Patti Smith's Horses Read Online Free

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 least 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’