Post 1

Growing up, my parents hosted many holiday parties at our house. While my mother cooked food for the party, my brother and I were always responsible for cleaning the house. One of my most treasured memories of the holidays is my mother’s cleaning playlist. A playlist she would play any time she was preparing the house for guests. She would never add or delete songs from the playlist, so I became very familiar with each song over the years and grew to love many of them. A nostalgic feeling comes over me, as if a blanket, whenever I listen to them. Big Yellow Taxi is in my top 10 favorite songs thanks to my mother’s influence. Before reading R. Serge Denisoff’s article Songs of Persuasion, I never connected the link between Big Yellow Taxi and the First Amendment.

As I sat in my room reading, I came across a single sentence that altered my perspective on the song. The sentence read, “The second type of propaganda composition is the rhetorical song, which may be defined as one written by a folk entrepreneur to identify and describe some social condition, but one which offers no explicit ideological or organizational solutions, such as affiliations with an association or movement,” (Songs of Persuasion, Denisoff). I began wondering if there were any songs that I knew that could possibly be a rhetorical song. For a second I thought no, but suddenly Big Yellow Taxi popped into my head. Throughout the whole song Joni Mitchell points out the terrible things society is doing to the planet. My favorite line from the song goes, “Took all the trees and put ‘em in a tree museum, charged the people a dollar and a half to see,” which is referring to the Foster Garden in Waikiki. I love that statement because of the power behind it, and its irony. When I was young, I always envisioned a cartoon of people chopping down trees in one foul swoop just to turn around and have museums for them, where people stood in long lines to pay to look at trees. Mitchell also points her finger at urbanization as she sings throughout the song, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” She is calling attention to the fact that society continues to expand and by doing so beautiful places people love are being destroyed. With all these impactful lyrics, Big Yellow Taxi is a protest song. Joni Mitchell was able to, so publicly, voice her opinion on environmental issues because of the protection she is granted by the Frist Amendment.