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Canadian-American singer Joni Mitchell performed her 1969 hit song “Both Sides Now” at the recent 66th Grammy Awards ceremony in the Crypto.com arena in Los Angeles. It was her first act at the awards show, and her rendition of the famous track from her Grammy-winning Clouds album had the audience gushing.
However, amid the euphoria, Joni received backlash on social media for cosplaying as a black man about three decades ago. People of color fans are offended that she has yet to show remorse about her pimp-strutting alter ego, Art Nouveau. “I’m so sorry I cannot deal with Joni Mitchell. The way her blackface “alter ego” named f—kin don juan just flies with people is so crazy,” a user on X, formerly Twitter posted. “I tried to look it up earlier to see if she’s apologized.”
More photos of Joni as her blackface persona began resurfacing, and social media users could not hide their disgust. “Godd—n it! I can’t like any famous white folks. Always a d—n secret racist,” someone replied. “She says there were Black artists on the album who said it was ok…and I still don’t like it. I was alive in 76-77 and knew it was wrong then,” another agreed.
Joni, who is of Norwegian, Irish, French, and Scottish descent, used Art’s persona in several instances, like the cover of Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, her concert film, Shadows and Light, and 1982’s The Black Cat in the Black Mouse Socks. “She was really looking at life from both sides now,” a fan quipped.
Joni told Rolling Stone in a 1997 interview that she was inspired to create Art while walking on Hollywood Boulevard in 1976 when “this Black guy with a beautiful spirit walking with a bop, as he went by me, he turned around and said, ‘Ummmm, mmm… looking good sister, lookin’ good!’”
She immediately decided to make a Halloween costume out of that moment and “bought a black wig, I bought sideburns, a mustache.”
“It was as if this spirit went into me. So I started walking like him…I bought some pancake makeup. It was like ‘I’m goin’ as him,’” she told the outlet. In 2015, the same year Joni suffered a brain aneurysm, she also admitted to “have experienced being a black guy on several occasions.”
“When I see Black men sitting, I have a tendency to go— like I nod like I’m a brother,” she noted.
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