Patti Smith's Horses Read Online Free Page B

appeal of its target. Thus Bobby Darin, in his well known version from 1959, presents a highly stylized MacHeath, successful and glamorous, the epitome of the fifties American dream. In this somewhat sanitized performance there is little sense of the biting irony evident in the original performance, sung in 1928 by KurtGerron, and sustained in Louis Armstrong’s and Lotte Lenya’s 1956 recording.
    What Smith restores to the song is a sense of both the danger and the allure of the gangster figure. In her rendition, MacHeath is presented as both an object of desire and as a symptom of capitalist unease. What Smith conveys brilliantly throughout her show is the sheer enjoyment of criminality, the perverse pleasure that drives entrepreneur and outlaw alike. With a glance toward the Manson killings as crimes that exposed the wickedness at the core of the Hollywood dream, Smith shows that she understands how transgression straddles political and moral divides, rendering left and right, good and evil, as perverse shadows of the other. This notion is sustained in her dedication to the novelist Jean Genet, whose fantasies of explicit gay sex within gaol walls highlight the close relations between transgression and taboo. We cannot, in other words, have one without the other. As Paul writes in Romans 4:15: “where there is no law there is no transgression.”
    Perhaps this explains the significance of Smith’s blasphemy in “Oath.” At a time when New York seemed in the grip of a religious revival, with George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” dominating the airwaves and the massively successful musicals
Jesus Christ Superstar
and
Godspell
about to premiere on Broadway, it takes chutzpah to claim that “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.” Smith, in this instance, is not denouncing Christianity, but rather its insidious transformation into a safe cultural commodity, a salve for the conscience-stricken children of the 60s. The technique of
detournement
or reversal, borrowed from the radical French Situationists, is a device that Smith will deploy throughout her career to highlight the vitiating effects of mass culture. When finally,in “The Ballad of a Bad Boy,” Smith turns to the perverse relationship between a mother and her son, the blurring of the death and life instincts is symbolized in the destruction of that archetypal symbol of American freedom, the car. Here, again, the capitalist obsession with pleasure is taken to its logical extreme: a violent rending of that primary moral absolute, the incest taboo.
    Tonight, then, is an opportunity to assault the complacency of early 70s America. With each song, Smith presents a sort of photographic negative, her characters inhabiting a shadow version of the land of the free. What she illuminates is the hidden complicity between good and evil, how that which we should despise becomes an object of fascination. Smith’s hipster audience must have lapped this up. It would have appealed, in particular, to the Warhol crowd, absorbed in their own version of late American decadence. But also, in more immediate terms, it would have marked Patti Smith out as a fellow artist, someone worth paying attention to. In recent years, Smith has downplayed the significance of the St. Mark’s event, claiming that much of its significance comes down to “who happened to be there” (Delano, 2002). This is true, for when the roll-call of those in attendance on this night, from the worlds of music and literature, is properly considered, it is clear that Patti Smith’s reputation, and her eventual fame, are as much the product of her acceptance within an artistic milieu as they are of her innate genius. Once again, therefore, our grasp of the meaning of this performance is related to our understanding of how culture is produced, disseminated, and consumed. It is, as they say, all a matter of history.
    But not merely of history. When we turn to look in detail at the circumstances that