Issue 2, Volume 1: Beyond Tyranny: Women of the Future

Musical artists often make attempts to explain their work, but it is always the music that ultimately speaks on their behalf - an invisible language that supercedes dialogue between musician and audience and evolves through intimate exchange. In a succession of moments, the artist delivers their soul's confession through poetry, melody and chord, and we, their fans, are mysteriously captivated as they pluck at our heartstrings, bringing clarity to what is often an amorphous state. And, it is those beloved, rare and masterful musicians who lift us into a kind of spiritual union while simultaneously exposing our humanity with brazen honesty. Contemporary musicians Joni Mitchell and Bjork are two ladies of song who have earned their right to speak on our behalf.

The status of troubadour has long been primarily the domain of men. A woman's musical expression was and continues to be marginalized within popular, marketable genres, always including some form of sexual exploitation. But in recent decades, these two women emerged and endowed the world with their exquisitely unique feminine voices. Both Joni Mitchell and Bjork transcended longstanding glass ceilings, attaining international acclaim and commercial success as truly innovative, groundbreaking artists. With the power of their unleashed originality, these ladies supercede both classification and time: like true visionaries, they soar ahead of their critics and often their audience.

Joni Mitchell

Joni has the extraordinary ability to capture moments in time with unfathomable precision and clarity of mind. Her song "Woodstock" distilled the very essence of the counter-cultural movement of the 60's. Yet she remained artistically detached from those times, preferring instead a more fluid and undefined exploration in which to follow her own muse, and served the revolution with lyric and song as a young and fresh voice. Equally, that revolutionary time served her as the door into a long-standing career, enabling her to establish a strong foundation as a prolific poetess of profound acuity, unique harmonic sensibilities, and a powerfully innovative feminine voice in a male-dominated industry.

Her willingness to honestly and shamelessly express her inner struggles surpassed all existing frameworks of lyrical expression, as those conflicts between love and career are uniquely female. Never before had a woman so openly laid bare the angst of the paradox between the unconditional surrender to her lover and the need for absolute freedom to aim for uncharted artistic expression.

[She] created an all-female universe with intuition, wisdom, intelligence, craftsmanship, and courage ... a world driven by extreme female emotion...

Joni carries this 'feminine universe' into every aspect of her artistic life. In a transcendental kind of way, she redefined what a woman in a 'man's world' could achieve through the melding of words with complex chordal structures to express her own interpersonal conflicts. Timothy Crouse of Rolling Stone wrote, "In portraying herself so starkly, she risked the ridiculous to achieve the sublime".

A Restless Soul

Success in one genre would always presage the leap into a new one. The woman known as a young, self-trained folk artist of the 60's, re-emerged time and time again, reborn within different styles and expressions, and eventually Joni's soundscape naturally evolved to jazz. First she broadened her musical palette by playing with jazz musicians, incorporating their tonalities. By the mid 1970's, she produced 'fusion' masterpieces: "The Hissing of Summer Lawns", "Hejira" and "Don Juan's Restless Daughter". Soon after, jazz great Charles Mingus would ask her to contribute to his finale. Neither her fans nor his would comprehend and appreciate the genius of his choice. And while those fans and the critics took years to come around, Joni continued to advance musically.

Through the 80's and 90's she would explore electronic music influences, choral and orchestral accompaniments, and later would be considered the pioneer of world music, well before 'world music' was a formal classification. Each new work brought her greater success and recognition. Throughout her timeless career while continuing the exploration of how to express herself within complex harmonic musical forms, she established what has become known as the unmistakable sound of Joni Mitchell.

Inspiration as Mentor

Joni credits Bob Dylan for expanding her poetic style through personal narrative and storytelling. Yet, the enormous influence Joni has had on other musicians is clearly evident by the impact she has had in a wide range of musical styles; country, funk, R&B, pop, jazz, electronic, experimental, punk, and folk. Covers and tributes dedicated to her musical legacy already number in the hundreds from artists as diverse as Led Zeppelin, Sarah McLachlan, Amy Grant, Diana Krall, Annie Lennox and Prince, to name only a few. In 2007, Nonesuch Records released the CD, "A Tribute to Joni Mitchell", featuring 12 internationally acclaimed artists. Singularly, it was Bjork who gave the most stunningly exuberant and over the top performance with her rendition of the obscure "Boho Dance" selected from Joni's 1975 release, "The Hissing of Summer Lawns."

Bjork speaks of Joni Mitchell's influence in the liner notes:

The first record of hers I discovered was Don Juan's Daughter; I was around fourteen, fifteen and I knew it by heart (still do, every instrument, every noise, every word). I would love to cover sometime some of the songs of that album but they might be too sacred for me, too immaculate for me even to be able to suggest that they might be done in any other way.

Bjork's rendition of Joni's Boho Dance supercedes any semblance of one musician merely covering another's work. Instead, Bjork completely metamorphosed to become the passionate intent of Joni's song. Maintaining her own artistic style, voice and unique pronunciation, Bjork seemed to share a timeless moment with Joni, an essential understanding, while employing Joni's own words. And though Joni had crafted unique chord transitions and jazzy instrumentation to convey her feminine meaning behind that "old romance, the Boho dance," Bjork belted out her lament with fiery passion "Jesus was a beggar, he was rich in grace" with aching soul - open and visible. In an industry rife with superficial knock offs, how rare and precious it is to experience a sublime moment with an artist who could so completely 'get' Joni Mitchell.

Bjork

Bjork was formally trained in music, developing an acute ear for precision and excellence and helped to accelerate her into experimenting with many musical styles including jazz-fusion. In her early teens, she was already recording and receiving radio play at home in Iceland, putting together and performing with bands, and by her late teens she was touring the UK and Europe as a punk rocker. Bjork's growing popularity drew attention to the cult following that was developing on both sides of the Atlantic. She remained, however, fiercely independent - rejecting offers to sign with large record companies - preferring instead to maintain complete creative control through her own record company.

That passionate independence isn't only demonstrated in her business sense, but in her music with its strangely appealing vocal styling soaring over dance beats. Like Joni, Bjork's lyrics speak from her female's soul's perspective, about love and her exploration of life as a woman and mother. Additionally and with artistic flair, she dresses fearlessly feminine with unique expressions of sexuality and personal experiences of gender - not the expectations of what she would be required to portray - to service and sell some abstract male fantasy.

In a recent interview in Spinner Magazine, Bjork stated, "As a singer-songwriter, what I do is write about how the human feels." Perhaps so, but the mind through which this singer-songwriter creates is intrinsically female. Her expressions of passionate love in "Come to Me" are nurturing and comforting, and her song "All Is Full of Love", speaks of a love that expands into the universal. In the adventurousness of her writing craft, she experiments and plays like a little girl, but brings to her verse the ancient and eternal wisdom of a wise woman.

The sensual tapestry Bjork weaves with the musical contributions and collaborations of her guest artists become a kind of rich aural wall of compelling sound. Whereas Joni is considered a "musician's musician" and broadened her tonal landscape through musical genre, Bjork extends her actual creative workspace into the far reaches of the globe. On her most recent work, Volta, she incorporates masters of the kalimba (thumb piano) from the Congo, the kora (harp lute) from Mali, the pipa (ancient lute) from China, and an all-female brass ensemble featuring French Horns from Iceland. Combined with her lyrics about living powerfully, passionately and breaking through fears, Bjork constructs, not just music CD's and videos, but a vision of an empowered future, from a woman's eyes and a woman's heart.

Both Joni and Bjork have heralded future paradigms by allowing their passions to carry them forward. They draw our attention to current paradigms unexamined or unrecognized. They soar as troubadours and poets, melodious or shocking, ancient and contemporary, and as women, beautiful with innate femininity. And in the wake of these women's personal explorations, we acknowledge them for bringing their unique voices to the table of artistic masters of lyric and song. They have truly demonstrated themselves to be "Women of the Future".

Bjork quotes from atributetojonimitchell.com