Not to displace anything in David's definitive Top 4 -
(sideline: except that I'm not quite convinced we've covered soul
properly in the person of James Brown, whose influence vocally and
rhythmically is definitive for funk-disco-rap but not so much in the
more slow-grooving melody-centred part of pop-soul-R&B - I think maybe
I'd tie Brown with Ray Charles for 4th).
- but on Tera's behalf I'd reluctantly say that if we look at the
current state of pop music, where female singer-songwriters are about
the only growing concern in the rock column of the equation, it's not
easy to avoid pegging Joni Mitchell fairly high up. You have to open
up your idea of "influential" here: "Blue" would be acknowledged by
astonishing numbers of performers as a seminal record (likely more
than any single Beatles or Dylan album). If you're bristling, let me
put it this way: Joni Mitchell was the pop-music equivalent of Jackie
Robinson, breaking the bar as the first major female artist to visibly
call the shots on her own career, on her own songs and in her own
distinctly female (but not feminized) voice - Madonna's godmother, and
also that of Sarah and Sheryl and Alanis and Lucinda and Rickie Lee
Jones and Lauryn Hill. Janis Joplin and Laura Nyro were important in
this sense, too, but Mitchell's influence was cemented by the fact
that she survived it.
(Yes, you might name Dolly or Loretta or Aretha or Billie Holiday or
Ella or Tina Turner, but I don't think any of them visibly held
control over their personae and music in the same way.)
The irony is that Mitchell's historical significance far outstrips her
musical quality - much of the latter is for the worse, in that she,
er, overlegitimized confessional songwriting (she is to song what
Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell were to poetry) - but if we assume that
the revolution in gender roles will go down as one of the 20th
century's most important developments, that historical place looms
pretty large (if depressingly recent).
carl w.
