The Slow Poison Of A Sucker Punch

"Has any pop song evoked a generation’s romantic self-infatuation more hauntingly than Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock”?

Sheila Weller, in her book “Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation” (Atria Books), which weaves the biographies of these singer-songwriters into a post-feminist history, writes: “It was the first line of the chorus — ‘We are stardust, we are golden’ ” — that “conveyed the impression of hundreds of thousands of people speaking as one.”

Stardust-sprinkled, golden children determined to save the world was one way of describing the youth culture’s heady self-image. The generational axiom that all you need is love persisted into the 1970s during the so-called cooling of America, when soft-rock singer-songwriters like Ms. Mitchell, Ms. King and Ms. Simon and male equivalents like James Taylor, Jackson Browne and John Denver personalized the communal conversation.



As Ms. Weller astutely emphasizes, the three singers in her biography belonged to the first generation of women to come of age with the pill. The belief in love as the answer coincided with the women’s liberation movement. An unvoiced question suggested by the book that has persisted through these women’s lives and their music is whether romantic love and promiscuity are compatible.

Having lived out your fantasies until “the heyday in the blood is tame” (to quote Shakespeare), what remains? In Ms. Mitchell’s newest album, “Shine” (Hear Music), love is barely mentioned. The stardust has turned to ash, and the gold has tarnished. As she surveys the ravaged planet, this disenchanted, 60-something ex-romantic throws up her hands and declares, “If I had a heart, I’d cry.” Passion has curdled into bitterness."

-- Stephen Holden, for the New York Times