What gets lost in the edit…..
Joni Mitchell and the Value of Imperfection
I have been listening to Joni Mitchell again, this time more closely than usual.
What I keep noticing are the moments that resist polish—the phrasing that stretches too far, the lines that feel slightly off and often, somehow, crammed in brilliantly, the places where the song does not resolve as neatly as it might. In some sense, the imperfections are exactly what make it perfect.
It is, I think, part of what makes the work endure. It is part of why I have never stopped listening to Joni, and why I am still, even now, continuously amazed—so honest, so brash, so challenging, and, at times, unexpectedly funny (“I want to shampoo you?”).
I’ve been wondering whether someone like her could even emerge in the world we are building now—not because there isn’t talent (there is), and not because there aren’t tools (there are more than ever). But because I am no longer sure we allow for the kind of uneven, searching process that made someone like Joni Mitchell possible in the first place.
Her music does not feel efficient, which is precisely why it lasts. It wanders, it doubles back, it resists resolution, and it asks more of the listener than we are currently trained to give.
What the Machine Prefers
Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, is very good at removing that inconvenience. It predicts and refines; it offers what is most likely to work, what is least likely to confuse, and what is most likely to be received without resistance. It suggests a better word, a clearer sentence, a more acceptable tone—something that, depending on the day, feels either helpful or faintly unsettling.
I know this because I use it. I used it this morning.
As a neophyte writer, it’s hard not to use it. Self-editing can be disastrous, and paying for a human editor is often cost-prohibitive. ChatGPT, for me, does what I would wish a human editor would do—for far less, or even for free. I don’t want to turn this into a living ad for it, though. In truth, the tool, as it were, is frightening—and I constantly question it.
And at a certain point, I found myself arguing with it—not because it was wrong, but because it was too right. Too balanced. Too eager to improve things that did not necessarily want to be improved. At one point, it suggested softening a line. At another, it quietly removed something I had written because it was too sharp, too excessive, too likely to disrupt the tone.
It was not malicious. It was doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Which, I suppose, is the problem.
Because if you follow every suggestion—if you accept every refinement, every adjustment, every gentle nudge toward clarity and balance—you do not end up with something terrible.
You end up with something “better.”
And also, quite possibly, less yours.
Would Blue Survive?
All of these ideas led me, somewhat unfairly but persistently, back to Joni.
Would someone—or something—have encouraged her to streamline, to clarify, to resolve what she chose not to resolve? Would the odd tunings have been “improved”? Would the lyrics have been guided toward something more immediately graspable? Would Blue have survived that process intact, or would it have emerged as a more effective version of itself, which is to say, a lesser one?
The Classroom Version of This
In my classroom, I see a conflict of this every day.
I have always used a ten-second rule in my classes, allowing a student ten seconds of reflective silence before giving an answer during a discussion. This method allows for the development of an idea—not just the delivery of an answer.
But students now live in a world where answers arrive before questions have fully formed, where writing can be generated and corrected in seconds, and where the long, slightly awkward middle—the part where nothing quite works yet—can be skipped entirely.
This is efficient.
It is also, I suspect, where the individual voice quietly disappears.
Because that middle space—the frustrating one—is where something idiosyncratic might emerge, where something not entirely correct might take shape, and where, occasionally, something genuinely new manages to exist. This is the reason I have always asked my secondary students to write on paper—so that they do not simply delete away their original ideas.
A Slightly Unruly Canon
I do not want a world that produces only acceptable writing. I want writing that is difficult, strange, occasionally excessive, and yes, at times a lot inappropriate—not for the sake of shock, but because that is often where honesty lives.
I want a world that still has room for writers who resist being made palatable—Sylvia Plath and J.D. Salinger, certainly, but also George Orwell and Anaïs Nin, Emma Goldman and Richard Wright, Rita Mae Brown and Andrea Dworkin, Toni Morrison and Edgar Allan Poe. Writers who pushed too far, or not quite far enough, or simply refused to settle into something easily approved.
And I want that same resistance in music and culture more broadly. I do not want someone like Poppy Z. Brite quietly edited into something more agreeable. I do not want Alix Dobkin softened at the edges. I want bands like Sex Pistols, Dead Kennedys, and The Velvet Underground to remain exactly as abrasive as they were meant to be—alongside Emily Dickinson, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, none of whom seemed especially concerned with behaving either.
This is not a tidy canon. That’s my point.
The Part I Don’t Usually Say
And this is the part I do not often say out loud, partly because it sounds dramatic and partly because I suspect it might be true: I have had actual nightmares about a future in which that kind of work does not appear anymore, not because it is banned, but because it is quietly revised out of existence.
In those dreams, everything is competent. Everything is clear. Everything is, in its way, quite good.
And nothing is memorable.
Somewhere Off to the Side
Sometimes I imagine those voices still existing somewhere, just slightly out of reach—like the objects in Mr. Charrington’s shop in Nineteen Eighty-Four, tucked away where you have to know how to look for them, where they feel real precisely because they have not been corrected into compliance.
This May Not Be Reversible
I am not anti-technology. As I previously stated, I am using it right now—at this very moment, in fact, arguing with it. (How very meta!) I am telling my Chat Bot that I will damn well keep my own inappropriate voice when I deem it to be correct (my version of “correct”).
However, my students use it. I’m pretty sure other writers are using it. It is not going anywhere. And I am also, if I am being honest, not entirely opposed to the idea of rewinding this trend, although I understand that it may not be an option. Can we ever go back?
So the question becomes less about whether these tools exist and more about how we use them.
What Still Matters
Do we let them (the little A.I. bots or “elves”) support what we are trying to say, even when it is awkward or excessive or subversive, or do we let them gently reshape it into something more acceptable or palatable?
When Poe first attempted to get his Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque published, many of the publishers rejected him claiming his works were entirely “too loud.”
Because I would still like to live in a world where something can be slightly wrong, or loud, and still be worth saying—where a line can go too far, or sound a little off, or even include something like “acid, booze, and grass… needles, guns, and ass,” as Joni Mitchell writes in Blue—and not be immediately corrected into something more appropriate.
I would still like to live in a world where someone like Joni Mitchell could happen.
And where we would still have the patience to listen.
ALL HAIL to the handwritten journal.
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