The legendary Lady of the Canyon doesn't mince words when it comes down to sex, relationships, and the stupidity of music critics.

A chain-smoking long-distance runner and self-described "multi-Scorpio," Joni Mitchell is a lover of opposition, a study in duality. At forty-four, casually clad in loose white cotton and a rakish black porkpie hat set off by silver fish-shaped earrings, she is a conversational chameleon, unpredictable, intelligent, shadow and light.

We sit face to face across a desk in a tiny, airless room in her manager's office in Los Angeles, ostensibly to discuss the latest effort of her fifteen-album, twenty-year recording career, CHALK MARK IN A RAIN STORM. Subtle, sophisticated, musical, and accessible, CHALK MARK is an amalgam of the different strains and voices that this underappreciated, extraordinary musician has been experimenting with in the last decade. Featuring such prominent friends as Willie Nelson, Billy Idol, and Tom Petty, the record is still uniquely Mitchell's and has been hailed by some as her finest in years. But Mitchell, characteristically frank, has a lot more than music on her mind.

Still irate over the roasting she took from the music press in the mid-'seventies, she spits out, "In the musical community, I have respect," a claim supported by admirers as diverse as Prince, Peter Gabriel, and Miles Davis. "But music critics? Are you kidding? Do you know a music critic in this country who knows anything about music?"

When she began to break away from familiar melodies and the standard four-beats-to-the-bar format and to experiment with jazz, African, and Caribbean polyrhythms - sounds that artists like Paul Simon and Sting brought to the musical mainstream a decade later - she was roundly criticized for being trendy and musically insincere. "I don't like to think about the man-woman business too much," she says, "but I would have had more recognition for my musical talent were I a man."

Mitchell feels that she was sometimes dismissed as a serious musician and portrayed instead as a sexy super-groupie. "Some people were persecuted for sexual freedoms while the banner [of liberation] was still flying," she says. "Examples were made. Even I was made such an example at one point."

These days, her life is different. Married (to musician and producer Larry Klein) and settled down with three houses, "cats and godchildren," and tax disputes to occupy her mind, she says, "Now, the idea of sexiness - Whoo! Hot! Sexy! - in an era that is so sexually dangerous, is absurd. Everybody is so wacko for this little buzz, this little momentary stimulus.

"I haven't seen every erotic film ever made, but what I have seen seems so ludicrous, because what frequently passes for erotic emotion in the female is, frankly, the angst of overstimulation," she declares. "In the whole scene, which is so dominantly interested in sexy and HOT, neither male nor female seems to know that the sound used to depict the woman in the erotic act is the sound of a woman who is not getting off! Ha! Nine times out of ten! So men don't know. Women don't even know! Nobody knows."

Mitchell admits that she has always preferred the company of men. "I like men's humor. I like to be around men in a way that I don't disturb their maleness, so they can be themselves. I don't like to put any coyness into the situation that might make them want to be more like men to a woman. I like locker-room talk."

Despite Mitchell's disdain for critics and commerce, she still seems to yearn for acceptance. After the interview, she asks, "Was I too personal?" Singing "Number One" on her new album, she wonders, "Will they shower you with flowers? Or will they shun ya when the race is run?" It's the same question she asked years ago on BLUE, the album she has described "as the purest one of all," the one that catapulted her to the fame she found frightening: "Will you take me as I am? Will you?"