Patti Smith's Horses (3 page)

But while music is undoubtedly pleasurable, it is also meaningful. Music is neither produced nor encountered in a sociocultural vacuum; it has a history, indeed
is
part of history, and always comes to us through some form of mediation. Thus, while the opening of “Tutti Frutti” works as a direct appeal to the body, and serves, no doubt, as an incitement
to rhythmic or sexual excitement, its specific charge, to adapt McClary and Walser’s argument (Frith and Goodwin, 1990), is as socially constructed as the contrapuntal intricacies of a baroque fugue. The sensual dimension of rock music, in other words, “is central to the ways in which rock is produced, marketed, and consumed.” It does not come to us out of nowhere, and to a great extent our experience of being turned on by a song is conditioned by our ability to recognize that song’s place within a wider musical and sociocultural system. For just as visual or written media rely on a variety of devices to construct their particular versions of the real, devices which are themselves determined and shaped by specific social and political circumstances, so the meaning of music is conditioned by a range of extramusical factors. Just as it would be impossible, for example, to understand the radical form of William Burroughs’s
Naked Lunch
(1959) without knowing something about the history of the American and European avant-gardes, not to mention the social contexts in which Burroughs’s work was produced and consumed, from McCarthyism to the Cold War, so a piece of music like Miles Davis’s
Birth of the Cool
(1950) only makes sense when it is located within the history of jazz, an account of a changing musical genre which is itself comprehensible only when located within the broader social history of black America.

Music, however, remains a notoriously difficult medium to approach from a critical perspective. “Only when I’m dancing can I feel this free,” sang Madonna in “Into the Groove” (1984), and much of popular music’s appeal can be traced to the notion that, unlike other cultural forms, music is where we are most likely to encounter ourselves, free, as it were, from the strictures of politics and ideology. But, as McClary
and Walser have argued: “it is precisely this illusion that one experiences one’s own subjectivity or a collective subjectivity in music” together with its “ability to conceal its processes and to communicate nothing/everything ‘directly’ that accounts for its peculiar power and prestige in society” (McClary and Walser, 1990). What music offers is the promise of release from the restrictions of everyday life. But such a release is, of course, illusory, and just as ideology works to convince its subjects that they are, in fact, outside ideology, thus rendering itself immune to critique and to the potential for revolt, so music, by concealing its origins in commerce, and by providing a sense of escape from the workaday world, operates as a lure to critical consciousness. To be lost in music, released from the nine to five, is to feel alive, but also, as Sister Sledge adds, to be “Caught in a trap” (“Lost in Music,” 1984): for who, once they have experienced such freedom, would wish to reflect on it? Might the act of close critical engagement ruin the illusion?

Of course, this thesis has its limitations, not least because music itself is more than capable of engaging with political questions, as evidenced in Patti Smith’s rendering of Brecht and Weill and in Dylan’s early protest songs. What remains problematic, however, is music’s appeal to the pleasure principle. As we shall see when we look more closely at
Horses,
the ability of rock ’n’ roll to generate states of euphoria is often at odds with its political mandate. Rock music, at its most hedonistic, is thrilling precisely because it returns us to a pre-civilized state of being, a chaotic realm of drives and impulses where repression holds no sway. In “Babelogue,” the riotous preamble to “Rock ’n’ Roll Nigger” from the album
Easter
(1978), Smith hollers “in heart i am an american artist and
i have no guilt. i seek pleasure. i seek the nerves under your skin …” (1994). To be free from guilt and to pursue pleasure with no regard for reason is key to the rock ’n’ roll experience; it is also, from a theoretical perspective, subversive to the extent that it challenges fixed ideas of class, nation, gender, and sexuality. But here, Smith’s self-proclaimed status as an “american artist” reveals the extent to which the celebration of pure
id
energy is bound up with the revolutionary spirit of capitalism. The song “Free Money,” from
Horses,
offers a perfect illustration of how rock music can celebrate even as it challenges the intoxicating effects of money and power. At what point does the Dionysian revel resemble the stock market crash? And, more particularly, when does the pursuit of happiness, of the release from guilt and repression, encounter its material foundation? Just as the singer realizes that ultimately there is no such thing as free money—it’s just a dream—so her claim to be an American artist is brought into collision with the brute realities of imperialism: there is guilt in Vietnam, in Watergate, and in America itself. These are political realities that Smith never shirks from addressing, particularly in her live performances.

But if there is a problem with Smith’s vision, it resides perhaps in her tendency to privilege the rock ’n’ roll experience to the exclusion of any form of self-interrogation. To some extent, and this is an issue that I will engage with at length, rock ’n’ roll for Patti Smith is a form of spilt religion. And just as the abiding truths of religious fundamentalism, for example, preclude rational critique, so Patti Smith is dauntless in her allegiance to the notion of rock as a vehicle of mental and social liberation. Still, one might say that Smith’s adherence to her cause is no more benighted than the psychoanalyst’s faith
in the revelatory powers of dreams. In both cases, the medium is privileged only to the extent that it serves as an arena for the exploration of complex and often contradictory desires. The analogy with psychoanalysis is appropriate, it seems to me, not least because references to dreams and fantasies abound in Smith’s work. What I’m suggesting, in other words, is this: that while we go about berating Patti Smith for failing to present a coherent political program in her work, for both rebelling against and participating in the dynamic energies of capital, we ignore the extent to which the logic of her songs resembles that of dreams. At the level of the unconscious it may well be appropriate to declare that one is free from guilt, at liberty to explore aspects and attitudes of the self that might not make sense from a rational point of view. To return to “Free Money,” under capitalism one might well fantasize about buying a “jet plane,” rising up “through the stratosphere,” checking out the planets and then “down / Deep where it’s hot in Arabia-babia / Then cool fields of snow.” And anyway, doesn’t the pursuit of commodity fetishism lead here to something finer, rarer, and less subject to the deadening effects of an exchange economy? Doesn’t it lead to something that cannot be bought or sold, to an experience of pure love?

The word “love” returns me to the word
theoria.
From the ancient Greek,
theoria
signifies both the contemplation of beauty and a desire to merge with the divine, and while this latter aspect might imply a suspension of the critical faculty, it does go some way to describing my own position as a reader and as a listener to rock music. Let me say from the outset, then, that this is a book driven by love. As a work of
theoria
it implies not merely the taking up of a critical stance, but the forging of a relationship based on love and realized in pleasure.
It is possible, I feel, to think from inside an experience, and in certain cases, such as this one, it may be the only way to understand what is really going on. And here let me be clear: I take pleasure not just in the visceral drives of Patti Smith’s music, but also in her ability to tease out thought, to place the body and the mind in exquisite tension, and in doing so to create something encompassed by neither. I realize that this high-minded claim might put potential readers off, but I want to stress that, for me, nothing is more heady, in the sense of intoxicating, than the champagne froth of a radical new idea.

This claim puts me at odds with the findings of the cultural critic Martha Bayles. In her book
Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music
(1996), Bayles attacks artists such as the Velvet Underground, Frank Zappa, and John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band for having wilfully “contaminated popular music with unhealthy artistic doctrines that were previously confined to high culture” (see Gracyk, 1998). Lacking the joyful exuberance of early rock ’n’ roll, soul and Motown, the music of these “perverse modernists” is characterized by “obscenity, brutality, and sonic abuse” (Bayles, 1996). A cursory glance at Smith’s investment in the disruptive anti-art of Rimbaud, Genet, and Brecht, together with her stylized appropriations of three-chord rock ’n’ roll, would appear to confirm Bayles’s thesis. What, exactly, Bayles might argue, is gained by using Wilson Pickett’s “Land of 1000 Dances” (1966) as a setting for avant-garde evocations of drug abuse, street violence, and mental breakdown (“Land”)? By mixing high and low discourses, Bayles warns, we risk destroying what was pleasurable in popular culture. We commit, moreover, to a morally bankrupt world where the anti-values of cynicism, irony, and despair reign supreme.

Against this view, I wish to stress that Smith’s interventions in the “exuberant modernism” of early rock ’n’ roll result in pleasure of a different order: an unsettling and nuanced pleasure, certainly, but one that remains rooted in the primal delight of “the simple rock and roll song” (“Land”). By embracing both sides of the cultural divide, and by refusing to either downplay her intelligence or disguise her enthusiasm for popular music, Smith is at liberty to explore the possibilities of cultural contamination. The result is a hybrid form. Unabashed in its celebration of the popular, defiant in its display of cultural capital, an album like
Horses
is political not least because its maker, the progeny of a working class family, refuses to know her place. By disrespecting the boundaries between high and low culture, Patti Smith violates the division between upper and lower class. By combining rock ’n’ roll with the power of the word (“Rock ’n’ Rimbaud,” as she called it), Smith speaks for an emergent class of highly educated but economically disadvantaged suburban youth. And this may well explain the antipathy of her fiercest critics, particularly those who contrast her work with the alleged innocence of early rock and soul. The idealization of early American popular music in contemporary rock writing is rooted, it seems to me, in a pernicious denial of the nature and significance of historical change. Such an idealization refuses moreover to acknowledge the inextricable links between power, capital, and popular entertainment that artists, such as Zappa, Reed, Lennon, Ono, and Smith, seek to expose.

My account of the St. Mark’s performance is intended to convey a sense of Patti Smith’s investment in the pleasures of cultural contamination. Now, looking back, I am struck once more by how much is condensed into this twenty-minute performance and the extent to which it anticipates the future. It will be five years before listeners get a chance to plunge into “Birdland,” “Elegie,” and “Gloria,” but the origins of
Horses’
distinct aesthetic vision are already in place: the references to criminality, to outlaw poets, to sin and redemption, and to the erotics of violent death. Given what has already been said about the problems rock music pose to critical analysis, it seems worthwhile, at this point, to return to the significance of the St. Mark’s event.

Why the fascination with the aesthetics of crime? In the week prior to the performance, Charles Manson and three female accomplices were convicted in Los Angeles of murder and conspiracy in the 1969 slayings of seven people, including the actress Sharon Tate. The Beatles song “Helter Skelter” was played at the trial. Meanwhile, as the American bombing of North Vietnam intensified, Army Lt. William L. Calley Jr. was convicted of murdering at least twenty-two civilians in the 1968 My Lai massacre. Closer to home, in 1967 in New York, incidences of violent crime totalled 75,000; by 1971 this had increased to 145,000, with murder rates up by fifty percent. Living in downtown at the notorious Chelsea Hotel, Patti Smith would have been familiar with the prostitutes and the pimps, the hustlers and the junkies. Her take on New York life in this period, although undoubtedly romanticized—“On the sidewalk, Sunday morning / lies a body oozing life” (from
“Mack the Knife”)—is rooted in knowledge and experience. It is, moreover, via the references to Jesse James and Brecht, linked with a sense of political agenda. This is the year of Tricky Dicky, of secret tapes in the White House, of accelerating antiwar protest, and of bomb explosions in the Capitol and Senate buildings. It’s also a time when popular entertainment and politics become curiously intertwined, from Elvis’s meeting with Nixon, to the broadcast of Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” on Radio Hanoi. The polarization of these events brings to mind the distinction Walter Benjamin makes in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1968), between the arts under fascism and communism: where the former renders politics a cultural activity, the latter responds by politicizing culture. One course leads to domination, the other to freedom.

Whether or not Smith is aware of Benjamin, she performs tonight with an acute sense of how easily art can be used to sustain, as well as critique, the lust for power. She knows that since art appeals to the
eudaemonic
or pleasure principle, it can be used as a tool of oppression, as well as of liberation. Thus, while Brecht speaks for the people, his creation “Mack the Knife” occupies a more uncertain position. It’s worth recalling that MacHeath, in
The Threepenny Opera,
is a tawdry gangster figure, and the opera as a whole is a satire on capitalism. What most singers take from the opera, however, is not Brecht and Weill’s socialism but the perverse 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 Kurt
Gerron, and sustained in Louis Armstrong’s and Lotte Lenya’s 1956 recording.