42: HORSES | PATTI SMITH
With the famous Keef shirt on
From Charlie Kaplan at NPR: I was loosely aware of two things about Patti Smith and her 1975 album Horses when I signed up to write about them for this feature:
The first was her status amongst rock's elite, which was mysterious to me. The first major event in my development as a listener happened early in the ninth grade — 2003 or 2004 — when my Dad bought me a copy of Rolling Stone's "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" issue, a pithy exercise in antiquarianism that proved to be as much a musical roadmap as it was an affirmation of the sensibility I'd gotten from my household. The top ten records on the list were things I'd grown up with: the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Beach Boys, etc. The next 490 instantly became priorities on my trips to Tower Records (doesn't that seem like a long time ago?), and became the albums of my adolescence. I listened to "Ramble On" from Led Zeppelin's II (#76) on repeat before my first real date with a real girl. I kept Otis Redding's Otis Blue (#74) in my CD alarm clock for most of my sophomore year in high school and couldn't listen to it for years afterwards because it gave me a Pavlovian feeling of not getting enough sleep. Other kids might have found their favorite music from friends or the Internet or radio, but I discovered The Strokes' Is This It (#367) and D'Angelo's Voodoo (#480) from an increasingly ratty issue of RS.
So how did I miss Horses, #44? It's nestled between two albums I've spent a lot of time with — Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and the Band's eponymous album — but I didn't know anyone who had heard it, or had gone out of their way to recommend it to me. Not that this should have been such a deterrent; I had taken leaps on other albums I hadn't heard about — Love's Forever Changes (#40), or Creedence Clearwater's Green River, (#96) — and they had paid off. Maybe it was the cover; there is something disquieting and alien about that black-and-white photo showing Smith leaning against a white expanse in a dress shirt, one hand slinging a blazer over her shoulder, the other clawing her suspenders. I'm sure the androgyny of her outfit and Joey Ramone haircut was shocking by 1975 standards, but that's not what threw me off — I thought she looked cool. It was something about her cold, distant expression; it's like she's thinking about something really terrible that she has to live with in secret. She's leery and suspicious of who she sees on the other side of the record. I knew Horses was important, but there was something about it that set it apart from the rest of that list that made me wary.
The second thing I knew about Horses came from a friend, who told me Patti Smith is considered a poet before anything else. So I decided that, despite being prompted to approach the record with no preconceptions, I would listen to it with the lyrics in front of me, in the hope that they would bring me closer to getting what Horses is all about. That's all had to prepare myself.
I give this back story to express how unprepared I felt for Horses while I listened to it. Song to song, it is challenging, exciting, and so much different from anything I've ever heard. To me, Horses is only music in a strictly technical sense; sure, Smith sings, and she has a band that plays really well, and sometimes she picks up on recognizable styles like reggae or hard rock, but these are only a sort of dramatic backdrop for her lyrics, like a film score, or a beat poet's bongos. Rolling Stone's list had conditioned me to expect the rigidity of song structure, melody, etc., and Horses does not play by those rules.
And as helpful as the lyric sheet was, Smith's performance was the really compelling element to me. The album's opening intonation, "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine" would feel like a stale trope or pose coming from someone else, but feels radical and terrifying when Smith says it. Part of what's so gripping about Horses' first track, "Gloria — In Exelcis Deo — Gloria" (an interpolation of Them's "Gloria") is how changeable and unpredictable Smith makes every element in the song. Nothing takes a single shape for long: not the tempo, the instrumentation, her accent, or the song's idea of gender. Smith sings from the perspective of a male narrator, all lupine lip-licking, but even his personality is in chaotic flux, distorting grotesquely as his libidinal advances intensify. Smith's narrator isn't rejecting atonement in his opening statement — he is relishing the depravity of what he can't wait to do, acts Jesus probably wouldn't have bit the big one to atone for, if he could take it back. And all this is coming from a woman, narrating as a man, preying on a woman. It really makes you rethink Van Morrison's early material….