Post Punk
My love of punk goes way back. The Sex Pistols, the Dead Boys, the Clash, the Ramones, Stiff Little Fingers...all the way back to the birth of the form.
Except for Patti Smith.
Patti Smith always bored me stiff. Self-indulgent, pompous, inaccessible, self-absorbed in her artiness, she struck me as more of a hippie-via-the-Village than a genuine punk.
Jim Farber of the New York Daily News,
agrees:
At times, Smith seems to suffer from a messiah complex, an impression deepened by her frequent biblical imagery. Somewhere along the line, Smith turned into the Mother Teresa of CBGBs. Unfortunately, her new songs not only wind up as well-intentioned mush, they confirm the warmongers' worst image of peaceniks - as wimps.
Smith belonged to the earliest wave of Greenwich Village punks - contemporaries of Lou Reed who hung out with William S. Burroughs, who saw themselves more as (and acted more like) beat era writers and poets than rock and rollers.
Smith numbered among her good friends Robert Mapplethorpe, and the parallel is blindingly obvious; her music, like his photography, is art that's intended to shock, to render discomfort, to make the art consumer uneasy.
Nothing wrong with that as such - it's a philosophy that's united American artists from Mark Twain to the present. But like Mapplethorpe, Smith represents a strain of American artist - of but not in the Sixties, post-hippie but awash in post-romantic existential despair and nihilism - that sounds self-absorbed and silly in the best of times, and mindlessly trite after 9/11.
How trite? "Radio Baghdad" proclaims the Saddam-era Baghdad an intellectual and cultural center, while calling the post-liberation city a sea of rubble (which I'm sure is meant as metaphor, since the city would seem to look less like Stalingrad than does Los Angeles these days).
Read the article, natch.
Posted by Mitch at
April 28, 2004 07:36 AM
Patti Smith is an idiot like Cobain's old squeeze..Think the dope and booze is finally rotting their minds...
More Sex Pistols, Joy Division, Ramones, and Public Image Limited....true voices of the post-60's generation....Don't trust the 60's Generation..
Posted by: Greg at April 28, 2004 08:47 AMI'm OK with "Horses", I guess, as background music, but her "Gone Again" is a heartbreaking paean to her lost love, Fred Sonic Smith. When she sings, "and the children will rise," at the end of "Final Reel," it's truly brilliant.
Posted by: Brian Jones at April 28, 2004 09:35 AMHere's the thing; Smith is an artist in a genre (or subgenre) that I'm not completely wild about, but she's an undeniably great practitioner in that genre.
That "pre-punk" genre (the Velvets, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, the New York Dolls, Smith, the Stilettos) aren't generally my favorites - too self-referential, too locked into New York - but on their own merits and in the context of their genre all of them have had some great moments.
Smith's appearance on SNL back in '78 - doing "Because The Night" and her deconstruction of "My Generation" - was amazing. "Gone Again" is a good catch. There are others. It all adds up to a few great moments in a body of work I can otherwise take or leave.
I'll give her the moments. It's not like I'm writing about Sham69 or Sigue Sigue Sputnik...
Posted by: mitch at April 28, 2004 09:44 AMNo Smith for me, either. Siouxie from Siouxie of the Banshees, yes. Wendy O. Williams, sure. And if you're from a certain time in Minneapolis, Wilma of Wilma and the Wilburs. Real rock girls.
Posted by: dan at April 28, 2004 10:09 AMDon't forget Exene Cervenka from the band 'X'. BTW he was also married to the Viggo guy from lotr.
Posted by: Darby at April 28, 2004 07:10 PMSHE not he, egads.
Posted by: Darby at April 28, 2004 08:38 PMKind of semi-off topic, I guess, but in light of the offing of Rich Stanek for using the "n" word, a couple of incredibly racist songs come to mind.
"I Wanna Be Black" from Lou Reed's "Street Hassle"
"Nigger" by Patti Smith, to lazy to dig out the vinyl and remember which album it is on.
Interesting how "artists" get away with stuff that most other's would be pilloried for.
Posted by: Wog at April 29, 2004 04:31 PMI love the music, hate the politics.
Posted by: patrick j at April 29, 2004 07:44 PMhttp://www.punkvoter.com/about/about_members.php
Another Hate Bush site. As always, no ideas just anyone but this guy. Bands I like Ministry, Bostones, etc. I guess I'll just steal their music like everyone else.
While I've always liked Smith and disagreed with her politics, her performance at the end of one of Neil Young's Bridge School Benefit enthralled me. All the performers were on stage and she started improvising lyrics during "Helpless" -- it was magical.
Posted by: Chrees at April 30, 2004 11:19 AM