Joni Mitchell – Blue vs. The Clash – London Calling
This has been a rotten one to call, though I suspect that’s a good thing. Likely there are more rotten decisions to come.
I’ll start out by saying that I’ve listened to Blue hundreds of times, and that up until now, I mostly knew The Clash’s most popular singles. And Blue should have been in my top thirty, but when I was selecting albums, I looked at the track list and thought there were a few that would annoy me now.
After listening to Blue again, it was a pleasant surprise to be mistaken about that. A few things about Mitchell are at their best on this album:
- She can write lyrical circles around most of the boys, and seldom, if ever, allows you to correctly anticipate the tail end of a rhyme or line. Go Dylan-lady, go.
- Her vocal stylings provide form for the songs as much if not more than the piano, guitar, dulcimer, drums. She uses her voice to syncopate and improvise, and again, it’s hard to anticipate exactly how and when she’ll switch things up.
- She blends genres and styles, and while she’s most often labeled a folkie, it’s easy to hear the influence of jazz and more. And this is early Mitchell, before she gets super jazzy adventurous (and often more annoying for it).
- She complicates easy notions of gender (both through vocal range and ownership of her subject matter), and it’s easy to see her legacy in artists like Prince, Bjork, and Antony.
A few specific things about Blue:
- The album is thematically cohesive, yet consistently reevaluating its themes. One form of cohesion I love: the word “blue” or “blues” appears in over half of the songs directly, and in those it doesn’t, it’s strongly implied (like “River,” where the word needn’t be stated).
- Blue is a work of unflinching realism, and yet it is reassuring. Many songs on this album upend their original declarations (“Last Time I Saw Richard,” for example). She writes without self-pity or sarcasm about love affairs, fame and wealth, and she does it in a way that makes a person inexperienced in all of the above actually empathize.
- For a thematically cohesive album, the songs are singular in their sound.
After revisiting Blue, I listened to London Calling three or four full times, and I enjoyed it all through each time. I know I will listen to this album again and again now that I own it. And Andrew’s right: “there’s not one dud song on it.” He’s also right that they manage to genre-blend and hop like nobody’s business, and that they’re just as emotional and political as Mitchell.
Still, I think the album lacks the combination of artistic chops and confessional immediacy that draw me to Blue. That’s no insult to London Calling: it’s just a matter of taste. I’ll also admit that it’s a rare double album that impresses me as much as a conventional album with a tightly constructed conceit. It’s part of the reason why Wilco’s Being There didn’t make my top 30, even though it contains many of my favorite Wilco songs. It just seems trickier to sustain a mood or mode of thought over an additional five to ten tracks.
So I’m stuck. It’s clear that both albums MATTER to 20th century popular music. Do I choose the album the critics favor? They’re both darlings, but The Clash is hands down higher-rated by the big name rock snobs. Or do I choose the album that engages me through and through? Then Joni Mitchell takes it.
Here is where I breathe and remind myself that Sufjan Stevens took down Nick Drake. Why shouldn’t Joni Mitchell at least stand alongside, or slightly edge out, The Clash? Let the chips fall…in the next round.
