Don’t ask Joni Mitchell, who just released Shine, her first album in a decade, what new music she likes. Nothing. “I couldn’t listen to music for ten years, I hated it all,” she said at a gallery opening of her pictures in Soho on September 25. “It just became grotesquely egocentric and made for money. It made me want to punch people.” So, apparently, did a lot of things. She spent her time painting, and reading Saint Augustine and the Koran, because, she says, “I was angry at the politics.” (And at “the American people, at Christians, at theology, the ignorance of it.”) So what’s her objection to newer music? “The whoring, the drive-by shooting of it all; I don’t care how well it’s crafted.” Earlier, party guest Rosie O’Donnell opined, “Nobody writes about fame and its effect on the soul better than Joni Mitchell. And a close second is Eminem.” So does Mitchell like Eminem? “You’re not listening to me,” she said. “I didn’t like music.”

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• Archive: “Intelligencer”
• Articles by Tim Murphy
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