1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 205. Janis Joplin – Pearl (1971)

 

And now to 1971, a year that sees more coups and guerilla wars around the world, notably that charming man Idi Amin taking over Uganda, and the Khmer Rouge gaining ground in Cambodia. More Vietnam, but with gradual moves for the USA to withdraw. Apollo 14 moon landings. The formation of Bangladesh as a nation from “East Pakistan”. George Lucas releases THX-1138.

This is the first female artist for a long time. Yes, we had Karen Carpenter, but she gets equal billing with her brother in the band name despite doing most of the heavy lifting in making their sound unique. Joplin died in October 1970, so this is a posthumous release, the last album she was working on with the newly formed Full Tilt Boogie Band, and one track, Buried Alive In The Blues, is left as an instrumental because she was yet to record her vocals for it.

The album is an R&B mix of glorious upbeat funk and slow soulful numbers, such as the epic Cry Baby (used recently in a perfume advert) that really show off Joplin’s vocal range, from surprisingly soft and melodic to the laryngitis wails for which she is justly famous.

Added to the soul mix is a more country number, the Kris Kristofferson composition Me And Bobby McGee, as well as Joplin’s famous spiritual pastiche of consumerism, Mercedes Benz. This is one of only two tracks that she has a writing credit for, the other being the stomping Move Over that opens the album. This one is about men using and discarding women, standing in contrast to the other tracks written by other people that are, as usual for female vocalists, either about “I’m happy because I’ve found a man” or “I’m sad because a man left me”. Given Joplin’s apparent bisexual proclivities, it’s a little ironic.

This was something I was pondering, how the female vocalists tend to be restrained to traditional love songs while the men can sing about nuclear war, or satanic rituals, or people riding giant flies, or minotaurs. Maybe Nina Simone’s biting polemic about the treratment of women of colour in Four Women even comes close to a song that’s actually political, and it’s notable that when Joplin gets to write her own song, one is about consumerism and the other about harmful relationships.

And she’d know about the latter. She’s a very good example of how the worst thing an addict can do is to hang around with other addicts. What a waste of a talent.

Oh, it’s a very good album, by the way.