How Real Can You Get?

233. LEAH ANDREONE, 'It's Alright, It's OK'
Produced by Rick Neigher; written by Leah Andreone & Rick Neigher
RCA 64662 1997 Billboard: # 57

I've loved this song since the first time I heard it, but there's no way I'd ever call it "authentic."

This is a singer-songwriter thing. The master narrative goes something like this: Bob Dylan changed American music forever by taking folk music and making it personal. After him, coffeehouses sprung up all over Europe and North America, but suddenly singers were no longer required to sing musty old Scottish songs. They could sing about the material of their own lives. And they did it alone, just them and a guitar or a piano on a stage. It was personal and it was non-industrial, just an artist talking to a selective audience.

There are a lot of problems with that reductive narrative, more than I can cover in a single post, but let me begin with just two words: Joni Mitchell. For me, Joni Mitchell was the greatest of the singer-songwriters, maybe not as great a songwriter overall as Dylan, but certainly the greatest at writing confessional songs that were both personal and relatable. Again and again, she wrote songs that you can "get" on first hearing, but you can still find new layers in them every time you listen.

But you know what? Mitchell's greatest album, Blue, is impossible without technology. I really felt this with a vengeance a few years back when Ted Turner did one of his tributes to modern songwriters and they featured Mitchell. For nearly all her great songs, those paying tribute couldn't really do justice to them with just one vocalist. All those gorgeous harmonies she laid down? Multitracking. Even when she did everything on an album, it didn't recreate a spontaneous, intimate performance, anymore than Beach Boys' Party! did. Each of Mitchell's albums was a labor of construction, every bit as much as one of her paintings, most of which show a lot more craft than your average Jackson Pollock.

A quarter of a century later, we have Andreone, definitely positioned by her label to be an inheritor of the Mitchell-derived tradition. Writing confessionally? Check. On the first Lilith Fair tour? Check. Huge in France? Check. But, on the other side of the ledger, is she a sellout? She doesn't play all the instruments! She cowrites the song with her producer! She's a fraud!!

I have a simple solution: this isn't folk, or even confession, and it's certainly not truth. It's Pop, and rather accomplished Pop at that. This is a good song about an almost total mental breakdown, but it's too polished to have been written by someone who had ever suffered one. I would bet, though, that she has been around someone who has, because several of the details recorded here seem spot-on. Moreover, no matter what the purists might claim, this song wouldn't have been as good on solo acoustic guitar, because you need the rhythm section and especially the organ to move you through it. And are white confessional folk singers from L.A. allowed to wail like that, as if giving into despair inevitably leads to facing Mecca?

One of the great shames about the reverse snobbism of so much 1990s music culture was that it tried to sell smart Pop as something that it wasn't. This song isn't Truth, but it does have a fair amount of soul. And it's not "upbeat," no matter what the allmusicguide might claim.

The Vinegar Tasters c. 1970

21. JUDY COLLINS, "Both Sides Now"
Produced by Mark Abramson; written by Joni Mitchell
Elektra 45639 1968 Billboard # 8

22. HOLE, "Clouds"
Produced by Kim Gordon and Don Fleming; written by Joni Mitchell
1991 Did not make pop charts

23. JONI MITCHELL, "Both Sides Now"
Produced by Paul Rothchild; written by Joni Mitchell
1969 Did not make pop charts

Behold the Vinegar Tasters! The illustration above is supposed to be an allegorical representation of three major Asian philosophies, with the three men around the barrel of vinegar meant to represent (from left to right) Confucius, Buddha, and Lao-Tse. The copy I've put up of the woodcut in question is pretty murky, but I'm told you're supposed to read their facial expressions as sour, bitter, and smiling in that order, indicating the affective bent of their views on the pain of earthly existence.

If we made a similar triptych of Joni Mitchell, Courtney Love, and Judy Collins gathered around this song, their expressions would not exactly match those of Confucius, Buddha, and Lao-Tse, but there would be a certain correspondence. Collins' version remains, I think, the most widely known and by far the sunniest interpretation of the song. Even if you could somehow remove that Mitch Milleresque glockenspiel from the arrangement, Collins still seems to grant only lip service in her performance to the downside of life. She may say that she recalls life's illusions, but she seems to be embracing them too. Collins, like Lao-Tse, seems to believe that even the vinegar of life is part of the natural order.

Courtney Love and the rest of Hole, however, seem to be the Buddhists in this interpretative picture. In Love's defense, she was allegedly forced by her hippie parents to sing this song repeatedly at the dinner table growing up, and that's enough to drive anyone to make a dirge out of even the most innocuous tune. But if Collins seems inclined to stress the Win side of life, Hole seems equally as inclined to stress the Lose side of the equation. Something's gained for Collins in living every day, but much more is lost for the members of Hole. Like Buddha, Love and her friends seem inclined to find life to be a world of dust, pain, and illusion. (And after all, wasn't it Buddha who taught his followers to seek Nirvana?)

And then there's Joni, who actually wrote the song, of course, and who serves as the Confucius of this philosophical hootenanny. Her accompaniment for the song is so simple that one probably doesn't notice it. It's just an acoustic guitar--"just," as if an experienced guitarist can't make her instrument speak with dozens of different voices and intents. Both Collins and Hole pile on the instruments in their arrangements, pile on the noise, to support willful sunniness or cloudiness as their temperaments lead them. Mitchell, though, just strums with a pick, adding a little figure at the end of each refrain that grows more tentative with each verse. And her strumming hits the downbeat so hard each time in most measures that one could easily interpret it as the other shoe of fate dropping, no matter what the singer thinks or plans. As far as her vocal is concerned, she's not angry the way Love is, nor is she bravely facing the deluge the way Collins may be. She just seems . . . resigned.


So who's the optimist in this picture? Who's the nihilist? Who's the realist? Like almost everything else in this life, it's open to interpretation.