In Damnation of...Horses by Patti Smith

"I'm an artist. Rock and roll is my art. I'm a nigger of the universe. And I'm free because, I can leap up and scream, I can put my fist up in the air, I don't give a shit."

vs.

"I'm an artist, I don't mind if you call me one, but if you do, I...I just don't mind and if you think it's bad I'll beat the fucking piss shit out of you 'cause I know how."

Maybe it's a coincidence, but I'm thinking no.

i always loved that tick tock tick tock FUCK THE CLOCKS intro to live time is on my side by patti.

yeah, this. i like the whole thing really.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-cfUC4rP_g

I mean, she's stepping into the shoes of arguably the biggest rock icon of her generation, and I don't see a bit of hesitance or deference.

sorry to state the obvious but her continued insistence on referring to herself as a "nigger" is so idiotic and maddening

She was way ahead of her time, and she was wrong in her time, but she's kind of been vindicated in the long run. I don't really hold it against her.

I honestly don't know what you mean by that! For me tho, I'd be willing to let it slide (like anyone cares lol) if it was just one incredibly stupid song from roughly the era of songs called "mongoloid" and lou reed's outRAGeous comedy slurs about his backing singers or whatever but it just seems to go beyond never-quite-disowned youthful dumbshit "provocation" into something sincerely creepy. And she's still at it (per penman's mention of her talking about "spades" in the book, and she still performs rnrn right?)

maybe I'm just trying to revive the spirit of overheated race relation debates since nakh revived that thread lol

can't stand that song by The Avengers for the same reason and i really like that band. i kinda love "we are the one" more than any patti song and it definitely stands up their with any 1977 Brit punk.

Agreed on Pere Ubu recent stuff, them and Wire are really consistently great

i kinda love "we are the one" more than any patti song

I had never heard this before, it's good! (I don't particularly care about punk tbf)

(haha yeah I will pass on that other song)

"up there"

kesha is the patti smith of our generation, discuss

no

I'm pretty sure I prefer Radio Ethiopia to Horses actually. Easter I've never got into if only because the song mentioned above is so collossally misguided and wrongheaded.

i thought it was pretty badass when i was younger, and musically it still is, but yeah

It's actually interesting that the Patti Smith and Frank Zappa threads are going on at the same time. Both kind of interesting, smart people from the 60s and 70s (respectively) who weren't quite up to transcending their times. I like her more than him, but that's just personal taste.

Did Patti ever have any difficult interaction with Weird Al or his band? Because then that would tie this thread with the Zappa thread and the Prince RIP thread as well.

Or else we could just discuss her jazz bonafides for the same result

oh she has those in spades

Um...

there is a book from the 70's called Rock 100 that Lenny Kaye co-wrote and i know there is a Zappa entry, but i don't remember what they wrote about him.

I'd be willing to let it slide (like anyone cares lol) if it was just one incredibly stupid song from roughly the era of songs called "mongoloid"

don't drag Devo into this!

but yeah, for me, it's the cringe-inducing "skip this track" thing like with Morrissey's "Bengali in Platforms"

It's way more aggressively cringey than Bengali, though Bengali's core message is way worse and meaner, but like when I was young I didn't even have the cultural literacy to know what Bengali meant in UK culture plus the song kinda drifts by in a haze whereas RnRN is so instantly like damn white lady pump yr brakes on the n word

did she ever wear that lester bangs t-shirt? did lester bangs make that t-shirt? he had a lot of homemade t-shirts.

Remember when that was a viable business model? When I was a kid, I had a friend whose parents ran a T-shirt printing store. I remember my whole third or fourth grade class went on a field trip and we got T-shirts printed there, so they'd be able to keep track of us all. I don't remember where we went, but I remember the T-shirts. They were green.

Oh yeah, I got a Let It Be t-shirt that way, to name one, from one of those places where they had all the imprints up on the wall so you could pick one, choose your shirt size and color and then they would use a press iron to meld it all together. The last time I saw something like that was late 70s.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/12/bf/c5/12bfc552bc9624ac0819fab5248b1806.jpg

As mentioned a couple of times above "Piss Factory"/"Hey Joe" is really great - pretty much the only thing I'll return to (slightly surprised Penman didn't mention it).

And then her voice was sampled in a Dead C track in World Peace Hope Et Al. Its only a couple of mins long but its the only other time I cared.

Was enjoying listening to this this am, has a brief snippet of smith. Her magnetism is apparent (and yeah the assertion that she might be reacting against the beat lineage in any way is mildly baffling)