Joni Mitchell's The Boho Dance

I've given myself the task of writing about one song a week for 2024 because, well, I think it'd be fun.

Joni Mitchell's The Boho Dance

IT'S JONI MITCHELL MONTH MOTHERFUCKERS!!! Joni Mitchell is my favorite songwriter - with an asterisk - so I wanted to spend four weeks talking about four exceptional songs from exceptional albums by an exceptional artist. I'll focus, for these write-ups, on two: 1975's "The Hissing of Summer Lawns" and 1974's "Court and Spark".

Elvis Costello introduced me to Joni Mitchell. Maybe Prince too. Wait a minute, hold on, I just found the article that had piqued my interest: Pitchfork's celebration of the 40th anniversay of "The Hissing of Summer Lawns", which quotes Elvis in Vanity Fair saying that "Shades of Scarlett Conquering" was "a whole book's worth of writing".

We're not talking about "Shades of Scarlett Conquering", however. At the time I read this article, I decided to see what the fuss was about and started listening to "The Hissing of Summer Lawns". I remember time passed sedately - I thought the music was fine - until I struck at a certain song, the topic of today's write-up.

"The Boho Dance" opens much differently than the prior tracks on the album. It does not open brightly with strings, as "Edith and the Kingpin" and "Don't Interrupt the Sorrow", nor with pounding drums as "The Jungle Line", it opens with the quiet keys of the piano. After what feels like a false start, of Joni not sure what to play, she sings,

Down in the cellar, in the boho zone, I went looking for some sweet inspiration; oh well, just another hard time then, with Negro affectations.

I was a hopeful in rooms like this, when I was working cheap. It's an old romance, the Boho dance, it hasn't gone to sleep.

The way Joni sings "Down in the cellar, in the boho zone" woke me up from my slumber, and I haven't slept since. She's not descending stairs, she's descending memory, and the hard D of "down" and the harsh r outset of "cellar" conveys the bitterness of this memory; and yet when she ascends to the "boho zone", elongating the o's of "boho", she wrings out the sweetness of these bad memories. That's always been Joni's strange gift: she sings o's like a wail and a whisper, her o's become wind, they denote freedom, something she sought always in her life. This theme is continued onward in "I went looking for some sweet inspiration", Joni elongating the e's of "sweet"; here, despite her hard-won cynicism, she does indeed look innocently for something that interests and inspires her.

By the way, "boho" is "bohemian". I think if Joni wrote this today, she would use our equivalent: "hipster".

The verses above aren't correct. I go by what I hear. For years I read "oh well, just another hard-time band" as "hard time then". The actual lyrics make more sense, but I wrote my edition to show how much the song demonstrated its melancholy to me. Which means now I have to justify the "Negro affectations" bit. In the actual version, it's Joni commenting on bands that were ripping off of black music (I love it, but this describes the Rolling Stones' 1972 "Exile on Main St" perfectly). In my version, I always thought there was a black waiter or otherwise worker who gave Joni a bit of sympathy, which furthered her melancholic state. I'll probably keep reading it this way.

Again with the o's in "I was a hopeful in rooms like this", Joni genuinely sounds like an innocent here, looking upwards at the ceiling lights for whatever dim illumination was afforded her. At that time I was a hopeful myself, trying to be a writer. Whenever I hear Joni sing these lines I think on my own struggles. The song is like a fine perfume to me, her memories evoking memories of mine.

The song is a reflection of hers, on her career, on her rise to fame, on her relationship to certain people after achieving said fame. What stands out is that she expresses neither anger nor sadness at these events. I mean, she gets a little blue, but for Joni, ever the consummate writer, she merely observes, she, at her piano years later, merely thinks, and wonders at why people do things. Who writes like this now? No one.

But even on the scuffle, the cleaner's press was in my jeans, and any eye for detail caught a little lace along the seams.

Beautiful l's in those last two lines. "Detail" ends with l, an l hardly pronounced, but that little l becomes the "little lace along the seams", thus showing you, by the words themselves, how the press became obsessed with something so small as the clothes she wore.

And you were in the parking lot, subterranean, by your own design, the virtue of your style inscribed on your contempt for mine.

Jesus was a beggar! he was rich in grace, and Solomon kept his head in all his glory. It's just that some steps outside the Boho dance have a fascination for me.

"Subterranean, by your own design," depicting a kind of darkness that comes from believing the righteousness of one's contempt, which is broken by the dazzling brightness of the lines "rich in grace / and Solomon kept his head in all his glory."

Funny thing as I write these lyrics down in written form. In other write-ups it was unclear to me when punctuation should be placed. Joni Mitchell's is the clearest where I know when she picks a thought up and then sets it down; the lyrics actually resemble poetry.

You read those books where luxury comes as a guest to take a slave, books where artists in noble poverty go like virgins to the grave.

Here is no "Eleanor Rigby"-esque bit of compassionate condescension. This is Joni's harshest critique in the song, and it comes so softly. It tracks with the themes of the album, which center on characters who do less doing in their lives and more thinking. "You read those books where luxury / comes as a guest to take a slave" is an amazing put-down to somebody who believes in a twisted form of "purity", but, again, Joni is merely observing and adding her opinions. She doesn't seem to have it in her to actually be mean; thus her commentary arises to storytelling, where the u's of "luxury" and "guest", so wide, so expansive, so seductive and beautiful, swoop down vampirically to "take a slave", the harsh a's denoting violence. There's not a little sarcasm detected in "books where artists in noble poverty / go like virgins to the grave", the robust o's of "noble poverty" leading to the slender i's of "virgin" and the palate-descending "grave".

Then,

Don't you get sensitive on me, 'cause I know you're just too proud. You couldn't step outside the Boho dance now, even if good fortune allowed.

She easily plays with these two different modes, of intense novelistic detail and straight-laced talk, becoming a character herself then writing dialogue seamlessly and without transition.

It's not one of her greatest songs - it always ends awkwardly in my eyes - but I may have been swooned by "The Boho Dance" because I felt she was talking to me. "Boho Dance" feels like a conversation she is having with someone about fame and art, where they sit at a table and Joni's eye flits from time to time to other people in the scene, "a camera pan[ning] the cocktail hour / behind a blind of potted palms / and find[ing] a lady in a Paris dress / with runs in her nylons." In other times in the conversations she makes bizarre but colorful metaphors, as with the "priest with a pornographic watch, / looking and longing on the sly."

I felt, and I still do feel to a lesser degree, a kind of hermititude when making art. There's certainly a loneliness to it, plumbing through the inexpressible and trying to put words to it. I wager the singer of "Boho Dance" is speaking to herself as well. She is wavering into believing the bohos and the purity of their art, and she convinces herself throughout the song that her life, after all, is her life, and she must move on from these memories and these people she used to know.

That's the inimitable quality of Joni's music, which is strangely absent in any other's: that of her music speaking to everyone, it does not create an audience. Even when she is seemingly speaking to herself, she disassociates, and finds herself doing more looking rather than thinking. Every other songwriter is saying something to someone, every other songwriter wants you to form an idea of their music, every other songwriter wants to make themselves live through the music, but Joni seems legitimately to write because she needs to write, which is an odd idea to reconcile with the fact that she was signed onto a huge label (well, not at the time: Asylum would be taken over by Warner Communications in 1972, after "Blue"). At that time, she had no reputation to defend, and no one wanted to listen to the material on "Hissing of Summer Lawns". But it did not matter for Joni, who for some reason took as her subject boring people in boring places bored with their lives. She saw something in them, and her listeners, decades and decades after her music's making, saw something in her.