Moog and Metaphors

JONI MITCHELL does beautiful album covers. She usually has a lot of room for art because all her albums have the lyrics printed out (sometimes hand-written) inside. Because of those lyrics, the records which came with the art and printed words were never very good for background sound. Her music was properly lilting and soothing and all that, but the primary appeal was always her lyrics: the universal qualities of lover relationships she captured in her songs. As background, the words just tumbled over each other in the breathless peal of her voice, and wafted around with the warm air that's wasted at the tops of rooms.

At least one song from Joni Mitchell's new album, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, will never be relegated to background music, if only because of its insistent growling. "The Jungle Line" combines a National Geographic tape of the warrior drums of Burundi with Mitchell playing Moog synthesizer and guitar. She sings a poem with images such as "Thru I-bars and girders, thru wires and pipes/Thru the mathematic circuits of the modern nights" and allusions to the French primitivist painter Henri Rousseau as well as The African Queen. But "The Jungle Line" drones after the first few lines, and unfortunately, musical innovation extends to the abandonment of bridges.

"Jungle Line" is innovative on more important grounds, however. Its subject is an impersonal objective generality: sophistication's fascination with primitiveness. This impersonality signals a departure from Mitchell's previous lyrical material, in which lover relationships crystallized in her own experience, her laments, and her hopefulness. With The Hissing of Summer Lawns she is attempting much more ambitious poetry than ever before--more striking images and a broader cutting insight.

THE OBJECTIVE STATEMENT Mitchell makes most prominent is suburban dreariness. Several songs are explicit narratives of that dish-water despair, there's-no-olive-in-my-martini madness. In "Harry's House/Centerpiece" Mitchell interposes a jazzy arrangement of a 1950s love tune, "Baby, you're my centerpiece," with a desolate vision of

Battalions of paper-minded males

Talking commodities and sales

While at home their paper wives

And their paper kids

Paper the walls to keep their gut reactions hid

The title song tells a similar story about a man's putting his wife in a ranch house on a hill, overlooking the valley bar-b-ques, blue swimming pools, and "the hissing of summer lawns."

But Electra/Asylum Records has chosen to promote, not these impersonal poems, but the two singles most like Mitchell's previous outpourings of love and love's conflicts. "In France They Kiss On Main Street" is a catchy song which revels in young love--"amour, mama, not some cheap display." The other single, "Don't Interrupt The Sorrow," appeals to animals if not to fight at least to rise; each distinctly narrated verse repeats the melody.

Most of The Hissing of Summer Lawns, however, is not so clearly defined. Joni Mitchell's despair and cynicism about surburbia, her alluding images, are too easily missed--the words trip over each other and get lost. She rarely succeeds at complementing lyrics with music. The bouncy conga rhythms are often too swift a vehicle for the words; and the synthesizer-chorale approach she takes to the more philosophical poems only makes them pretentious or droning.

Joni Mitchell doesn't paint pensive self-portraits with flowers for her covers any more. There's a city skyline in silver-gray behind a row of little houses on their little plots. There's a huge expanse of green in front, and six naked people are carrying a boa constrictor through it. This is no background, this is foreground.