Sometimes … one does sense a degree of California School of Pointless Insight in [Mitchell's] work. Sometimes I feel I've put myself through all manner of tortuous self-analysis with her and am no closer to knowing what to do about it, and the vehicle of escape—whether it be a big yellow taxi, the pick-up pitch of a fast lady trying to compete with the hockey game in the bar of the Empire Hotel, or a street corner where someone is providing free clarinet music—is not always there when I need it…. Pretentious, some say [of "The Hissing of Summer Lawns"], meaning (I gather) not artistically but intellectually. Others claim that the less serious parts of it are too full of jive—including too much use of jive and words like it—and they don't want her making what she does jibe with this label someone pinned on her, Queen of Rock….
I wonder … if "Hissing" may have been a longer jump than she could gracefully make. Her liner-note message—"The whole unfolded like a mystery, and it is not my intentions to unravel that mystery for anyone"—reads a little bit nervous, a little bit defensive, to me. This could be merely the eye of the beholder playing its tricks, of course; it does seem that in "Hissing" Mitchell was trying for the kind of ambiguity that the ear of the beholder could put to private uses. Spiritually, she may have primed her followers for all this, but stylistically she has not; without giving much warning in previous work, she slips—in ambitious songs like Don't Interrupt the Sorrow and Shadows and Light—into a sort of Joycean stream-of-consciousness way with words, and a job of making grammatical sense of them must be done before one can start to cogitate upon what they mean. Did she conclude there was no way to be more direct about these things, or did she, consciously or unconsciously, court mystery—was she, consciously or unconsciously, trying to impress those academic types who like to have things as abstract as possible so the rabble can't unscramble them? Too soon to tell, I think, but keep in mind that the simplest answer sometimes is the best, and the simplest answer is that she was again flying in the face of, trying to fly away from, a set of rules.
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