(Jazz-Rock, Experimental) Joni Mitchell - The Hissing Of Summer Lawns - 1975, FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

Fans and critics regard this as an artistic turning point, and the beginning of her unique blend of folk, jazz and rock.

"In France They Kiss on Main Street", the starter, is a jazz-rock song about coming of age in a small town in the rock & roll-driven 1950s. (The song was released as the single from the album and reached #66 on the Billboard charts.) "The Jungle Line" borrows a field recording from Africa of the Drummers of Burundi (mistakenly called 'warrior drums' in the credits), onto which Joni dubs guitar, synthesizer and her vocal line. The lyrics pay homage to the works of the French Post-Impressionist Painter Henri Rousseau, in particular his 1897 painting "The Sleeping Gypsy". Mitchell blends details of his works with imagery of modern city life, the music industry and the underground drug culture. "Edith and the Kingpin" marks a return to jazz in a story of a gangster's new moll arriving in his home town. "Don't Interrupt The Sorrow" is an acoustic guitar-based song with stream-of-consciousness lyrics.

"Shades of Scarlett Conquering" is an orchestral based piece about a southern belle. The title track, "The Hissing of Summer Lawns", is about a woman who is being treated as part of her husband's portfolio, with the central image an imagining that the sprinklers on suburban lawns are in some way expressing disapproval at the materialistic culture contained in those houses. "The Boho Dance" comments on people who feel that artists sell out their "purity" for commercial success, with an ironic glance at those who said this of Joni herself. "Harry's House/Centerpiece" concerns a failing marriage. "Sweet Bird" is a sparser acoustic track that is a slight return to Joni's more confessional singer-songwriter style. The album closer is "Shadows and Light", consisting of multiple overdubs of her voice and an ARP String Machine (credited as an ARP-Farfisa on the album sleeve).

The African theme of "The Jungle Line" is continued on the album sleeve, with an image of natives carrying a huge captured snake (both were embossed or "raised" on the original vinyl album cover). The men and the snake are superimposed against the Beverly Hills suburbs, with Mitchell's own house marked in blue on the back cover.

The album was not as radio-friendly as Mitchell's earlier work, and despite the album attaining initial commercial success, reaching #4 on the charts and quickly going gold, contemporary reviewers were not entirely kind.

Joni Mitchell evolved from the smooth jazz-pop of Court and Spark to the radical Hissing of Summer Lawns, an adventurous work that remains among her most difficult records. After opening with the graceful "In France They Kiss on Main Street," the album veers sharply into "The Jungle Line," an odd, Moog-driven piece backed by the rhythms of the warrior drums of Burundi — a move into multiculturalism that beat the likes of Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, and Sting to the punch by a decade. While not as prescient, songs like "Edith and the Kingpin" and "Harry's House — Centerpiece" are no less complex or idiosyncratic, employing minor-key melodies and richly detailed lyrics to arrive at a strange and beautiful fusion of jazz and shimmering avant pop.

Jason Ankeny

With The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Joni Mitchell has moved beyond personal confession into the realm of social philosophy. All the characters are American stereotypes who act out socially determined rituals of power and submission in exquisitely described settings. Mitchell's eye for detail is at once so precise and so panoramic that one feels these characters have very little freedom. They belong to the things they own, wear and observe, to the drugs they take and the people they know as much if not more than to themselves. Most are fixed combatants in tableaux, rituals and scenarios that share Mitchell's reflections on feminism.

As might be expected, Mitchell's approach is very cerebral. In "Don't Interrupt the Sorrow," a poem of almost impenetrable mystery, she voices the core of her vision. Among other things, the song parallels modern forms of female subjugation with both Christian and African mythology in imagery that is disjunctive and telegraphic:

He says "Your notches liberation doll"
And he chains me with that serpent
To that Ethiopian wall
Winds of change patriarchs
Snug in your bible belt dreams.

"Edith and the Kingpin," a nightmarish urban tableau, portrays a pimp/pusher/mobster initiating a new girl into his stable of dope-entranced concubines. "The Jungle Line" also uses drug dealing as an effective metaphor for sexual and racial enslavement. Here again, Mitchell, never one to disavow the powerful glamour of evil, pulls a brilliant twist, uniting images of cannibalism, wild animals, slave ships and industrial squalor with the gorgeously innocent paintings of imaginary jungle scenes by the late-19th-century French Primitive, Henri Rousseau.

Always Mitchell displays enough moral ambiguity in her lyrics to avoid condescension; her latent impulse to anger is consistently redeemed by a compassionate, seemingly genuine sorrow, as well as by a visual artist's impulse to perceive the beauty in all things. The tension between Mitchell's moral and aesthetic principles is resolved with special grace in "Shades of Scarlet Conquering," the full-scale portrait of a southern belle very similar to Tennessee Williams's Blanche DuBois. Here Mitchell's feminist sensibility is implicit in her compassion:

Beauty and madness to be praised
It is not easy to be brave
To walk around in so much need
To carry the weight of all that greed

If Mitchell's view of the outcome of feminist struggle seems pessimistic, it is not totally hopeless. "The Hissing of Summer Lawns" and "Harry's House—Centerpiece" pose opposite solutions to a similar situation: the suburban wife as her husband's captive trophy—materially comfortable but emotionally and spiritually famished. In the first song, the wife remains with her husband:

Still she stays with a love of some kind
It's the lady's choice
The hissing of summer lawns

In the second, which is far superior, she leaves him. Here Mitchell's lyric evokes genuine conflict. Her excited fascination with the chic kineticism of New York high life sets up the tension between a life the writer perceives as attractive but dangerous as well:

He opens up his suitcase
In the continental suite
And people twenty stories down
Colored currents in the street
A helicopter lands on the Pan Am roof
Like a dragonfly on a tomb

The song then segues effortlessly into the Lambert, Hendricks and Ross tune, "Centerpiece," whose smug marriage proposal (" 'Cause nothing's any good without you/Baby you're my centerpiece") in the context of Mitchell's story seems devastatingly sexist and shallow as well as seductively hip. The song, moreover, doesn't disown the wife's responsibility for the marriage and its breakup. In the coda, the abandoned husband remembers his wife with her "Shining hair and shining skin/Shining as she reeled him in." Mitchell understands the enormous power and restlessness of a true siren.

Images of entrapment and enslavement (an artist to his patrons) also inform "The Boho Dance," the album's other song set in New York. Inspired by The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe's clever diatribe against the art world establishment, this recollected dialogue depicts the hypocrisy of a scene that only pretends not to be thoroughly commercialized.

Two philosophic songs, "Sweet Bird" and "Shadows and Light," fill out the album's schematic concept. The first is a serene meditation, tinged with sadness, on the fading of youth ("all these vain promises on beauty jars") that develops into a fatalistic lament for all that will eventually be extinct.

In sharp contrast to the languid reflectiveness of "Sweet Bird," "Shadows and Light," Mitchell's first venture into a quasi-liturgical writing style, stands halfway between incantatory prayer and sermon and also unravels some of the clues to the mystery of "Don't Interrupt the Sorrow." The song unites the antinomies of beauty and evil, freedom and slavery in a supremely relativistic statement of personal faith. While acknowledging the power of devils and gods, Mitchell perceives them as male myths, necessary for the creation of inevitably patriarchal systems. But "laws governing wrong and right," Mitchell recognizes, are "ever broken."

If The Hissing of Summer Lawns offers substantial literature, it is set to insubstantial music. There are no tunes to speak of. Since Blue, Mitchell's interest in melody has become increasingly eccentric, and she has relied more and more on lyrics and elaborate production. This parallels Mitchell's growing interest in jazz, a form that would seem the ideal vehicle for developing her gift.

Four members of Tom Scott's L.A. Express are featured on Hissing, but their uninspired jazz-rock style completely opposes Mitchell's romantic style. Always distinctly modal, Mitchell's tunes for the first time often lack harmonic focus. They are free-form in the most self-indulgent sense, i.e., they exist only to carry the lyrics. With the exceptions of "Shades of Scarlet Conquering" and "Sweet Bird," neither of which boasts a strong tune but at least have appropriately lovely textures, the arrangements are as pretentiously chic as they are boring.

The album's most flagrant example of pseudo-avant-gardism is the drum- and synthesizer-dominated arrangement for "The Jungle Line." Where Mitchell's "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire" from For the Roses was a truly sinister evocation of addiction, its angular tune coiling on an intensely seductive vocal track, "The Jungle Line," which is quite similar in theme, sounds brittle, gimmicky and enervated. "Shadows and Light" suffers from too many vocal overdubs and a synthesizer that sounds like a long, solemn fart. The only catchy melody is the non-original "Centerpiece," and it lacks altogether the wit, sophistication and inventiveness of "Twisted," Mitchell's earlier excursion into the Lambert, Hendricks and Ross catalog.

If Joni Mitchell intends to experiment further with jazz, she ought to work with an artist of her own stature, someone like pianist Keith Jarrett whose jazz-classical compositions are spiritually and romantically related to Mitchell's best work. The Hissing of Summer Lawns is ultimately a great collection of pop poems with a distracting soundtrack. Read it first. Then play it.

STEPHEN HOLDEN, January 15, 1976

The Hissing of Summer Fawns

Overall Album Score: 9.0 out of 10

This is the first Joni Mitchell album where I`m find myself abnormally delighted with.

I mean, it`s not actually a better album than the average Joni Mitchell album released from the beginning of time until now, but it`s definitely the weirdest. It`s for that reason, I`m tempted to start proclaiming this album my favorite of all the Joni Mitchell discography, because I`m probably the only person who will!

Oh, and Prince too, apparently. Weirdly enough, Prince is quoted as saying this album is the only album [he] ever enjoyed from beginning to end. So, in addition to looking fantastic in black briefs, the weird appreciation of Joni Mitchell`s The Hissing of Summer Lawns is another thing I have in common with Prince.

But, as I stated, this really isn`t any better than the previous Joni Mitchell albums. It`s just different.

How? - you ask the stupid Internet critic, who doesn`t get any money for writing these reviews, which are worthless anyway.

Simple, - says the Internet critic who earns just enough money to afford soda crackers for breakfast. It continues in the folk-to-jazz vein that Joni Mitchell had been traversing for a few albums now.

Interesting, - you ask, while offering the stupid Internet critic 50 percent of your next paycheck, which he really is quite grateful for.

Indeed so, - he responds. And, there`s some weird experimentation stuff in here. Plus, there`s a song that sounds eerily like a song from an old Commodore computer game from 1988 even though this album was released in 1975.

Wow, - you say. Tell me more, o stupid Internet critic who I promise to give lots of more money to in the near future.

I shall, - I respond. Just for you, I will write an overall album sum-up and track reviews for The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Just scroll down.

Awesome! - you respond as you scroll down. ... as you scroll down

Dude, scroll down.

Overall Album Score: 9.0 out of 10 (I think Joni Mitchell was just getting tired of writing that normal music that she knows everybody`s going to like and jumping out of her skin a little bit.)

Average Song Score: 9.1 (Um... Good songs!)

Album Tilt: 9.0 (A very distant album... and very distancing, too, but actually very very very pleasant to listen to.)

Artist Rating: 9.0 (This is the first time it struck me that Joni Mitchell is a very peculiar person in a not-obvious sort of way. I totally DIG THAT ABOUT HER!)

Track Reviews

In France They Kiss on Main Street 9.5/10

I know where else they kiss in France. And do you know what else? Joni Mitchell says "braziers" in this song. SHE`S DIRTYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!! And she`s also far from her hippie roots. While the song`s lucid, easy melody is like her old stuff, the instrumentation is much more extravagant. Hear me, people: THERE`S AN ELECTRIC GUITAR IN HERE!!!!!! It`s a very pretty song.

The Jungle Line 8.5/10

Chances are, if you`re on this Web site, you have extensively played Nintendo/Atari/Games on the old Commodore/etc. I`m sure it`s not just my insanity when I notice that the instruments in this song sound like they were taken off a computer game enjoyed by millions in 1988. And, when was this song written? 1975!!!!! Joni Mitchell was certainly a visionary! Actually, other than the ominously accurate Commodore 128 computer game noises, this song sucks. It`s just a bunch of drum noises, Joni singing an ordinary tune, and a boisterous drunken cheer every once in a while. But, seriously, this song deserves an 8.5. I can`t express that enough.

Edith and the Kingpin 10/10

Joni Mitchell does the world a disservice by abandoning her video game songs and resuming her former-hippie, now-fruity-jazz-lady persona. And actually, this is a much better song. Mitchell`s voice is the sweetest voice I`ve ever heard (sans that one dream I had where I heard Heather Locklear`s voice calling me to the room with fresh laundry) and the instruments are dang pretty, too. Of course, this song sounds *ahem* unabashedly 70s soft rock and *ahem* AM radio-ish, but then again, I`m 15 percent homosexual.

Don`t Interrupt the Sorrow 8.5/10

Does this sound like the same song as the last one? *listens more closely* Oh yeah, it is. And it`s not as good. Because I said so. Seriously, I don`t know what my justifications are anymore of awarding these songs specific ratings! Alright, I thought of why I don`t like this song as much: It`s not as PRETTY. BOOOYAHHHH!!!

Shades of Scarlett Conquering 9/10

You know, I could always pretend I know what these songs mean by reading their titles, but ... crud. Shades of Scarlett Conquering, I`m just at a lost. For a start, Scarlett is misspelled probably because Joni Mitchell was too busy licking toads to write proper hippie songs anymore. This song is weird, actually. And it`s weird in a very subtle way, much like the song`s title. It`s pretty and appealing when you`re just listening to it, but if you pay very close attention to it dude. This song is weird. Just take my word for it.

The Hissing of Summer Lawns 8.5/10

As opposed to the previous track, I understand this song title. Lawns that have sprinkler systems often hiss in the summer. And that`s what this song is about! SPRINKLER SYSTEMS!! Or rattle snakes who hang out in your lawn. I don`t know. This song is nice, but MAN!!!!! Do you actually expect me to explain the reason I give these ratings? You`re not really reading this not really.

The Boho Dance 8.5/10

Like a priest with a pornographic watch. I personally like the pornographic watch where the hands of the watch are legs and I shouldn`t think of such things. And, I shouldn`t do the Boho Dance, either, because it`s a DIRTY DANCE. And, um, this is a pretty song. She`s not making sense to me, but life doesn`t make sense to me, either, so this all pretty much evens out in the end.

Harry`s House/Centerpiece 10/10

Okay, I figured out what the problem with this album is. It`s EASY LISTENING! The only not-easy-thing-to-listen-to-song was that one that sounded like the computer games, and, because I`m a product of the video game generation, I have a hard time concentrating on these dang EASY LISTENING SONGS!!! But, alas, this song that sounds like Joni Mitchell wanted to be the jazz queen of the era of her mother is one of the nicest songs of the album. I like the saxophone (or whatever the crap that horn thing is) and the jazzy piano makes me want to be a socialite in the 40s and hang out with that jerk Humphrey Bogart and his weird friends.

Sweet Bird 8.5/10

Dude, you`re not supposed to put marshmallows on turkey. Besides, I thought you were a vegetarian! Oh wait, I just looked it up on Google, and I don`t think Joni Mitchell is a vegetarian. I would have uncovered a Joni Mitchell is the Greatest Person Ever page on the PETA Web site. Yeah. I never would have thought that she was a normal human being even though she is getting very very spaced out lately with these albums. Very very weirdly spaced out. Dude, Joni Mitchell is my hero.

Shadows and Light 9.5/10

You have to freaking believe me that more than any other song in this WEIRDDDDD album, this song IS FREAKING ME OUT!!! It`s got this choral vocal thing that sounds like a spiritual that was written in one of the more eccentric parallel universes and this very odd synth is playing off key in the background. Call me weirder than your mother, but I LIKE IT!!!! And now, I will proceed with writing the rest of this review.