Blue

This week a strong candidate for Best Album Ever is 50 years old, and everyone, it seems, is a fan. It wasn't always that way. That year of 1971 alone, when I turned 17, was unusually full of contenders for that meaningless title, although few of them have shown the longevity of Blue. Certainly, music writer David Hepworth has set out a music insider's case for that time as "rock's golden year" in his book 1971: Never a Dull Moment. But the views of insiders, whether journalistic or musical, always entirely miss the point. Yes, it's interesting to be reminded by Graham Nash that some of the songs on Joni Mitchell's Blue were written about him, or by David Crosby that "Joni went out with me, Graham Nash, James Taylor, Jackson Browne and Leonard Cohen", but all this is simply wrong-headed narcissism: those songs were written for and about me.

I've already written about my relationship with Blue and have nothing to add, other than to repeat the more general case that all music – indeed all creative work – ultimately belongs to those who use it in their own lives, not to those who create it, or provoked its creation. If some scholar were to finally identify the "dark lady" of Shakespeare's sonnets, or even discover a bundle of tear-stained manuscript copies in Shakespeare's hand, it would add nothing whatsoever to them, beyond fuelling the sort of higher gossip and copy-editing that excites scholars and fills superfluous books. If you love and admire the sonnets – or any of the thousands of such messages in a bottle thrown into the uncertain waters of time and fate every year – and have made them part of your life, then they are your personal property, written for you alone, and you already know precisely who the dark lady is. I certainly do, even allowing for the fact that she was actually flaxen blonde. You may also, like me, have had a drink or two with "Carey", wished yourself elsewhere at Christmas, or retreated to the bar and brooded over a candle, with nothin' to talk to anybody about, especially that damned "Richard"! [1]

So perhaps the most authentic response to Blue I've come across this week is this, not from one of Mitchell's famous exes or a musician, but from a woman who had to walk five miles through the African bush to the game lodge where she hoped to spend the night, and sang songs from Ladies of the Canyon and Blue in order to keep up her courage as she passed through lion country. See, Mr. Nash and Mr. Crosby? You know nothing of the power of those songs.

1. The strength of my connection with the songs on Blue first made me aware, I think, of the power of lyrical cross-dressing; a routine necessity for women, of course, given the preponderance of the masculine viewpoint in literature and song, and which must be particularly the case in languages inflected by grammatical gender. For me, though, it was a big step down the road towards understanding what Keats called "negative capability", or "being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason".