Oy Canada

One of the core truths of pop music is that lyrics suffer when separated from music and read as "poetry." But even The New Yorker is willing to make an exception, or suspend disbelief. Its September 17 issue carries "Bad Dreams Are Good," the text of a song from Joni Mitchell's forthcoming album Shine.

Mitchell has more than her share of admirers who find her doing no wrong. Embarrassing duds such as "Furry Sings the Blues," from the 1976 Hejira -- in which she condescends to old bluesmen with the admission that "I'm not familiar with what you played," but wow, "I get such strong impressions of your heyday" -- are excused for supposedly being self-mocking. As if she's ever demonstrated such an ability, or, indeed, desire.

"Bad Dreams" is already receiving praise for revisiting the environmental awareness of Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi," one of her few songs to display a sense of humor. (Note: I'm a fan of some of her work, especially the rightfully ubiquitous Blue and Court and Spark.) This time, however, she's ranting at "oblivious . . . cell-phone zombies" who "babble/Through the shopping malls" while condors and whales die. Gosh. There's also a "Furry"-like tonal botch, Mitchell seeming to take Genesis literally (but she can't really be -- can she?) with her moan that "Before that altering apple/We were one with everything." We've wrecked "wild Eden Earth," but Joni provides a glimpse of hope at the end, with a tiny child (of course!) schooling us that "Bad Dreams are good." One imagines Al Gore urging her to take a chill pill.

If this all weren't so carefully, if not well, wrought, it could serve as a parody of any number of folkie platitudes. (Ask me about my all-time favorite, "Virginia Woolf" by Indigo Girls, which assures its heroine that "you weathered the storm of cruel mortality." No, she didn't. She died.) As it is, Mitchell is working a whole other plane of awfulness; she's insisted over the years that few, if any, singer-songwriters can touch her, what with her jazz pretensions and just-so guitar tunings and all. "Bad Dreams," even without its accompaniment, proves again that she's been right.