In Damnation of...Horses by Patti Smith

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

I like it but that's about as far as it goes for Patti tbh.

between that logic and alex in nyc's sexist takedown, i think i'll just forget music for a while

xpost

I'm with the lrb piece m/l although I like the odd bit from her non-horses (seventies) albums. Horses I love.

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

Yeah, this. I tried to like this when I was younger, and I revisit it every few years thinking "perhaps this time!" but nah.

Dare I ask, which post are you asserting is sexist?

o all of those folks pissed off at me for shitty things I’ve said about Patti Smith, I respectfully apologize. I spoke out of turn and without having done enough of my homework.

So sexist! (insert joke emoticon here, I couldn't see anything objectionable in that piece whatsoever even though we disagree on her musical merits)

Austin, if you aren't down with BOC and Springsteen, you have no business listening to a Patti Smith album in the first place, imo

Seriously, I'm certainly guilty of saying loads of needlessly inflammatory shit, but I cannot fathom how I'm being sexist here. Enlighten me.

You are not a woman, but you criticized a woman.

Both of these are true. Than you for the affirmation. Didn't realize the latter would automatically render me a sexist. More to the point nowhere in either post -- the first one or the much later one -- did I ever allege anything about anyone sleeping their way to the top.

alex, in your blog post (at least, the one you linked to, which was excerpted from some german book) you implied that she slept her way to fame.

it wasn't your post on this thread but the blog post you linked to '

apologies if i misread and you were just linking it; you seemed to imply that you wrote it (FWIW i don't know your real name)

this one: http://vassifer.blogs.com/alexinnyc/2005/07/in_damnation_of.html

Through a strategy of opportunism that set the template for unhealthily ambitious scenemakers like Courtney Love to follow years later, Smith managed to befriend and manipulate enough people...

the implication is pretty close...

I thought this record was okay, if unspectacular. I don't care enough about it to revisit it, though.

That was the first post, which I recanted in the second post. But I'm not recanting anything beyond that, as your perceived implication is unfounded. One can be an manipulative opportunist without it involving sex. The allusion to Courtney love directly relates to a snippet of video in Nick Broomfield's documentary, "Kurt & Courntey" wherein Love recites a to-do list in her campaign towards establishing herself as a star. One of those is "befriend Michael Stipe" (which, of course, she did). This is an example of manipulative opportunism that doesn't involve sleeping around.

Throwing terms like sexist around is pretty serious (much like branding someone a racist. In future, I'd suggest thinking long and hard before wheeling out such a big gun before it is warranted.

She was notoriously opportunistic, especially in the early days.:

Gerard Malanga: "I was a little pissed off at Patti because when the book came out she thanked Anita Pallenberg, who she didn't even know, Bobby Neuwith and somebody else."

"I went out of my way to twist a few arms and get her work known and then she just turns around and thanks Bobby Neuwith....What did she get out of Bobby Neuwith? Maybe she got to meet Dylan. I thought it was a bit of brownnosing."

sorry if i hastened to conclusions, alex. usually that sort of tale strongly implies, or is accompanied by, the sexist narrative of a woman sleeping her way to the top. i didn't know all these things about the young patti smith.

it still seems kind of irrelevant to whatever you think of her album. plenty of opportunists make good records; put another way, many if not most successful people are opportunists one way or another.

Austin, if you aren't down with BOC and Springsteen, you have no business listening to a Patti Smith album in the first place, imo

Further proving my point that this album has nothing to do with punk.

Does it matter whether it has anything to do with punk?

When it's been assigned to that scene and thumped into the ears of music fans for generations following as such, then yes. Its whole reputation relies on it.

Its whole reputation relies on it.

Now you're just being silly.

<3 horses all time
free money $$$$$$$$$$ redondo beach lyfe $$$$$$$$$$$
i can't even really feel how ppl don't think her band was aces?? like they are just a great sound

HOrses is great and possibly even better live. The Easy Action sets I've heard of her live as well as the boots from the era have been great. I also really like Radio Ethiopia which people apparently thought of as more fo a misfire than Horses. Not so hot on Easter which is more poppy or conventionally rocky or something.

Would love a set of her journalism. Kind of surprised there isn't one out but haven't come across one.
Did really enjoy Just Kids too