Joni Mitchell's In France They Kiss on Main Street

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 In France They Kiss on Main Street

So, after "Boho Dance", I felt myself slowly converting into a Joni Mitchell fan. I went through "Hissing of Summer Lawns" again. To me in the present day, "Hissing" is an awkward album. It features incredible writing, but it's also languorous, it's too tired to congeal into something greater. I think the succeeding "Hejira" (1976) is better. But at the time I listened to it, I absorbed it completely. For someone who was just introduced to Joni Mitchell, and the awkward genre of "singer-songwriter", the lyricism was nonpareil. As Elvis Costello noted, she wrote books in her songs. And my favorite among them is their first, "In France They Kiss On Main Street".

I joke, half-humorously, half-seriously, that Joni should've won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature over Dylan. Her songs have better opening lines than begin most of the novels the winners write.

Downtown, my darling dimestore thief; in the war of independence, rock n' roll sang its sweet victories. Under neon signs, a girl was in bloom, and a woman was fading in a suburban room.

The flashing d's of "darling dimestore thief"; the ambiguity of what the girl is doing under neon signs; where the girl is doused in lights, the woman is sunk in the darkness of her empty house; and in the backdrop Joni associates the imagery of the American War of Independence (I think - it's weird because she's Canadian) and the counterculture movement of the '60s. You think your historical novel is so special? Joni sums it up in four lines.

(I admit I indulge in making fun of the Nobel Prize a lot. I make fun of literary awards in general. Here's a fun little bit of mockery I usually indulge in. I know what a Nobel, Man Booker, National Book winners' novel looks like. For the protagonist, pick your ethnicity, pick your gender, pick your sexuality, pick your disability, pick your obsession a la Swann, pick your neurosis; for your setting, pick your moment of social divide, ex. French Revolution, The Troubles; for your plot, your protagonist probably learns how to be "free" or some shit; and then pick a tragedy. Now you too know how to win literary awards!)

And just as soon as Joni sets this backdrop, she sets up the narrative of the song:

I said, Take me to the dance, do you want to dance? I love to dance; and I told him, they don't take chances, they seem so removed from romance. They've been broken in churches and schools and molded to middle class circumstance.

setting up immediately this extremely strong-willed, exciting character who puts you through the whirlwind of her life and her worldview. We know nothing about this world except through this character's eyes, and we take her social critique, "they've been broken in churches and schools / and molded to middle class circumstance" to be true. It's all the more true when one analyzes the poetry of these lines, the first three lines flashing with the a's of "dance", "chance", and the steaminess of "romance"; take, in contrast, the squares, who take only hollow o's, "removed", "broken", "schools", and "molded" whistling in the wind, through wide, vast, passionless fields made only of weeds. Of particular note is how Joni sings "they seem so removed from romance", conveying the tension between what we partake in versus what they deny themselves, elongating the outsets of "so", "removed" and "romance". Which o's she continues in the concluding line: "and we were rolling, rolling, rock n' rolling", using those same hollow o's to make wheels, moving away from the old dreary scene.

Downtown, the dance halls and cafés, feel so wild you could break somebody's heart doing the latest dance craze.

Gail and Louise, in those push-up brassieres, tight dress and rhinestone rings, drinking up the band's beers.

I'm not sure if these are the right way to structure the verses. I try to keep the meter largely consistent, thinking the lyricists have an unconscious feel for measure. It's an unusual choice to go for tercets, but here the choice works perfectly. Couplets pass by at the end of a breath; quatrains describe action; here, Joni in the tercet is caught up in the rush and excitement of the scene, yet training her eyes on the individual actors long enough for breath, focusing on Gail and Louise in those wonderful gerundives. Gail and Louise aren't doing, they are, they are part of a picture and Joni's glance quickly moves away from them.

Young love was kissing under bridges, kissing in cars, kissing in cafés, and we were walking down Main Street, kisses like bright flags on holidays.

Again with the gerundives, Joni giving so much color to the kissing going around her. "Kissing under bridges" is six feet (poetic meter), while "kissing in cars" and "kissing in cafés", are four and five. The first line, she is taking her time observing; the second, she is rapidly roving from scene to scene, as if in a car. Then, "kisses like bright flags on holidays"... beautiful image. Not a kiss felt but a kiss seen, and in seeing impacts the viewer.

Downtown, in the pinball arcade,

we take note here that Joni continues to use this "Downtown" motif, using it either to change time or to change the setting, showing that the "downtown" she speaks of is a complex, living, breathing organism that changes rapidly and energetically.

Anyway, back to it,

Downtown, in the pinball arcade, with his head full of pool hall pitches and songs from the hit parade,

he'd be singing "Bye Bye Love" while he's racking up his free play; let those rock n' roll choir boys carry us away.

I'm not sure what she means by "rock n' roll choir boys" here. I like to think it refers to the sound of pool balls smashing into each other, which she depicts in the rolling l's of "head full of pool hall pitches", the scintillating i's of "songs from the hit parade, / he'd be singing" and the raucous a's of "racking up his free play".

Sometimes Chickie had the car, or Ron had the car, or Lead Foot Melvin, with his hot-wire head.

We'd all go looking for a party, looking to raise Jesus up from the dead.

And I'd be kissing in the backseat, thrilling to the Brando-like things that he said.

This is where she gives up the act a little bit. Joni has so much fun singing this song, one wonders if this is her own experience. That last line, "thrilling to the Brando-like things that he said", is almost too tongue-in-cheek, as if she's too self-aware to really fall in love with those corny lines (Marlon would be, let's see, in his mid-thirties when Joni was a teenager. Maybe that's hunky?).

Thus, I never see "In France They Kiss On Main Street" as a song about romance or youth necessarily; I see it, oddly, as a historical recounting, a very slanted one at that. It's merely the story she sought to tell. It's the entrypoint to an album that is about female empowerment, not in any absolute sense, but in a relative sense. She begins the record blazing with this utopian fantasy of lust and equality only to then transition back to reality, into the quieter ways women express themselves, as on "The Jungle Line", "Shades of Scarlett Conquering" and "The Hissing of Summer Lawns". That she lavishes so much detail into her canvas, to frame it within a social context, to populate it with all of these characters and the cornerstones of their lives, is nothing short of remarkable in less than 300 words.

For this reason, Joni is one of the higher standards for art that I try to uphold. Whenever I write a passage, I reread it and say, "What's the essence of what I'm trying to convey? How do I say it in even less words?" Joni was able to get right at the heart of not just lust and desire, but the feeling of an unlimited, magical world where one is free to pursue themselves. I'm never satisfied until I can get that Joni Mitchell directness, that commanding gaze.

So, Swedes, get to it: she's still alive, and if you deign to give her the medal, we'll only remember you did not give them to Joyce, Kafka, Tolstoy, and Borges too, just to name a few.