Patti Smith's Horses Read Online Free Page A

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.
    Why the fascination with the aesthetics of crime? In the week prior to the performance, Charles Manson and three female accomplices were convicted in Los Angeles of murder and conspiracy in the 1969 slayings of seven people, including the actress Sharon Tate. The Beatles song “Helter Skelter” was played at the trial. Meanwhile, as the American bombing of North Vietnam intensified, Army Lt. William L. Calley Jr. was convicted of murdering at least twenty-two civilians in the 1968 My Lai massacre. Closer to home, in 1967 in New York, incidences of violent crime totalled 75,000; by 1971 this had increased to 145,000, with murder rates up by fifty percent. Living in downtown at the notorious Chelsea Hotel, Patti Smith would have been familiar with the prostitutes and the pimps, the hustlers and the junkies. Her take on New York life in this period, although undoubtedly romanticized—“On the sidewalk, Sunday morning / lies a body oozing life” (from“Mack the Knife”)—is rooted in knowledge and experience. It is, moreover, via the references to Jesse James and Brecht, linked with a sense of political agenda. This is the year of Tricky Dicky, of secret tapes in the White House, of accelerating antiwar protest, and of bomb explosions in the Capitol and Senate buildings. It’s also a time when popular entertainment and politics become curiously intertwined, from Elvis’s meeting with Nixon, to the broadcast of Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” on Radio Hanoi. The polarization of these events brings to mind the distinction Walter Benjamin makes in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1968), between the arts under fascism and communism: where the former renders politics a cultural activity, the latter responds by politicizing culture. One course leads to domination, the other to freedom.
    Whether or not Smith is aware of Benjamin, she performs tonight with an acute sense of how easily art can be used to sustain, as well as critique, the lust for power. She knows that since art appeals to the
eudaemonic
or pleasure principle, it can be used as a tool of oppression, as well as of liberation. Thus, while Brecht speaks for the people, his creation “Mack the Knife” occupies a more uncertain position. It’s worth recalling that MacHeath, in
The Threepenny Opera,
is a tawdry gangster figure, and the opera as a whole is a satire on capitalism. What most singers take from the opera, however, is not Brecht and Weill’s socialism but the perverse