Patti Smith's Horses Read online

  At the close of the song, Smith announces: “this reading is dedicated to crime [my emphasis; the final syllable is delivered in an extended drawl] … to the great pit of Babel … everybody talks about the great tower that they rose up to the face of God but nobody talks about the pit that they dug at the same time so that men could stick their tongues in the mouth of hell.” The litany of criminal saints embraces “the petty thief the whores of Mexico … Anne Powell the only woman Genet could love … Johnny Ace … Jackson Pollock … James Dean … Mayakovski … Gene Krupa … Mary Magdalene … Christ himself … and Sam Shepard.” Delivered in a characteristic New Jersey burr, the reading of the poems that follows is confident and assured, focussing on themes of sex, betrayal, and sacrilege. Using a range of rhythmic techniques, Smith displays an impressive command of language, juxtaposing self-consciously artistic formulations with street talk, slang phrases, and judicious expletives. But while the poems go down well with the audience, it is the songs that prompt the greatest applause. “A Fire of Unknown Origin,” the text of which will appear in Smith’s first volume of poetry, Seventh Heaven, in just over a year’s time, centers, like “Mack the Knife,” on an androgynous figure of death, “sweeping up the hallway like a lady’s dress … death comes riding from the highway in his Sunday best.” The song will eventually appear as the B-side to Smith’s 1979 singles “So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star” and “Frederick.”

  The riding theme is sustained in the following number, “Picture Hanging Blues,” about the outlaw Jesse James. Here again, Smith celebrates James as a rabble-rousing artist figure, working with death as a mode of mental and social liberation. The song cycle closes with “Ballad of a Bad Boy.” Dedicated to Sam Shepard, the verses tell the tale of a stock car racing hoodlum, bound up in a fatal relationship with a death-dealing “mom.” Relishing the song’s wickedness— “Oh I was bad, didn’t do what I should, mama catch with a lickin’, and tell me to be good”—Smith imbues the lines with lascivious intensity as Kaye thrashes an increasingly frenetic Link Wray—style rhythm. The sheer sexiness of transgression, of good and evil, queer and straight, male and female, is topped only by Smith’s flouting of Christian salvation in her introduction (“Christ the great escape artist, greater than Houdini and the finest faggot in history having twelve men to lick his feet”) and in her poem “Oath,” which opens thus: “Christ died for somebody’s sins but not mine / melting in a pot of thieves / wild card up my sleeve / thick heart of stone / my sins my own.” In four years’ time, these words will initiate the album Horses. Tonight, in St. Mark’s church, they resound as a declaration of artistic intent.

  MacHeath, Jesse James, Jean Genet, and the murdered young punk: a selection of hommes fatals. It’s been quite an evening and the crowd respond well to this new entrant on the scene: Patti Smith, with her Keith Richards bangs, her Johnny Carson wisecracks, and her shotgun delivery, an outlaw poet with a rock ’n’ roll heart.

  Theoria

  Horses, released by Arista records in November 1975, is the greatest rock album of all time: end of story. For a literary critic, well practiced in the art of scholarly detachment, this is a strangely liberating yet dangerous claim. I would not dare, for instance, in a formal setting, to say the same of the productions of my favorite nineteenth-century poets. In my field it just wouldn’t be done. Rock ’n’ roll seems different, more visceral, more in tune with the promptings of the heart than the deliberations of the head. But I’m not sure now that I should allow myself this license with Patti Smith. Why, after all, should a record not be treated with the same care and attention, and intellectual rigour, that would be applied to an epic poem or a collection of sonnets? And by now, of course, rock writing has reached a high level of academic respectability, signalled by the appearance in 1988 of Simon Frith’s Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop and in 1990 by Richard Middleton’s Studying Popular Music. Subsequent research by Walter Everett, Tricia Rose, Martha Bayles, Adam Krims, Susan McClary, Allan Moore, and Dai Griffiths, to name but a few, has gone on to consolidate this position. But although the analytical study of popular music, which spans the disciplines of musicology, sociology, and literary and cultural studies, is no longer the lightweight subject that it once seemed, a literary critic must nevertheless endeavor to justify his interest to those in the know.

  The problem with taking rock music seriously, of course, is that rock music does not appear to want to be taken seriously. Patti Smith herself has spoken of her bafflement at being presented with a copy of a PhD thesis relating her work to Rimbaud: “It’s just great that people keep on pursuing things. I mean, I’d rather see someone write a worthless, 900-page dissertation on CBGBs than see them take their own life. Then again … I might want to shoot him after he wrote it” (Bracewell, 1996). Duly noted. But still I return to my opening query: why should rock music resist analytical study? The oft-cited Elvis Costello line (the attribution is disputed), “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” underscores the sense in which the sensual, corporeal aspects of rock ’n’ roll seem diametrically opposed to the cerebral, abstracted realm of critical scrutiny. And there is truth to this, to be sure. But what interests me about Costello’s claim is the way it constructs music as an entirely unmediated experience, impacting on the listener directly, without any recourse to pre-existing cultural codes, with “codes” defined here as the underlying rules or conventions of a signifying system, be this a literary, fashion, or indeed musical or architectural system. People who hate this sort of approach, which may be identified in general terms as structuralist or, more latterly, poststructuralist, would rather maintain that music is not determined by pre-existing codes, it just is. To them, the analytical study of music is experienced as an assault on the primary experience of music: its ability to instill states of anger, freedom, and euphoria in the listener. By rendering the emotional charge of music an object of formal analysis, so the argument runs, we murder to dissect. And again, there is some truth to this, as anyone who has read through some of the more arid productions of musicology will no doubt attest. Furthermore, it wasn’t an academic treatise on the modal scale in contemporary jazz that turned Patti Smith on to music, but the hair-raising cry of Little Richard’s “Wopbob-aloobop-alopbamboom!” And for what it’s worth, I get the same feeling whenever I hear Smith chanting “Horses, horses, horses!” on the track “Land.”

  But while music is undoubtedly pleasurable, it is also meaningful. Music is neither produced nor encountered in a sociocultural vacuum; it has a history, indeed is part of history, and always comes to us through some form of mediation. Thus, while the opening of “Tutti Frutti” works as a direct appeal to the body, and serves, no doubt, as an incitement to rhythmic or sexual excitement, its specific charge, to adapt McClary and Walser’s argument (Frith and Goodwin, 1990), is as socially constructed as the contrapuntal intricacies of a baroque fugue. The sensual dimension of rock music, in other words, “is central to the ways in which rock is produced, marketed, and consumed.” It does not come to us out of nowhere, and to a great extent our experience of being turned on by a song is conditioned by our ability to recognize that song’s place within a wider musical and sociocultural system. For just as visual or written media rely on a variety of devices to construct their particular versions of the real, devices which are themselves determined and shaped by specific social and political circumstances, so the meaning of music is conditioned by a range of extramusical factors. Just as it would be impossible, for example, to understand the radical form of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959) without knowing something about the history of the American and European avant-gardes, not to mention the social contexts in which Burroughs’s work was produced and consumed, from McCarthyism to the Cold War, so a piece of music like Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool (1950) only makes sense when it is located within the history of jazz, an account of a changing musical genre which is itself comprehensible only when located within the
broader social history of black America.

  Music, however, remains a notoriously difficult medium to approach from a critical perspective. “Only when I’m dancing can I feel this free,” sang Madonna in “Into the Groove” (1984), and much of popular music’s appeal can be traced to the notion that, unlike other cultural forms, music is where we are most likely to encounter ourselves, free, as it were, from the strictures of politics and ideology. But, as McClary and Walser have argued: “it is precisely this illusion that one experiences one’s own subjectivity or a collective subjectivity in music” together with its “ability to conceal its processes and to communicate nothing/everything ‘directly’ that accounts for its peculiar power and prestige in society” (McClary and Walser, 1990). What music offers is the promise of release from the restrictions of everyday life. But such a release is, of course, illusory, and just as ideology works to convince its subjects that they are, in fact, outside ideology, thus rendering itself immune to critique and to the potential for revolt, so music, by concealing its origins in commerce, and by providing a sense of escape from the workaday world, operates as a lure to critical consciousness. To be lost in music, released from the nine to five, is to feel alive, but also, as Sister Sledge adds, to be “Caught in a trap” (“Lost in Music,” 1984): for who, once they have experienced such freedom, would wish to reflect on it? Might the act of close critical engagement ruin the illusion?

  Of course, this thesis has its limitations, not least because music itself is more than capable of engaging with political questions, as evidenced in Patti Smith’s rendering of Brecht and Weill and in Dylan’s early protest songs. What remains problematic, however, is music’s appeal to the pleasure principle. As we shall see when we look more closely at Horses, the ability of rock ’n’ roll to generate states of euphoria is often at odds with its political mandate. Rock music, at its most hedonistic, is thrilling precisely because it returns us to a pre-civilized state of being, a chaotic realm of drives and impulses where repression holds no sway. In “Babelogue,” the riotous preamble to “Rock ’n’ Roll Nigger” from the album Easter (1978), Smith hollers “in heart i am an american artist and i have no guilt. i seek pleasure. i seek the nerves under your skin …” (1994). To be free from guilt and to pursue pleasure with no regard for reason is key to the rock ’n’ roll experience; it is also, from a theoretical perspective, subversive to the extent that it challenges fixed ideas of class, nation, gender, and sexuality. But here, Smith’s self-proclaimed status as an “american artist” reveals the extent to which the celebration of pure id energy is bound up with the revolutionary spirit of capitalism. The song “Free Money,” from Horses, offers a perfect illustration of how rock music can celebrate even as it challenges the intoxicating effects of money and power. At what point does the Dionysian revel resemble the stock market crash? And, more particularly, when does the pursuit of happiness, of the release from guilt and repression, encounter its material foundation? Just as the singer realizes that ultimately there is no such thing as free money—it’s just a dream—so her claim to be an American artist is brought into collision with the brute realities of imperialism: there is guilt in Vietnam, in Watergate, and in America itself. These are political realities that Smith never shirks from addressing, particularly in her live performances.

  But if there is a problem with Smith’s vision, it resides perhaps in her tendency to privilege the rock ’n’ roll experience to the exclusion of any form of self-interrogation. To some extent, and this is an issue that I will engage with at length, rock ’n’ roll for Patti Smith is a form of spilt religion. And just as the abiding truths of religious fundamentalism, for example, preclude rational critique, so Patti Smith is dauntless in her allegiance to the notion of rock as a vehicle of mental and social liberation. Still, one might say that Smith’s adherence to her cause is no more benighted than the psychoanalyst’s faith in the revelatory powers of dreams. In both cases, the medium is privileged only to the extent that it serves as an arena for the exploration of complex and often contradictory desires. The analogy with psychoanalysis is appropriate, it seems to me, not least because references to dreams and fantasies abound in Smith’s work. What I’m suggesting, in other words, is this: that while we go about berating Patti Smith for failing to present a coherent political program in her work, for both rebelling against and participating in the dynamic energies of capital, we ignore the extent to which the logic of her songs resembles that of dreams. At the level of the unconscious it may well be appropriate to declare that one is free from guilt, at liberty to explore aspects and attitudes of the self that might not make sense from a rational point of view. To return to “Free Money,” under capitalism one might well fantasize about buying a “jet plane,” rising up “through the stratosphere,” checking out the planets and then “down / Deep where it’s hot in Arabia-babia / Then cool fields of snow.” And anyway, doesn’t the pursuit of commodity fetishism lead here to something finer, rarer, and less subject to the deadening effects of an exchange economy? Doesn’t it lead to something that cannot be bought or sold, to an experience of pure love?

  The word “love” returns me to the word theoria. From the ancient Greek, theoria signifies both the contemplation of beauty and a desire to merge with the divine, and while this latter aspect might imply a suspension of the critical faculty, it does go some way to describing my own position as a reader and as a listener to rock music. Let me say from the outset, then, that this is a book driven by love. As a work of theoria it implies not merely the taking up of a critical stance, but the forging of a relationship based on love and realized in pleasure. It is possible, I feel, to think from inside an experience, and in certain cases, such as this one, it may be the only way to understand what is really going on. And here let me be clear: I take pleasure not just in the visceral drives of Patti Smith’s music, but also in her ability to tease out thought, to place the body and the mind in exquisite tension, and in doing so to create something encompassed by neither. I realize that this high-minded claim might put potential readers off, but I want to stress that, for me, nothing is more heady, in the sense of intoxicating, than the champagne froth of a radical new idea.

  This claim puts me at odds with the findings of the cultural critic Martha Bayles. In her book Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music (1996), Bayles attacks artists such as the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa, and John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band for having wilfully “contaminated popular music with unhealthy artistic doctrines that were previously confined to high culture” (see Gracyk, 1998). Lacking the joyful exuberance of early rock ’n’ roll, soul and Motown, the music of these “perverse modernists” is characterized by “obscenity, brutality, and sonic abuse” (Bayles, 1996). A cursory glance at Smith’s investment in the disruptive anti-art of Rimbaud, Genet, and Brecht, together with her stylized appropriations of three-chord rock ’n’ roll, would appear to confirm Bayles’s thesis. What, exactly, Bayles might argue, is gained by using Wilson Pickett’s “Land of 1000 Dances” (1966) as a setting for avant-garde evocations of drug abuse, street violence, and mental breakdown (“Land”)? By mixing high and low discourses, Bayles warns, we risk destroying what was pleasurable in popular culture. We commit, moreover, to a morally bankrupt world where the anti-values of cynicism, irony, and despair reign supreme.

  Against this view, I wish to stress that Smith’s interventions in the “exuberant modernism” of early rock ’n’ roll result in pleasure of a different order: an unsettling and nuanced pleasure, certainly, but one that remains rooted in the primal delight of “the simple rock and roll song” (“Land”). By embracing both sides of the cultural divide, and by refusing to either downplay her intelligence or disguise her enthusiasm for popular music, Smith is at liberty to explore the possibilities of cultural contamination. The result is a hybrid form. Unabashed in its celebration of the popular, defiant in its display of cultural capital, an album like Horses is political not le
ast because its maker, the progeny of a working class family, refuses to know her place. By disrespecting the boundaries between high and low culture, Patti Smith violates the division between upper and lower class. By combining rock ’n’ roll with the power of the word (“Rock ’n’ Rimbaud,” as she called it), Smith speaks for an emergent class of highly educated but economically disadvantaged suburban youth. And this may well explain the antipathy of her fiercest critics, particularly those who contrast her work with the alleged innocence of early rock and soul. The idealization of early American popular music in contemporary rock writing is rooted, it seems to me, in a pernicious denial of the nature and significance of historical change. Such an idealization refuses moreover to acknowledge the inextricable links between power, capital, and popular entertainment that artists, such as Zappa, Reed, Lennon, Ono, and Smith, seek to expose.

  Standing in the Shadows

  My account of the St. Mark’s performance is intended to convey a sense of Patti Smith’s investment in the pleasures of cultural contamination. Now, looking back, I am struck once more by how much is condensed into this twenty-minute performance and the extent to which it anticipates the future. It will be five years before listeners get a chance to plunge into “Birdland,” “Elegie,” and “Gloria,” but the origins of Horses’ distinct aesthetic vision are already in place: the references to criminality, to outlaw poets, to sin and redemption, and to the erotics of violent death. Given what has already been said about the problems rock music pose to critical analysis, it seems worthwhile, at this point, to return to the significance of the St. Mark’s event.