In Damnation of...Horses by Patti Smith

The very first sentence in this thread says it all really...

It's still vile.

Still great.

I don't have strong feelings about her, but she makes a lot more sense if you consider her ties to Springsteen & Blue Oyster Cult, rather than Richard Hell or Television. And relating her to Ramones or Dead Boys doesn't make any sense at all, in retrospect.

She reminds me most of Mark E. Smith. Not in her content, but more in the meth-fueled stream of consciousness, just run through a different brain.

Listened to it once.

Really liked it.

Never listened to it again.

How queer!

just got offed just saw patti smith live at the cambridge junction

the music was good, lively, toe-tapping rock stuff, the performance was superb, and patti herself absolutely riveting, her between-song patter sweet, self-parodic, earnest and very funny all at once. and that's BEFORE i get onto her ad-libs during songs. most of which were about her excitement at being in cambridge, a place of 'peace and knowledge' (yeah, right!). and meeting a cow. or something. very bizarre (if amusing) soliloquy during extended Hendrix cover. oh, and she also made a lot of meeting some 'brothers' (turned out to be 'fellows') earlier on in the day. and told a lovely anecdote about shoes. what's not to love?

it did help that her backing band were superb.

I like Gloria and Land of a Thousand Dances. Everything else about the album disappointed me after hearing 20 years or so of hype.

I got the double CD version at fopp a while ago for £5 (must have been a mistake of pricing), and I can say that previously I was of an Alex in NYC mind (well, I wouldn't say vile, but I could say I couldn't see it)....

However, the second CD has the "Don't look back" gig recreation of the full album, and here it sounds great/alive/relevant.

So, um, try that one.

Oh, I have it here.

revive for AlexNYC

http://youtube.com/watch?v=-8L6F-yhRW4

Her poetry in that one is terrible. I can't stand her beyond horses. But I'll always stand by horses.

I like the song Horses, but the album as a whole is a bit meh.

No! "Birdland" and "Kimberley" and "Gloria" redeem it for sure, I also like the rest of it but I am a rabid fan.

ps) Horses is also way better than any album that Sleater Kinney, Bjork, Tori Amos, Sinead Oconnor, or PJ Harvey ever did. So there.
So does that make Horses the best album recorded by someone with a vagina (or is there another connection between these artists that I am missing)?

best ilm zing ever

"gloria" and "horses" are both fantastic, but i wish the rest of the album sounded more like them. that one cod-reggae or something song is nearly unlistenable.

Mostly hostile Penman review (Horses is the one he likes):

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n09/ian-penman/ways-to-be-pretentious

Ah, he's no AlexInNYC

alex was a trailblazer when it comes to patti hate.

I now realize I forgot to post the update I penned last summer.

BRACE YOURSELVES!

Well, you didn't exactly change your mind about the music, did you?

As I say, seek out the live version of the album, CD2 in the deluxe reissue, that for me turned me around.

And yes, "Just kids" is great.

Nah, the music still sucks a tremendous platter of balls.

a "tremendous platter" of anything sounds pretty okay

like i'm imagining that they're slightly spicy, garlic-marinated balls and that they're being ferried about the pavilion by a nicely dressed young man in an apron and bowtie. the sun seems to be coming out.

yeah this album is one of a handful of "canonical" albums beloved by people i respect that i just cannot appreciate at all.

alex in nyc's blog post above is pretty sexist, though, trading in clichés of women sleeping their way to renown

Posted by me elsewhere a couple weeks back:

I remember taking a "history of rock music" class in my first taste of community college around 2000/2001 (so I was around 19 or 20 at the time) and was really excited to get to the punk/new wave section. In the textbook (which I wish I had saved, but alas, did not) there was, of course, much talk of the CBGB/NY scene. Besides the Ramones, the one artist that was hyped up more than anyone else was Patti Smith; in particular, Horses. There was a listening guide, no actual music was licensed, so it was up to the professor to play us the tunes mentioned. He never got around to Patti Smith, favoring instead the Ramones and more new wave-ish stuff. Because of this hype, I started to build up in my mind the thought of Patti Smith, and Horses, as this all-ahead, ass-kicking punk rawk record that was, awesomely, fronted by an equally as ass-kicking female lyricist that could provoke your mind while you rocked out. I was poor and jobless and had next to no spending money, so I would always check the racks at the used record shop and all they would have in there was multiple copies of Easter and Wave. Never did pick those up. So, anyway, time passes and I got myself a job at that very same used record store about a year later as a record clerk, in charge of processing all incoming arrivals. So, one day a copy of Horses finally shows up. I'm super excited. Didn't even bother to ask to play it in the store or have a go at the listening station. Just blind purchased it. After a long shift, I get it home, place it on the turntable aaaannnnnnnndd. . . this.

It just sucks. It's boring. It's overrated. And it sounds nothing like what it's been assigned to. It has the production of a million other shitty 1975 rock records. Total disappointment.

people who don't like this record suck

i guess it's overstated as a "punk record" (its proto-punk ffs, its attitudes inform what comes later) but it's got this free-flowing, expansive quality that i feel like very few records have (like for some reason i kind of associate this record with astral weeks)

i like this album well enough, but i always wished there were more moments like the first 30 seconds of "land," the whole "the boy looked at johnny, johnny started to run..." bit, which is wonderfully intense and spooky. i can appreciate patti as an influence and an icon but most of her actual music always felt a little tame to me next to the slits or the raincoats or x-ray spex or yoko ono or a lot of other female artists from roughly the same era who don't get a tenth of the attention she does (or get mostly negative attention). still, nothing against her.

also

I don't have strong feelings about her, but she makes a lot more sense if you consider her ties to Springsteen & Blue Oyster Cult

otm

And we arrive at the crux of why Horses is a bad album.

i wish i liked this album. i've tried it a couple of times. she looks so cool on the album sleeve.

surprised that so many find horses inaccessible or downright crap. it's appeal has always seemed pretty basic & obvious to me. loose, tough, bruised-up and romantic - not some paint-pealing firebomb, for the most part, but a damn fine 70s rock record. i like her voice, her lyrics and her style, the music's druggy shamble and drift, spasmodic attack. it's weird to me that patti might be faulted for failing to measure up to the mythology that got pasted onto her. with such expecations set aside, horses a strange, singular and beautiful album. only about half brilliant, but the brilliant half is as exhilaratingly immediate as anything by the velvets, stooges or insert canonical whoever.

Love Patti and her music from "Horses" thru to "Wave" but I can't stand contemporary hippieish PS with her constant namedropping of and self-associating with the Poets' Pantheon. She's always namedropped Rimbaud, Blake and the Beats she knew but nowadays it's OTT.

And we arrive at the crux of why Horses is a bad album

listen idk what to tell you if you think blue öyster cult is bad. can't think of a single better rock band tbh. maybe only thin lizzy

people who don't like this record suck

― HYPERLINK TO RAP GENIUS (BradNelson), Thursday, 5 May 2016 00:57 (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

see what i mean? i respect tim's taste a great deal, but i don't get this record.

people who don't like this record certainly aren't doing a great job of not sucking