OK, Marcel, someone finally lured me into this thread.
Joni uses bad grammar in her songs, especially when she's referring to
conversation or writing in dialect.
As Marcel's "rama dama ding dong" so cogently exemplified...
Grammar and poetry are circles that intersect but do not overlap. Poetry
simply doesn't follow the rules of grammar, and it never did.
Bad grammar has been used in song for centuries:
Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby?
Ain't No Mountain High Enough
Twas a Lover and His Lass (Shakespearean, Dowland?)
Poets have always twisted words around. Lewis Carroll and ee cummings were
particularly brilliant at doing it. Even Homer did it, plus he was
foolhardy enough to do it in ancient Greek!
Naturally Joni would want to write with bad grammar sometimes -- she's
writing about rock and roll people and modern times. She's also one of this
century's best wordsmiths, so if Shakespeare and Homer and T. S. Eliot used
bad grammar, then we have to be fair and let Joni Mitchell use it as much as
she wants (as long as she doesn't overdo it and the commas are in the right
places).
[Thanks, Marcel, you make me laugh... And the past tense of Bomp She Bomp
is "Had Bomped" and the subjunctive past is "She Bomp a Loo La."]
It's fun to find these little nuances of poetic license in anyone's work.
But...
"She don't like my kick-pleat skirt,
she don't like my eyelids painted green...."
Just couldn't be written any better, I think.
Musingly,
Harper Lou
