Whether they’re folk music lovers who have been rocking with her since the 1960s or R&B fans who discovered her through the Janet Jackson and Q-Tip collab, “Got ‘Til It’s Gone” (which samples her hit, “Big Yellow Taxi”), Joni Mitchell has Black fans that span generations. But now, nearly 60 years after her first single was released, some of those fans are clutching their pearls as they learn the story about a problematic alter-ego that she’s been rocking with for decades.
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It all started when Mitchell showed up at a Halloween party in 1976 dressed in Blackface, an afro, a pimped out jacket and hat and a pair of sunglasses. Although many of the guests at the party had worked with Mitchell before, she was able to hide in the cut going unrecognized by others. Photographer Henry Diltz captured a then-32-year-old Mitchell in the background while trying to take a picture of his wife’s costume.
Check out the photo for yourself here:
Looking back on the moment, Diltz remembers Mitchell being proud of fooling her industry friends.
“She dressed up like that to see if she could fool her friends, and boy, did she,” he said. “Everyone in that room was her friend, and none of us got it. She was proud that she could pull that off.”
Years later, Mitchell explained in an interview that the inspiration for her questionable Halloween costume look came from an exchange she had with a Black man on the street in Los Angeles.
“I was walking down Hollywood Boulevard (when) a black guy walked by me with a diddy-bop kind of step, and said in the most wonderful way, ‘Lookin’ good, sister, lookin’ gooood’,” she told Q Magazine in a 1988 interview. “His spirit was infectious and I thought, I’ll go as him. I bought the make-up, the wig… sleazy hat and a sleazy suit and that night I went to a Halloween party and nobody knew it was me.”
But that wouldn’t be the last time Mitchell came out in Blackface. In fact, it became an alter-ego that she named “Art Nouveau.” The character was even featured on the cover of her 1977 album, “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter.”
But if you’re thinking that a now-82-year-old Mitchell looks back at this time in her life as cringey, you’d be wrong. In fact, she’s continued to defend “Art Nouveau” in interviews, claiming that she’s some sort of bell hooks, Maya Angelou-type trapped in a white woman’s body.
“I don’t have the soul of a white woman,” she told LA Weekly in an interview. “I write like a black poet. I frequently write from a black perspective.”
Black people, of course, have weighed in on the matter on social media.
On X, lots of users were not amused.
“There’s WAY too many blackface pics of Joni Mitchell,” wrote someone on the platform.
On TikTok, @blackwahala tells Black folks that we shouldn’t be surprised, considering that Mitchell is a white woman from Canada who was born in the 1940s.
“Doesn’t make it right but it’s not surprising!” she captioned a post.
TikToker @leexlewis agrees and says he loves to use this little fun fact to throw white people completely off their game at parties.
“My favorite conversation starter at a party is Joni Mitchell in Blackface,” he says in a post. “It’s the funniest, strangest, most bizarre thing, and it’s an absolute joy to bring up, especially in a party full of white people.”
Now that the cat is out of the bag, some Black people are seeing Mitchell in a whole new light.
“Joni Mitchell is an evil creature but I feel her music is magical,” wrote someone in the comments of Black TikToker @sydneytashellee’s cover of Mitchell’s hit song, “California.”
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