In Damnation of...Horses by Patti Smith

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

she's "punk" in a historical rather than a musicological sense, inasmuch as she belongs to the counterculture that followed in the wake of the hippies & rejected many of their values. this seems really obvious to me? idk

plus she had an attitude (or at least projected one, on record) and couldn't sing for shit

she loved hippies!

Dylan, Jagger etc

She was heavily involved in the CBGB scene that Television set up and became what was known as New York Punk.
Seemed to be about d.i.y. lo fi return to basics rock after late 60s early 70s rock excess. Contained a lot of improvisation but wasn't as technique based as the mainstream of the time.

(xp) I hope you're not implying Dylan and Jagger were hippies?

Anyway, it's not as cut and dried as that, she was hippyish and punky.

new york "punk" avant la lettre didn't subscribe to the whole (generally overstated) punk orthodoxy, in sound or ideology

in other words this is a dumb conversation

you might like patti smith or you might not, but it shouldn't have to do with whether or not she is "punk" unless you have signed a contract saying you can only like punk rock.

Also, musically her band were pretty punky!

Oh and the guitarist really triggered a return to basics in compiling Nuggets. I think that has been pointed to by a lot of people as a triggering point.
I'm still not sure if Kaye was recognising people buying singles from the era when he was working at Village Oldies which from the name I'd assume was a 2nd hand place.

I never thought of her as punk in the same way the Sex Pistols were, and never really felt that I was being asked to feel that way. I don't see that she's someone who calls out for a contrarian response. Her most recent album is wonderful, as is her first. I've been told that she was amazing live, and am prepared to believe that.

I'm trying to think about which opening statement is more ballsy. "I am an antichrist, I am an anarchist." or "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine." My sense is that most people couldn't parse the first because they didn't know enough about Greek prefixes, but would understand that the second was problematic.

I'm one of those milennials so I have a woefully poor grounding in mod v rocker studies but for what little it's worth patti smith is quite clearly one of the biggest hippies on the planet

I was behind her in line at Kim's Underground once, when she dealt with aplomb with an asshole Kim's employee, which forever endeared her to me.

Genre descriptions for Horses:

Wikipedia- Punk rock, art punk, garage rock
AllMusic- New York Punk, Punk/New Wave
Discogs- Rock, Art Rock (this is the only one that gets right)
RateYourMusic- Proto-Punk, Singer/Songwriter, Garage Rock, Poetry, Art Punk, Piano Rock

No.

Ha, I started this thread 14 years ago partly because of this problem: Taking Sides: Patti Smith vs Aerosmith

contains the following unedited sequence of posts, from the halcyon days when this board could reliably make me belly-laugh at work:

Both of them pale in comparison to Alice Cooper. I'd love to hear Patti's pronunciations of all those dead French guys' names. Also, the 'legendary' first line of 'Horses', pfffft - one of those Statements to which the only possible reply is "Yeah, so what?"

Aerosmith had a few moments of accidental comingtogetherness (chemical division). 'Rocks' is to garage rock what 'Exile' was to gospel music. 'Night in the Ruts' has some interesting what-the-fuck-were-they-on moments too.
― dave q, Friday, 18 January 2002 01:00 (14 years ago) Permalink

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First of all, Patti by a mile.

But Aerosmith could rawk, in an illiterate sense. So they were cool for awhile (like 2 LPs worth) - until they started recycling every fucking thing. I hate Aerosmith soooo much. I can't think of a band that's less creative.
― Dave225, Friday, 18 January 2002 01:00 (14 years ago) Permalink

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fucking yank shit. golden oldys. i love music from what ive seen board should be called i love shit cos thats all u talk about.
― XStatic Peace, Friday, 18 January 2002 01:00 (14 years ago) Permalink