The angst has always been with Patti Smith, from Horses to Radio Ethiopia to Easter and even to Wave. If not present in pure noise, it is present in her whimpering and babelogue. Listen carefully. Behind the music of Patti Smith--behind her mesmerizing God-licks and Christ soliloquys--the seemingly mindless energy of punk is made indelibly clear and mindful.
"I feel like some misplaced Joan of Arc...oh God give me something, give me something to give, a reason to live, set me free...I don't need your fuckin SHIT!....I HAVE NOT SOLD MYSELF TO GOD BABY WAS A BLACKSHEEP-BABYWASAWHORE! BABY GOT BIGERRNBIGGERNBIGGA! BABY GET SOMETHIN' BABEEGETMORE--BABYBABEE BEEBEE WAS A ROCKNROLLNIGGA! [outside is society a waitin' for me] are you ready to be heard?
THE SKEPTICS will always wince at cliches about youth rebellion and yarns of repressive society, but perhaps it is because they are the ones in control. The truth is that any society sets standards, and ours sets quite a few. When those standards become so complex and exacting that your mind feels full of pins and needles and your life is spent on everything but yourself...
When I first met her she was so full of sex and gyzm, a real enchantress, she able to charm old winos, animals, and turn the odds on games of chance. We spent all our time in bars that winter, with psychotics and cocaine and morphine and rock'n roll. Me, I was a bit hungover and getting hungry, waiting for tunafish at the counter and she sat near me stuffing her face with coleslaw and milkshakes, dripping down her chin like drool and falling from her mouth.
She finished, exhausted. "Want to party with these pills?" she asked emptily, finally looking up; all her spark departed, sucked back into a syringe, leaving only white, wooden flesh, hanging from her bones and that whole juggernaut of woman so soft and lucid like all the arable nature was now dampened with that phenobarbital glaze..."
"I don't think rock'n roll is more outrageous than what Jimi Hendrix did or Jim Morrison or, um, Jagger, or even Chuck Berry, cause in comparison to the society they were disrupting, they're all pretty outrageous. It's just that as living becomes more difficult...you know, um, it's like you have to go out of your way to have fun these days, and it's so confusing to really spend time doing what you like to do, for some people. So the music has to be more powerful, equally as crazy as the forces keeping you down. "I was a sick kid, I used to get all kinds of diseases...yeah, eating dirt, like...I lived in New Jersey and wrote poetry when I was really young. And I was always thinkin', 'Why don't all these people just leave me alone, andand, and let me read my comics and stare at my hand or write poetry or sing, or or, just take it easy. And I guess it's good that I can sing about it, but it's like a tragedy because there are a lot of people who can't sing and they listen to the radio. I don't know what I'd do..." She looks back on her music now, perceptively, formulating a pseudo-philosophy around it, mending together her thoughts. Some of it seems so contrived, like all the stuff Jim Morrison mumbled in The Soft Parade. But it is all worth looking at, because Patti Smith was a precursor and now a survivor of a unique generation of rock'n' rollers, a generation which is now evolving and turning in new expressive directions. Enter Elvis Costello.
HER NEW ALBUM is softly stated, lacking the rambunctious bitching rancor of her previous work. It is disappointing in a sense. Much of the angst gets lost in the attempted level of sophistication. Patti is no longer wailing and screaming, but then again, she is no longer being spanked.
Wave is the realization of a musical direction which Patti Smith has sought for a long time--the unification of poetry and sound--and commercial success has given her the freedom to do whatever she wants in a studio. And no one can deny her talent, her mind and her music--it still moves. What is a punk, anyway? Where have you seen safety pins put through leather jackets and chains and clashing colors worn with jackboots? It's nowhere. It's nothing. It's a unique look, deliberately designed to resemble nothing else around it: it is an effort to isolate and distinguish, to glorify and attract attention to an otherwise anonymous and lost self:
What does a swastika mean? During World War II, it meant the mechanical annihilation of an entire race of human beings--an act motivated by the highest form of vanity. But on the t-shirt of Sid Vicious, who knows what it means? It is shocking, stomach-twisting, and if nothing else, it is some kind of self-glorification that Vicious and his followers need...the self-glorification he saw in old war documentaries when he was in grammar school, ripping out toilet seats during recess.
Right or wrong, people today need to glorify themselves. And there is a whole world of symbols to do it with, from swastikas to three-piece suits.
"The face of evil is always the face of total need..." --William S. Burroughs
But Patti Smith is one punk who has transcended the need for self-glorification and has instead found her ability to express her angst, however sophomoric it may appear at times.
She first appeared with that worn leather, her straggly, filthy looks could not be avoided. This the woman who thinks that orgasm is the highest state of consciousness, who roots her angst in Burroughs, Rimbaud, Hendrix, Morrison, the Bible--symbolists all. Patti Smith has used the symbols of our time exceedingly well, just as Dylan and Springsteen did before her, towards somewhat different ends. Avoiding the swastika, she has flaunted her hair, her leather, her boots, her sickliness, her chains, her sex...powerful symbols which horrified Rotarians and changed rock'n'roll.
BUT SYMBOLS themselves are meaningless, like words without perceptions. And to cling to any symbol--whether to be mindlessly patriotic or trendgoing punk--is decadent. And this is where the angst either emerges, or turns the knife inward. This is where confused fools lose themselves in their symbols and overdose, and it is where artists use their symbols, change them, flex them, adapt them, to express their angst. It's facing reality: Iggy Pop is a fool, Sid Vicious is dead, Johnny Rotten is dying, and Patti Smith is fucking with the future.*