Joni Mitchell: Classic or Dud

Are you assuming she cares about such things, what's so henious about putting out unreleased material?

i get the urge to listen, i just have weird issues about people's wishes being posthumously ignored - where that's the case, not necessarily here

we've been over my very harsh take on this before. in the absence of explicit permission from the author/artist I don't think unpublished/unreleased stuff should be printed/released. I don't care how many great works the world would have to live without as a consequence, exhume Max Brod and piss on his bones, etc.

(And I'm a huge Joni Mitchell fan, probably no artist alive more important to me, but there's no way I'm listening to demos she didn't consent to having released, or engaging in idle speculation about whether she cares they're out there or not - she's tightly involved in her catalogue, if she wanted me to hear the demos they'd be on the box set. It doesn't matter how good they are, my pleasure isn't actually the most important thing in the universe.)

Yea that is harsh.

lol the part about how I think Max Brod can go hell is harsh. The part about "it's easy, don't listen to stuff a living artist didn't release through the channels readily available to her" is pretty easy. If she'd wanted to make it available, she could - when you grab stuff like that, you're essentially saying "as long as I myself am not the guy who a) stole it or b) broke trust with the artist, it's cool" - 100% not down with that, I've been on the other side of it, it sucks.

I guess I had a wishy-washy comeback about how she is a now a Legacy artist *ugh*, pretty much retired etc: Why not make the big sign-off-on-yr-past box set like Neil Young, but I know it really doesn't hold water.

I like bootlegs, live/studio whatever, always have done. I don't like that ugly, entitled attitude that many collectors share, but I do get the tingles when I know some artist I love is putting out a bunch of unreleased material. My other half works in the back catalogue dept of EMI and she deals with Bowie, who has a good attitude towards his archive, basically 'It wasn't good enough them, why would it be good enough to release now?', which I think the answer to which would be *cause I (the artist) have a massive tax bill/divorce settlement or am sitting here on my broke arse*

think it was borges who noted the ambiguity re: the kafka/brod situation - ie what was stopping kafka from destroying the manuscripts himself?

cos he thought he might want the stuff up to the point at which he was dead?

it is very hard to destroy your own stuff. you want to put it somewhere where nobody will ever see it, or have somebody else destroy it. or imagine magic scenarios where you did it & learned what you learned from it but then it's gone. but just speaking as a guy who now destroys his own stuff if I have even a second of "you know, I don't think I want people to hear this": it's just hard to destroy your own stuff. when you do it, it means that you, too, will not be able to hear/read it again; if you wanted to salvage a line or a phrase or a change from it, better have a good memory, because destroyed means destroyed. if you intend to keep working up to your last day, it's nicer to have anything you might still use lying around. ergo I don't find any ambiguity in the kafka situation. he asked a friend to do something he couldn't do himself, his friend betrayed him, the world sucks and people are awful, smoke weed every day

obv. I have ~~feelings~~ about this issue lol ok

i agree with you, a lot of writing etc. is junk writing that precedes true writing and people shouldn't have to show their working out if they don't want to.

xp aero, surely you could keep private copies for yourself?

record everything in code

In Moscow they canoodle on Leningradsky Prospekt, that sort of thing

xxp and make sure that any friends who could be your max brod die before you do.

Make real sure.

we live in a world of Max Brods now. destroy everything

esp grocery lists

Brod only saved, what, Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle? Three of my least fav. Kafkas

My favorite was in that bunch.

i thought those little short stories (my favorites of his) were published while he was alive.

and to be fair to Brod, he did tell Kafka he wouldn't burn the papers

we only have Brod's word on that & he's a pretty untrustworthy motherfucker so I don't buy it

I should start a separate Thread of Max Brod hate though I get real irrational when I think about that dude I wanna beat his ass

I thought the story was only published in The Trail but nah ok

"Before the Law" (German: "Vor dem Gesetz") is a parable contained in the novel The Trial (German: Der Prozess), by Franz Kafka. "Before the Law" was published in Kafka's lifetime, first in the New Year's edition 1915 of the independent Jewish weekly Selbstwehr, then in 1919 as part of the collection Ein Landarzt (A Country Doctor). The Trial, however was not published until 1925, after Kafka's death.

I read everything here until The Shorter Stories this past summer and I was blown away by how good they were, good job, Franz!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_Stories_of_Franz_Kafka

under, not until

i'm sure those individual album scores are hella arbitrary but a 10 for court and spark/hissing and an 8 for hejira? :\

heh, my thoughts exactly. i don't think any of them are 'perfect' albums.

The review is best on For The Roses, I think. Leaving aside the score I think the Hejira bit was too high-level (even just relative to the still-short treatment the other albums got).

Jessica otm for saying that Hejira is for old people tho

"old" meaning over-30s that is

this is true, the police confiscated my copy

i'm sure those individual album scores are hella arbitrary but a 10 for court and spark/hissing and an 8 for hejira? :\

I appreciate Hopper throwing down the gauntlet for Hissing and giving it a 10 -- that record is always, always the one I play for people who only know the earlier records, those first two tracks in a row destroy all preconceptions of what she's about. Even if Hejira goes deeper for many fans once you are a fan, the idea of using the 10s to flag the three you think fencesitters should hear first sort of works for a PF review

Reckless Daughter = my favorite

loved the review, going to go home tonight and listen to as many of them as possible

I think Jessica is probably right in general but Hejira was my favourite album in the world at 14 and Court & Spark is the golden run album it took me longest to warm to fully.

totally got lost again in Reckless Daughter last night, there's no way it isn't the high point for me. it's too bad this review steers people away from it, less by dealing with the music than by going all P.C. on the packaging. you can rail on the fact that Joni dressed herself as an Indian with a word balloon saying 'How!', but to then immediately transition into mentioning 'Paprika Plains' as the highlight of the record without mentioning... the lyrics... well, space constraints, I guess? You can, in passing, safely call out blackface as not-okay-ever, but when you've got a jazz-fusion record with the artist in blackface with a word balloon next to her face saying 'Mooslems, Mooooslems! Heh, Heh, Heh', then there is officially something more complicated going on than you are ever going to be able to deal with in under one paragraph

I mean, yes, Mingus made me nervous the first time I heard it, but one night last year I came home and put it on and it was perfect, from beginning to end

Noticed they'd released a box of all of her lps to the late 70s, it was in the local HMV this week. I couldn't see anything on it about remastering so wondered, assume a box like that does indicate that though.
Had been thinking of getting hold of a few of those lps if I could get hold of a decent remaster.

Anybody got that set?

sorry just took a quick glimpse back at previous messages, & didn't seem to be what was being talked about. But now I see that was the reason the thread was revived.
It just was something I'd meant to google when I saw it on the shelf but had slipped my mind on getting home so was interested if anybody had 1st hand familiarity with it yet.

I've bought it and played through "Court", "Hissing" and "Hejira". Don't think they've been remastered, the packaging doesn't say, but it only lists the year of release on each record, and usually the year of the remastering is added, isn't it? Plus, I added "Hejira" to my ipod and the volume level is low. But it sounds good, anyhow, so I don't complain.

Thanks to recommendations by ilx's own Mordy, I got a used copy of Clouds and Heijera today - my first two Joni albums ever (I only knew maybe one or two songs before that)

I planned to listen to both today, but Clouds appears to be stuck on repeat :)
i love it so much

(truthfully I was looking for Blue or Court + Spark but the record store had neither and I had a gift card burning a hole in my pocket. turns out settling for these two was a lovely decision)

Wait till you get 'Blue,' then you'll be in heaven. I love a lot of her other work, but 'Blue' really stands above on every level.

Do people love or hate Jaco's bass on Hejira? My dad is reading a Jaco bio where he claimed that Joni offered him a few hundred thousand to impregnate her (for his musical talent, I suppose). I hate to see it, but I can totally imagine her doing that!

hate to say it (and I'd hate to see it!). sorry bout that

I love Jaco's bass. Anyone who says otherwise should not be trusted on anything.

I guess I'm not the only one who thinks Hejira would be nowhere near as good without him. I don't like to think of myself as a fretless bass guy but between this and Mick Karn, I guess I am!

I'm generally not a fan of fretless electric bass guitar, but yeah, Hejira is unimaginable without it.

I came late to Clouds, thinking she would still be finding her feet. Boy, was I wrong. Might be my second fave Joni, after Blue.

i'd like a thread of indispensable bass albums, come to think of it!

Listened to some of Heijera on the drive home...fretless bass takes some getting used to, at least for me. But so far i love Amelia, and the title track.