Joni Mitchell - by Ruth Charnock (Paperback)

About the Book

"Joni Mitchell: New Critical Readings recognizes the importance and innovativeness of the musician and artist Joni Mitchell and the need for a collection that theorizes her work as musician, composer, cultural commentator and antagonist. It showcases pieces by established and early career academics from the fields of popular music and literary studies on subjects such as Mitchell's guitar technique, the politics of aging in her work, and her fractious relationship with feminism."--

Book Synopsis

Joni Mitchell: New Critical Readings recognizes the importance and innovativeness of the musician and artist Joni Mitchell and the need for a collection that theorizes her work as musician, composer, cultural commentator and antagonist. It showcases pieces by established and early career academics from the fields of popular music and literary studies on subjects such as Mitchell's guitar technique, the politics of aging in her work, and her fractious relationship with feminism. The collection features close readings of specific songs, albums, and performances while also paying keen attention to Mitchell's wider cultural contributions and significance.

Review Quotes

"A welcome addition to the serious scholarship on the creative contributions of Joni Mitchell. Approaching her work from fresh and surprising angles, the authors provoke a spirited conversation-eloquent, funny, cutting, dense with allusion. A loving look at the legacies and contradictions of a towering figure of popular music." --Lloyd Whitesell, Associate Professor of Musicology, Schulich School of Music, McGill University, Canada, and author of The Music of Joni Mitchell (2008)

"There's still a lot to explore in the work of Joni Mitchell. This eclectic collection of texts looks at some of the lesser-known aspects of her musicianship in a way that reflects the multiplicity of Mitchell and her audience." --Anne Karppinen, University Teacher in English, Open University of the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and author of The Songs of Joni Mitchell: Gender, Performance and Agency

"Joni Mitchell has been widely acknowledged as a central figure in popular music, yet as far as serious inquiry goes, she also seems perpetually underserved. This may be because much writing about Mitchell either veers precipitously into the personal and emotional, or focuses determinedly on technical analysis of her music. This anthology crucially aligns both approaches as a way of challenging the boundaries between the pop heart and the scholarly mind. Decades-long conversations about Mitchell, feminism, and race are advanced in new ways here, while wholly surprising inquiries into her relationship to disability and queerness vastly expand the conversation. And in every essay, there's a sense of what Mitchell calls 'solid love'-tested and blessed-the kind of deep work on a crucial artist that only comes from a scholar's self-aware commitment to her work over time." --Ann Powers, Critic and Correspondent, NPR Music, USA, and author of Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music (2017)

About the Author

Ruth Charnock is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln, UK. She is the author of Anaïs Nin: Bad Sex, Shame and Contemporary Culture (forthcoming, 2019) and various articles and essays on Joni Mitchell, Marvin Gaye, Anaïs Nin, contemporary American literature, and popular culture.