Evangelical Christians used by the ultra-conservative and reactionary Bush administration's Falcons in the service of greed, hatred and war... Without forgetting cynicism, promoted as a safe bet by all actors ; ecological disasters ... A non exhaustive list, unfortunately.
To conclude, one can note that Dog Eat Dog’s denunciations were made by an artist who had more or less remained mute when it was fashionable to howl along with wolves (the famous "Protest-Song" movement in the 1960s), but instead found indispensable to call things by their name twenty years later, in a decade when, in her own words, "nobody else did".

Finally, with Chalk Mark In A Rainstorm (1988), Joni Mitchell meets success again (at least critically, if not in terms of public enthusiasm and miraculous sales). The artist summarizes with panache -like thumbing her nose at her detractors- a decade that still avowedly leaves her followers somewhat disoriented. The electronic and somewhat confusing experiments of the Dolby period (Empty-Try Another or, later after Dolby, with The Reoccuring Dream), are probably and partly responsible for this mixed reception.

No matter what, the Eighties come to an end with this highly sophisticated and ambitious album. Chalk Mark In A Rainstorm is a mastered, lush, and sometimes very dense delivery, containing brilliant tracks such as Lakota, where the musician once again stands up as a passionate advocate for the Native Indian Sioux people dispossessed of their land by the Anglo-Saxon invaders, or even the extraordinary The Tea Leaf Prophecy.
This composition, based on the theme of her own parents’ meeting during Second World War time, addresses an implicit evocation of the unwanted

child theme ("Don’t have kids when you get grown" / The Tea Leaf Prophecy). A theme and suffering that echoe her poignant personal story, when relating to "Little Green", this child born from a too young and immature relationship, whom she was not able to keep, thus having the child being adopted in the 1960s. She will later reunite yet with her daughter, after a long research at the end of the 1990s. The album also offers gems such as the extremely brilliant My Secret Place, co-sung with Peter Gabriel, or even in the register of some deeper, humanist and politically charged composition, like The Beat Of Black Wings.

Incidentally, The Beat of Black Wings is quite interesting in more than one way, because it underlines once again the extraordinary duality of the woman and of the artist. Joni Mitchell uses the symbol of Black Wings to conceptualize death. However, in order to symbolize life, the urgency of life through the gross impulse of sexuality (a stigma there of her thirst for a male mate), the singer had used exactly the same symbol, when one considers the content of Black Crow (Hejira, 1977). There, the hunter is a female crow which she identifies with, scanning the ground from the icy heights where she is lost, beating her black wings to better pounce on her prey -the complementary male.

This example gives the full measure of the complexity of the character of Joni Mitchell, which seems to indicate that Shadows & Light, (fom The Hissing of Summer Lawns, 1977), Yin and Yang, Good and Evil, fascination and repulsion are never anything but the polarities of a same vibration. A statement synthesized in the unsurpassable Down To You (Court & Spark - 1974), when she wrote : "Constant Stranger, You're a brute, You're an angel, You can crawl,