Patti Smith

Last month I was talking with people about how I believe that Patti Smith is seriously overrated. But if you want to formulate a statement, you’ll also need arguments on which to base it. To be sure, I realize that she helped female singers explore modes of expression beyond merely singing pretty love songs. In that respect, you can draw a direct line to Blondie and to Siouxsie and the Banshees. Unfortunately, that also means that she often sounds horrible, no Janis Joplin or Billie Holiday (singers who likewise can be said to have been limited in their vocal range, but still were unrivaled in their expression). The spoken word delivery of her own poetry is even more annoying (witness “Birdland,” and “Land” on Horses, “Poppies” on Radio Ethiopia, “Babelogue” on Easter, and the title-track on Wave, for instance).

Musically, her albums provide a link between the psychedelic art rock of The Velvet Underground and the American punk rock of Television, The Ramones, Blondie, and The Runaways, via some garage blues rock. If her debut errs on the artistic side, it lacks the punch on the punk side. I prefer the burst of energy on her rendition of The Who’s “My Generation.” In retrospect I find it hard to believe that critics blamed her for self-indulgence on her sophomore effort, as if Horses (1975) wasn’t overly self-indulgent. You might say she sold out, in that onwards from Radio Ethiopia (1976) her sound became more and more polished and mainstream, until Patti Smith sounds just like Stevie Nicks (not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that, just that Stevie Nicks does that better). So, to me it seems that her overall relevance is limited to the late-70s NYC punk rock scene at Max’s Kansas City and CBGB... Admittedly, I wish I could have been there!

The members of her band in the 70s (Lenny Kaye, Richard Sohl, Ivan Kral, Jay Dee Daugherty) are no doubt talented, I’ll give her that, but much of the music remains rather uninspiring and unoriginal. Noted exceptions include “Radio Ethiopia” (ten minutes worth of distorted rock guitar noise), “Chicklets” (a nice outtake with fender rhodes), “Easter” (a religious meditation on death and resurrection), and “Dancing Barefoot” (a celebration of falling in love). Perhaps it’s unfair to dismiss her poetry without so much as a word, but I just can’t force myself to analyze her lyrics. I just think she’s trite. (“Hey Sheba, hey Salome, hey Venus eclipsin’ my way, ah! / Her vessel, every woman is a vessel, is evasive, is aquatic. / Everyone, silver ecstatic, platinum disk spinning”; or “She is recreation. / She, intoxicated by thee. / She has the slow sensation that / He is levitating with she” ... ?)

Sorry if I offend any die-hard followers, but my contention remains that Patti Smith is a clear case of being at the right place at the right time – and with the right people: photographers Robert Mapplethorpe and Lynn Goldsmith; producers John Cale, Jack Douglas, Jimmy Iovine, and Todd Rundgren; plus musicians such as Tom Verlaine (Television), Allen Lanier (Blue Öyster Cult), (her own guitarist) Lenny Kaye, and Bruce Springsteen; and the coterie of Rolling Stone writers who praised her to the stars (she was herself at one point an RS writer). That doesn’t mean I find her outright bad, I just could have lived without her music – even if I’ll keep her first four albums in my iTunes...