Patti Smith vs Patti Smyth

Any Smyth but only because she's not Smith. The emperor wears no clothes. She's a death-harpee.

Case for Smith: "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine" = best first line of a debut album ever, also she sang backup for MOTHERFUCKING BLUE OYSTER CULT. You can't front on that. No. Don't try.

Don Henley also has good hair, so you haters can sit and spin.

http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/0/2557421874cb55b048256dce002d6caf?OpenDocument&Click=

The word "tragic" appears four times in a Smyth bio, which...I just can't help but find funny. The bio almost makes her seem like a bad-ass. Too bad the music is so fuckin' bland.

bang bang

Jeez Alex, what did Patti Smith do? Piss in your pool..
http://www.sohoblues.com/SoHoBluesBWPortraits/previewpages/preview10.jpg

I am reading Please Kill Me and every time Patti Smith comes up I skip to the next chapter. Everything about her makes my skin crawl.

This thread is shocking in its almost complete inattention to "Goodbye To You" which crushes "The Warrior," not to mention all the Patti Smith I've ever heard. It's hard to understand why this wasn't among the biggest pop songs of the era.

A very rare instance in which each singer can sing the other's songs without a problem. I can hear Smyth performing a more than credible version of "Dancing Barefoot" or "Rock and Roll Nigger," and Smith doing "The Warrior" or "Sometimes Love Ain't Enough."

that bio of patty smyth upthread is pretty, um, o_0

What do I remember about Patti Smith from Please Kill Me? She has really big boobs. Seriously, given all the retartedness, douchbaggery,and drug induced fun described in Please Kill Me, Patti doesn't come off that badly. Her biggest sins were being manipulative and ambitious. Tell me one artist who isn't a little bit like that.

also, a teenaged me used to fantasize about patti smyth and laura branigan lezzing it up a la ms. branigan's "self-control" video ... alas that such a thing never occurred ;_;

i've never once had an erotic thought about patti smith ... ugh.

yeah, i've never understood the appeal of legs mcneil -- he ALWAYS came off like a first-class douchebag who badly needed someone to put a doc marten-clad foot in his ass.

Patti Scialfa

I can see why people don't like Patti Smith, pretentious and humorless, but the first couple of records are so good I mange to overlook those faults.

Eisbaer, Patti beckons you with her bedroom eyes...
http://www.fogcityjournal.com/images/photos/patti_smith.jpg

I just saw Patti Smyth a couple of hours ago in a local park. She was good! She walked through the crowd, such as it was, and sat in people's beach chairs. "You're giving me a beer? Wow, thanks! Bud Light?!?"

She didn't cover any Patti Smith songs, but she did play "River Deep Mountain High" as her encore.

What do I remember about Patti Smith from Please Kill Me? She has really big boobs. Seriously, given all the retartedness, douchbaggery,and drug induced fun described in Please Kill Me, Patti doesn't come off that badly. Her biggest sins were being manipulative and ambitious. Tell me one artist who isn't a little bit like that.

I can't deal with poetry. I find any involved in it revolting. I think of her as one of those annoying coffee house people who made it.

As far as the book goes, it was four bucks at a used book store. It's not as good as England's Dreaming or Wreckers of Civilization but not much else is.

Patti Smith hasn't aged particularly well, has she?...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/80/Patti_Smith_performing_in_Finland,_2007.jpg/800px-Patti_Smith_performing_in_Finland,_2007.jpg

is "Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough" (#2 for six weeks in fall '92) one of the last times in the grunge era that two Old People scored a huge hit on the pop charts?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK4peuAODtc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofA3URC1wyk

i can not think of any non-bryan adams examples

good call on "I Finally Found Someone." I was going to mention "Change The World" in my original post.

i wasn't sure that adams-streisand was actually that big a hit (it didn't get alot of play on armed forces radio if you can imagine) but it apparently made it to #8. trying to think of the last genuine (ie non-itunes blip, minimum 3 weeks let's say) top ten hit by a 40+ act. i'm guessing 'don't tell me' by madonna (can't remember if 'hung up' was actually a real hit or itunes blip).

"Hung Up" briefly hit the top ten, yeah.

"Hey, Soul Sister" and any recent Jay-Z hit?

lol I should have said "boomers" aka the Steve Winwood group

thought to check on mary j's age, somehow jay-z slipped my mind. train dude was 40 when 'hey soul sister'. interesting story c/o wikipedia:
“ I said, 'I want to write an INXS-y song. So, they started playing kind of an INXS-y song, and I wrote the song 'Hey, Soul Sister' to it and the melodies and started to sing it. And I said, 'Man, this just doesn't sound great to me.' ”
—Pat Monahan, on wanting to write an INXS-y song.
“ One of the guys, Espen, who's like a huge star in Norway, picked up a ukulele, and said, 'Hey, how about this?' I said, 'Are you (kidding) me?' And it made the difference. It made my words dance. It made sense. These words were meant to dance with ukulele and not guitar. ”

“ I said, 'I want to write an INXS-y song.
—Pat Monahan, on wanting to write an INXS-y song.

classic Carver-esque exchange

yeah Espen is one of the guys who co-wrote a lot of those Stargate hits with strummy guitar riffs like "Irreplaceable" and "With You". funniest thing about "Hey, Soul Sister" is still the lyrics inspired by Burning Man, though.

Weird Al may actually be the oldest person besides Madonna in the top 10 in recent memory, was 47 when "White & Nerdy" peaked

i think "believe" is the last big boomer hit, unless something like "my father's eyes" or whatever charted much higher than i remember. i think whatever madonna is her last real big hit (which i heard 'hung up' everywhere and i like 'hung up' so fuck it i'm gonna say it's 'hung up', plus unlike subsequent itunes blips it didn't resort to desperate younger guest stars) is the last from that 'mtv generation', have the red hot chili peppers managed to sneak into the top ten anytime recently or has rock radio been that dead for that long? kinda blowing my mind to think of train as these longtime vets that have roughly been visible for as long as the stones were circa emotional rescue.

"4 Seconds" was much bigger on US radio and charts than "Hung Up," alas.

can't believe i forgot weird al! plus 'white & nerdy' is genuinely one of his biggest hits, and tbh if you gave me odds on most likely to score another top ten hit and it was weird al vs the field (and the field is 'anyone else who had a video introduced by alan hunter') i'd take weird al in a heartbeat.

I suppose it was some kind of envoi to have "Sometimes Love..." and "How Do You Talk to an Angel" be the early nineties Heart and Starship proxies.

man I always forget "This Used To Be My Playground" hit #1.

yeah it wasn't until some of the younger 'people' started doing '4 seconds' at karaoke that i accepted that maybe it was kinda a hit and not just this thing that access hollywood showed ten second clips of for a few days and madonna fans managed to buy onto the top ten for a week. is that the last timberlake appearance in the top ten also?

well, he had the appearance on T.I.'s hit the same year.

and I think the Ciara collab grazed the top ten.

o right. i think the last time i regularly listened to commercial music radio the republicans held the senate.

was that when "Separate Lives" hit #1 or

hahaha. you have no right!

oh hey, J.Lo had maybe the biggest song of her career at 42 last year

i guess Santana was the last real baby boomer w/ serious hits though

I don't think its possible to overstate the degree to which the Britney/Backstreet Boys/Eminem era fundamentally changed the dynamics of the pop charts. No other era in pop displayed such a schizm between what is typically thought of as "kid's music" and what is "adult's music," the former all but obliterating the latter as a presence. The blockbuster albums of any previous era (think Thriller, of course, but also the Bodyguard soundtrack and whatever that one Shania Twain album was) had a definite across-the-board appeal that nevertheless skewed slightly more towards the adult side of things; even in the case of something like Jagged Little Pill, I remember quite a few adults buying it at the time (the Grammy wins undoubtedly helped here). These days, with the likely exception of Adele (and possibly, though I hesitate to say it, Maroon 5), it is pretty much unheard of to have something with such flexible appeal hit the pop charts hard. It is simply impossible to imagine how something like "Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough," or "Change The World" (was this really that big of a hit? I mean, I remember hearing it a lot around '96, but it never seemed to quite reach the same level of ubiquity as some of these others), or even "My Heart Will Go On" happening these days. Movie soundtrack ballads used to be a sure thing, but can anyone even name any of the ones from Avatar, or The Lord of the Rings movies?

Most of the big sellers of the last decade that seem to be purely adult appealing all seem to fall into specialty categories: Josh Groban, Susan Boyle, those horrible Rod Stewart Great American Songbook records, etc.

Also, never knew that "This Used To Be My Playground" hit #1. Don't even remember it getting that much airplay at the time. My main memory of the song, in fact, was being at a grade school party and someone complaining when it came on the radio cause it was bumming everyone out. Credit Madonna's sheer unstoppability at the time, I guess, and the power of the 90s movie ballad!

http://images.nymag.com/arts/popmusic/features/lyricopener110718_fig_1_560.jpg

from a piece nabisco wrote last year: http://nymag.com/arts/popmusic/features/narcissism-2011-7/

around the same time i also wrote a thing about how "Someone Like You" was the first honest to god ballad #1 in years (6 since "We Belong Together" and i don't know how many w/ something with no thumping drum machine) and part of Adele's huge commercial triumph probably was that she was someone in her early 20s who could appeal to people who bought Susan Boyle records.

ha no wait it was Fergie who had the last ballad #1 before Adele: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2011/09/adele_someone_like_you_billboard_charts.php

"Change The World" was goddamn ubiquitous down here for most of '96: it and "Head Over Feet" and the "Friends" theme and Jann Arden's "Insensitive" were on loop.

19th biggest Hot 100 hit of '96!

How 'bout Aerosmith, "I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing"?

well, "Jaded" was a top 10 hit even later than prob any boomer hit besides a couple of the Santana singles

but good call w/ Aerosmith in general

I've never even heard of "Jaded," but I wasn't paying much attention then. Just checked Blondie's "Maria" -- wasn't a huge chart hit in the U.S. but went to #1 in the U.K.

"Jaded" was definitely not as big as the Armageddon song but it was kinda the last gasp of Aerosmith as pop culture force, was all over the radio and they played it at the Super Bowl

"Insensitive" even made it outside of Canada?!

Smyth's duet with Don Henley from the early 90s, "Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough" was a decent bit of MOR slush, superior to anything I've hard by Smith, which granted isn't much. (I heard bits of Horses back in the day.)