Sex Kills

Joni Mitchell was one of the big things of my teen years and then other things came and happened. Over the years while these things were happening a compartment held all the books and records of earlier times and every now and again they'd play through, but other things were happening and gradually they'd get forgotten. There were new things happening too, new songs, new books. In some ways I'm glad about that because as we get older and maybe slow down, we begin to unpack the compartments we left stored with our things and are able to look at the stuff in them with new eyes. Just lately I've been listening to a lot of Joni's older stuff, watching interviews and hearing some I hadn't heard, like this. It's amazing the level of consistency she kept in her work across her whole career.

The song itself is a snapshot of our world today. It doesn't really explore any of these things but frames them, the way we do when stacking them up in our minds while feeling powerless in the face of it. It's the way many of us listening to the radio while driving. We're frozen in a moment of knowing of piled up truth. Then, as we pass some bushes, fake ones painted on a billboard trying to sell us some deal, the news comes over about some kid taking a gun into a nursery and we know for sure something terrible is lurking behind the faked up leaves.