In the late 1960s - when hard rock and protest music were all the rage - she wrote very quiet, introspective and personal songs, and her "conscious" lyrics were done playfully a la "Big Yellow Taxi."
She went against the grain, but inspired a number of imitators of lesser quality (James Taylor, Jackson Browne, the new Carole King).
Then, when the singer-songwriter movement she helped create really took off, she went in another direction: jazz fusion and avant-garde music.
She collaborated with forward-thinkers like Jaco Pastorius and Charles Mingus.
But now she's just following along with the crowd.
Many people who used to be original, innovative talents (Pete Townshend, Burt Bacharach, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell) are following the lead of ninth-rate hacks like Conor Oberst and putting out cookie-cutter anti-Pope and anti-President songs and albums.
It doesn't make me angry - it makes me kind of sad. It's like watching a spry grandparent who used to be full of clever jokes and interesting stories and who liked to take you traipsing all over town reduced to drooling incoherently in a nursing-home basement watching gameshows.
Or the grandparent who tells you the same story over and over ...
“But we have poisoned everything/And oblivious to it all/The cell phone zombies babble/Through the shopping malls…”
“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”
Remarkably similar thoughts - only 35 years apart! As someone who loved her records back then, all I can say is that she is stuck in a time warp. There’s nothing more pathetic than an aging hippie who can’t seem to find anything better to do than protest “something.” It’s just that same old Viet Nam protest attitude being re-hashed. It was tiresome then, and it’s tiresome now.
“When I was young, we used to go out and protest the War. By golly, I’ve still got it, I can still protest the War! ... What War are we protesting, anyhow?”