni herself speaks in Mercer’s book, Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell’s Blue Period: “A black pianist named Henry said that I made raceless, genderless music. I really treasure that he felt that way about it, because that’s what I hoped I would do.”

• Calling Blue one of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, Rolling Stone magazine writes that “Mitchell sounds utterly alone in her melancholy, turning the sadness into tender, universally powerful art.”

I want to suggest that while the album may seem universal, its lyrics revolving around travel may be true to a limited experience: middle-class recreational travel and journeying. In “Carey,” various tourist destinations are named–Amsterdam and Rome, accentuated by “the wind… in from Africa” and “my fancy French cologne”–while in “California,” Spain, “a park in Paris, France” and “a Grecian isle” color the scene, with Mitchell’s voice soaring as she nonetheless longs to get back to California.

In addition to writing about these specific geographic locations, Mitchell opens the album with the lines “I am on a lonely road and I am traveling, traveling, traveling, traveling/ Looking for something, what can it be?” In that song, “All I Want,” as well as in “California,” “River” and “This Flight Tonight,” Mitchell writes about traveling or desiring to travel. As previously noted, the sense of travel is reinforced by the unusual guitar tunings on multiple tracks, with the album creating an overall sense of wandering that author Marilyn Adler Papayanis notes. This sense of wandering and its middle-class connotations are complicated because they are marked by gender marginalization. As Papayanis writes, in the 1960s,

The rambling songs (“Traveling Man,” “The Wanderer,” “King of the Road,” “I Get Around”) that celebrate freedom from confinement–often in tandem with love ’em and leave ’em womanizing–are, essentially, phallocentric, male narratives. …By the same token, girls (for the most part) didn’t wander…. Blue is an album that calls into question the gender of wandering.

So in a sense, the travel imagery in Blue embodies both class privilege and a rethinking of which gender(s) can take advantage of this kind of journeying. Thus, Mitchell arguably re-inscribes which class(es) can wander and travel, even as she undermines the patriarchal gender roles that dictate women’s participation (or lack thereof) in these practices.

Still, traveling and freewheeling journeying to various destinations often associated with tourism illuminates issues that black feminist bell hooks mentions in her essay, “Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination.” Hooks writes on vastly differing cultural experiences of travel across lines of race, class, and gender.

Hooks quotes theorist James Clifford’s essay, “Notes on Travel and Theory,” in which Clifford writes about “the term ‘travel,’ despite its connotations of middle class ‘literary’ or recreational journeying, spatial practices long associated with male experiences and virtues.” Hooks furthers Clifford’s subsequent questions about expanding traditional discussions of travel by saying:

Theories of travel produced outside conventional borders might want the Journey to become the rubric within which travel, as a starting point for discourse, is associated with different headings—rites of passage, immigration, enforced migration, relocation, enslavement, and homelessness. Travel is not a word that can be easily evoked to talk about the Middle Passage, the Trail of Tears, the landing of Chinese immigrants, the forced relocation of Japanese-Americans, or the plight of the homeless…. From certain standpoints, to travel is to encounter the terrorizing force of white supremacy.

Ideas like these suggest that we need to interrogate whose and what experiences are on the other side of Mitchell’s narratives, including the people “in this tourist town” (in “Carey”) whose stories get overlooked. Would a truly universal album be able to include voices and perspectives of those marginalized in such narratives while still being spearheaded by someone who is white and middle-class?

Still, the lyrics and music on Blue are so personal that claims of the album’s universality might ignore the social locations of those calling it universal: the album may appeal to individual experiences, often of those with privilege, involving travel. And yet, the album’s great themes are love and loss, not travel, which means that Mitchell’s lyrics may indeed appeal to a multitude of audiences worldwide.

However, the issues surrounding the travel imagery complicate ideas of the album as “universal.” Still, when I discussed some of these ideas with a professor I had at college, she talked about how she and other African American feminists in the 1970s listened to Blue then, so, again, perhaps some aspects of the album are more universal than others.

So, one may ask, if travel isn’t the central theme of the album, why bother complicating ideas of the album as universal by discussing issues of privilege and oppression within it? I believe that attempting to name privilege can help break down prominent constructions of privilege and oppression, rather than reinforce them, because privilege and oppression are different sides of the same systemic coin, so to speak. As sociologist Michael S. Kimmel writes in the introduction to Privilege: A Reader,

Exciting new research… is examining what previously passed as invisible, neutral, and universal. We now can see how the experience of “privilege” also shapes the lives of men, white people, and heterosexuals. Such an inquiry, long overdue, will enable us to more fully understand the social dynamics of race, class, gender, and sexuality and how they operate in all our lives.

Today a multitude of books and other resources examine issues of privilege and oppression. And within the last 20 years, there has been an increasing amount of scholarship on the intersections between privilege and marginalization in music, including Gayle Wald’s essay, “One of the Boys? Whiteness, Gender, and Popular Music Studies,” and Reebee Garofalo’s textbook Rockin’ Out: Popular Music in the U.S.A. These sources are strong examples of incorporating issues of simultaneous privilege and marginalization in music.

A final note: in my mind, none of these issues detracts from the stunning beauty and power of Blue. Even if I am not a woman and have never traveled outside the United States, there is plenty of longing about love and loss in this album that I feel like I can relate to. But naming what is and is not “universal” in art constructed as such is important work for scholars and activists to undertake. If more marginalized voices demand to be heard, we all must listen, whether or not the experiences of anyone are universal.