I’m ‘friends’ with Joni Mitchell ‘official’, on Facebook. A recent post from her concerns a re-release of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. I had the temerity to say, in a comment on the post, that I much prefer the original cover.
And, no surprise, some pious person has taken a potshot, referring to the original cover as a ‘racist caricature’. Oh dear, humanity may well be screwed, if we’re all really that dim witted.
The replacement cover image is taken from photo sessions for the Dog Eat Dog album cover, when Joni, by now with Larry Klein, was going all ‘80s: perm, power dressing suit style garb, and lyrics railing against the Reaganomic (or Thatcherite, here in the UK) cultural drift.
To use such an image is to Bowdlerise and misrepresent the people and the times that produced the wonderful music of Don Juan.
It is, ironically, a triumph for the kind of shallow lying pop culture Joni bemoans on Dog Eat Dog. It is populist simplicity airbrushing over messy history, to make it conform with modern ideas/ideals. And to make money, of course. That justifies all.
It’s a form of Capitalo-Stalinism, pretending to be morally sound.
This article, about Joni and Don Alias, is interesting… And there’s a very interesting story about the painting shown above. Joni painted Don… with an erection!* He felt uncomfortable about this, and requested she remove it (not his actual willy, but the painted one… um, she hadn’t painted his…this could get weird). So she did.
It was Joni’s choice to ‘black up‘, as the character ‘Art Nouveau’, for the cover of Don Juan. More on this shortly.
But if the history re-writers want to be properly thorough, they should change Don Juan, in the title, as well, while they’re at it. He was, after all, probably a fiction, of Carlos Castaneda’s imagining. A ‘racist caricature’, by the terms of this genuine ‘PC gone mad’.
The genesis of Art Nouveau may be revealed here, in an intriguing BBC News piece. That’s definitely worth a read.
Meanwhile, back to now; the madhouse that is America under Trump will be keen – ‘manifest density’, and all that – to export their moral superiority, no doubt. The kind that floods the world with porn, but won’t allow an erect penis to be seen in any other way than covertly, in furtive shame.
But violence? They’ll deregulate violence, both real and imaginary, such that this sort of thing (see below) becomes a laudable comic romp, sanctified by its economic success:
The virile member? No way. The pornography of violence, yes please!
One of the most grotesque ironies in this vomiting forth of simplicity, ignorance and subterfuge, is how the so-called ‘woke’ agenda has been embraced by the ultra-capitalist machinery of advertising. Such that we’re drowning in a tsunami of smiling mixed-race couples, or under/over-represented minorities.
The effect – driven not by a quest to improve the world, but the urge to create yet more sales/wealth – is often not to promote tolerance and understanding, but to stoke petty discontents into smouldering hatreds.
But back to Joni, and Don Juan. I think it’s tragic that her inspired cover artwork has been vandalised by the myopic execs of current times.
This second image of Art Nouveau must be causing apoplexy across the whole spectrum. What’s that he/she is saying? Holy Baby Jesu with a Kalshnikov! Maybe the execs could rescue it all with an appeal to ‘trans-rights’?
To boil the whole debacle down into suitably facile contemporary parlance… FFS!
FOOTNOTE – Execs Censoring Artists!?
The sidewalk is a history book
And a circus
Dangerous clowns
Balancing dreadful and wonderful perceptions
They have been handed
Day by day
Generations on down
The above are a few lines from Joni’s lyrics to Charlie Mingus’ ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’. Are the kind of folk who changed her record cover going to take a hatchet to her lyrics? Are penny-pinching dullards to censure/censor the poetic insights of artists!?