Joni Mitchell - The Hissing of Summer Lawns

Court and Spark had earned Joni Mitchell mainstream pop acceptance, but its underlying spirit of discovery pushed her to risk new-found success with this edgier, experimental sequel released in 1975. Although the session crew is largely the same, and sleek jazz elements again abound, these songs find her introducing Burundi drums (on "The Jungle Line"), layering magisterial but forbidding vocal harmonies ("Shadows and Light"), and casting rueful shadows across the sun-dazed Southern California of the title song. Her daring promptly earned critical scorn and halted her commercial expansion, but the album's confident eclecticism and dark beauty have outlived that reception: from the safety of hindsight, Hissing was a promise to stay hungry and creatively adventurous, a promise kept then and now. --Sam Sutherland Amazon.com

It's an old romance...the Boho Dance

Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R23ZF26WPUPU5N My name is Jeremy Gloff. I am a musician (check me out on Amazon!) and retro music enthusiast. If you enjoyed this review make sure to check out my Amazon user profile to check out my other reviews. I am always up for making new friends and discussing the music I love!!! November 13, 2008

Joni wins her "struggle for higher achievement"

"Hissing" is Joni Mitchell's greatest album. It's been called "avant-garde", but there is something forbidding about that term and this music is accessible and enjoyable. The arrangements are well-textured and always interesting, never overstuffed, gimmicky or cute, and often - very often - astonishingly beautiful. Kudos to Tom Scott and the LA Express, and to Joni for coaxing such a classy performance from them. The music is strongly jazz-tinged without being actual jazz, but the main thing is it works. Devote one full listen to just the instruments, then another to Joni's voice, then a third just to concentrate on the lyrics. Each listen will reveal new pleasures and a greater appreciation for the quality of the entire effort. Each song is a treasure, no song disappoints, and one can listen to them again and again without growing weary of them. Unlike earlier (and some later) efforts in which Joni focuses on herself, here she focuses her laser lens on the world in which she moves, alternately with sympathy and withering criticism. Cinematic imagery abounds in these songs, from the the Kingpin's clasping hands in "Edith", the blood-dipped barbed-wire fence of "Hissing" to the dragonfly helicopter of "Harry". These images suck you in, song by song. One gets the sense that Joni is disgorging her vision of life with some pain, but with the conviction of necessity, and that she is doing so with ambivalence to popular reaction. This album rises above any popular genre, and even above Joni's other lofty output. It is a work of art - ennobling, uplifting, timeless. April 26, 2008

Timeless greatness

Ever since it's release, this has been a favorite of mine. The poetry and musical taste of Joni Mitchell is totally unique. I'll enjoy it forever!! March 21, 2008

Inimitable

"Hissing" is inimitable. Nothing like it has been done before or since... sure, others (and Joni herself) have done plenty of songs that are similar to parts of "Hissing", but this is a collection of songs that was not only groundbreaking in the early 1970's, but still is today. This, along with "Mingus" represents the side of Joni that makes her music so compelling... the willingness to reject the obvious, sure-fire formula in favor of experimentalism. This is the true artist in her element. I love this entire album, but "Harry's House", "The Jungle Line" amd "In France..." are my favorites. The piano line in "Harry's House" sounds as fresh and dynamic today as it did over 30 years ago.

People who claim that the '70s were a musical desert haven't found this oasis. March 12, 2008

Joni's most accomplished album

This is Joni Mitchell's most accomplished album and the work by which she should ultimately be judged. Joni by turns satirises, laments, cajoles and savages the cultural millieu of mid 70s America. We are drawn towards parties full of arrogant and ruthless fat cats, alienated house wives and model girlfriends and disenchanted artists in a landscape of cocktail soirees and pool parties. Song by song, Joni deconstructs the commercial world that she felt was straightjacketing her creativity and freedom. In it's place, she reveals ennui and hypocrisy.

Central to the album is a suite of songs, which glides along on cocktail lounge keyboards and horns (Shades of Scarlet Conquering, The hissing of summer lawns, The Boho dance, Harry's house/Centerpiece) and yet...around the edges of these songs and in fact in the other songs on the album is a very different sort of music. For here we hear a more primitive and avant-garde sound appearing, symbolising the unease beneath the veer of respectability and wealth. 'Centerpiece' jumps out of the middle of 'Harry's House', darkly mocking the married misery of a couple with a rather more idealised version of married life. 'The jungle line' brings in Burundi drums and, like the tribal figures on the cover carrying a snake, represents the chaotic underbelly of corporate America. Another interpretation of the snake is that it represents man's fall from the garden of Eden, where a snake lured Eve towards evil and, consequently, gave man original sin and the Christian fixation on guilt. If the snake is the evil and guilt/hypocrisy at the heart of the corporate world then Joni wants none of it and would rather free the creative anmial within her from this original sin world, as she writes, "Anima rising, Queen of Queens, Wash my guilt of Eden, Wash and balance me. Anima rising, uprising in me tonight. She's a vengeful little goddess with an ancient crown to fight".

Aside from the biblical and primitive imagery, Joni also uses Jungian analogy to devastating effect on the most avant-garde song of her career - the last song of the album, 'Shadows and Light'. According to Karl Jung, the then in-vogue Austrian psychoanalyst, all people are composed of shadows and light - figuratively and metaphorically. If we look at any object what we in fact see is a combination of shadows and light. Our brain interprets it into a mental image. But if there was only light or shadow the object would make no sense. Jung transposes this to the mental state of man so that the shadows are the darkness and primitive urges within man, and the light is the compassionate and self-transcending side of man. Creativity comes from sourcing both the shadowy and the lighter side. As a painter and admirer of the Impressionist school of art, which focused on the delineation of colour and light, Joni was further taken with this idea of Jung's. In 'Shadows and Light' she uses an Arp-Farsifa to penetrate through the corrupt world to reveal this final assessment of man's predicament. It is one of the most arresting songs of the post-modern era and is quite unique.

Of the other songs, 'In France they kiss on main street' is the most commercial, with Crosby, Nash and James Taylor harmonies and a 'Free man in Paris' style tune. It was one of her last hits and with it she bid goodbye to her commercial status before boldly embarking on the next stage of her career with 'The jungle line'. 'Sweet bird', by contrast, stylistically harks back to 'For the Roses'. It is a dreamlike song, commenting on the fragility and temporality of man. In the end, every effort is in vain and even the fat cats' time will pass, "They can never get that close, Guesses based at most...on what each set of time and change is touching".

This album is one of the few really flawless albums of our age. Forget the usual rhetoric and hyperbole directed at any album someone likes. Objectively, this is a work of art and works on many levels. If you like Joni, be prepared for her finest work. If you want to broaden your horizons, look no further. December 24, 2007

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