All This Useless Starfuckery
Patti Smith is back in the merchandising public's eye this week, as her Horses album has received the remastering and repricing treatment. Contained within is a recent live performance of the record's material, performed by the still-living remnants of her original band, augmented by fellow NYC original punker Tom Verlaine on guitar. The occasion has been marked by a surge of music rag coverage, all breathlessly overhyped and distressingly familiar to those who lived through the first incarnation of Patti in the 1970's.
I have never cared for Patti Smith's recorded work; but I do have lots of respect for her symbolic importance to the American side of the original punk movement. She was punk rock's first strong woman, one who made a good study of how to offer a righteous middle finger to the establishment of her era. Rockers from such diverse acts as Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon. X's Exene Cervenka, and DNA's Ikue Mori grew out of the tradition she helped establish, and I credit her influence on a younger generation of female musicians. But like so many forms of art that once seemed challenging and transgressive, the passing of time has not been kind to her body of work. With the distance of more than 25 years her music comes off as more hippie than punk, simple bar band rock leavened with an uncomfortable amount of pretense and morbid seriousness. She at least had the grace to know when it was time to get out of the business, unlike her contemporaries in bands like the Ramones and the reunited Television. With the reissue of Horses and other reissues looming in the near future, rock critics have picked up where they left off with her, confusing symbol with substance and in the process relentlessly overhyping her music. In an age where her dead lit-celebrity obsessiveness (particularly if it were offered up by a new, unheralded, and unconnected artist) would come off as an embarrassing form of hero-worship, critics steadfastly ignore this aspect of her music in an attempt to shore up the idea of her cultural relevance. I feel this is aesthetic revisionism of the highest order.
One of the most annoyingly un-punk things about Patti Smith was her very public adoration of such overrated cultural figures as Arthur Rimbaud and Jim Morrison. Such petulant heroes say much about those who worship at their altars; their fans are as impressed with the life legends surrounding them as they are with the work produced by the artists in their willfully short lifetimes. Rimbaud and Morrison also represent the hoariest of cliches about art and artists--too sensitive for the vagaries of human existence, their massive souls were too large for a world where conformity is more prized than insight; so they removed themselves from their respective fields in what should have been their creative prime to renounce the world in which we live. I prefer to think of them as pseudo-monastics with real publicists, or as transparently adolescent assholes, in love with the luxury and excess and privilege their talents bought them in their societies. Like them, Patti and the NYC punkers were rock stars first and foremost; and whether you speak of Richard Hell, Debbie Harry, or Tom Verlaine, they were careerists all, despite the lofty aesthetic ideals they publicly espoused.
Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's history of the 1970's NYC scene, Please Kill Me, exemplifies the worst tendencies of "I was there" myth-making while simultaneously misunderstanding the fundamental significance of its subject. Representing themselves as ground-floor participants in an important artistic movement, they strike me more as clueless documentarians bragging about their proximity to genius rather than perceptive and skeptical critics cruising through a creatively fertile period of time. While entertaining, the book ultimately fails to see its own most important point--that the original punks of the 1970's in the US and the UK were not really that punk rock, but just regular old rock stars playing at smaller venues. Although nobody in the scene embodied the plain old rock god more than Lou Reed or Iggy Pop, Patti made her bones by attaining notice as a hanger-on at the Max's Kansas City scene and she began to climb the ladder by becoming friends with the famous and fabulous. Whether dating Sam Shepard and Robert Mapplethorpe, or chilling with William Burroughs, Patti's radar was finely attuned to the methodology of success and fame. She was not alone in this endeavor, and as the newspapers and magazines of New York City began to descend on the CBGBs crowd, bands like the Voidoids, the Dead Boys, and Television tried to outdo each other in terms of public intoxication and dissipation, safe in the knowledge that their excesses (though possibly damaging to overall life expectancy) would be widely reported by the trend-followers of the media. These actions of course helped establish "credibility" for the bands.
It's not really Patti Smith's fault, that all of these supposed aesthetes were little more than media whores with guitars and syringes, but I do find it ironic that the further one gets from the date of punk rock's birth in 1976/77, the more one finds artists whose lives were more fully in agreement with the demanding ideals of the punk movement. Anti-stars are still stars of some kind. This statement is lost on the hero-worshipping writers of books like Please Kill Me and the UK's The Boy Looked at Johnny. They prefer that their readers view musicians as tangential and insignificant as Stiv Bators and Poly Styrene as hugely important figures instead of the footnotes to history that they deserve to be. Bands like Black Flag, the Minutemen, Scratch Acid, Bad Brains, Mission of Burma, the Fall, the Ex, the Butthole Surfers, and Sonic Youth are the real punk rockers, artists who were committed to the performance and creation of their music despite economic hardships and being relatively ignored by the radio and print media in their countries. Patti Smith, on the other hand, was well known to a wealthy and sophisticated audience while she was active in the 1970's--as well as being someone who perfectly fit the prototype of the USA/UK music star. After all, she'd spent much of her life preparing to act out the tired stereotype of a really famous person--her only twist on this corniness was that she was a woman. If that is why she deserves to be celebrated, then so be it--I have no problem recognizing her as the first of a generation of women who decided that rock was no longer the property of men. But songs do not become more poignant or more significant if they are written about the musician's famous friends, unless of course the listener is a credulous and cautious rock critic.
I have never cared for Patti Smith's recorded work; but I do have lots of respect for her symbolic importance to the American side of the original punk movement. She was punk rock's first strong woman, one who made a good study of how to offer a righteous middle finger to the establishment of her era. Rockers from such diverse acts as Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon. X's Exene Cervenka, and DNA's Ikue Mori grew out of the tradition she helped establish, and I credit her influence on a younger generation of female musicians. But like so many forms of art that once seemed challenging and transgressive, the passing of time has not been kind to her body of work. With the distance of more than 25 years her music comes off as more hippie than punk, simple bar band rock leavened with an uncomfortable amount of pretense and morbid seriousness. She at least had the grace to know when it was time to get out of the business, unlike her contemporaries in bands like the Ramones and the reunited Television. With the reissue of Horses and other reissues looming in the near future, rock critics have picked up where they left off with her, confusing symbol with substance and in the process relentlessly overhyping her music. In an age where her dead lit-celebrity obsessiveness (particularly if it were offered up by a new, unheralded, and unconnected artist) would come off as an embarrassing form of hero-worship, critics steadfastly ignore this aspect of her music in an attempt to shore up the idea of her cultural relevance. I feel this is aesthetic revisionism of the highest order.
One of the most annoyingly un-punk things about Patti Smith was her very public adoration of such overrated cultural figures as Arthur Rimbaud and Jim Morrison. Such petulant heroes say much about those who worship at their altars; their fans are as impressed with the life legends surrounding them as they are with the work produced by the artists in their willfully short lifetimes. Rimbaud and Morrison also represent the hoariest of cliches about art and artists--too sensitive for the vagaries of human existence, their massive souls were too large for a world where conformity is more prized than insight; so they removed themselves from their respective fields in what should have been their creative prime to renounce the world in which we live. I prefer to think of them as pseudo-monastics with real publicists, or as transparently adolescent assholes, in love with the luxury and excess and privilege their talents bought them in their societies. Like them, Patti and the NYC punkers were rock stars first and foremost; and whether you speak of Richard Hell, Debbie Harry, or Tom Verlaine, they were careerists all, despite the lofty aesthetic ideals they publicly espoused.
Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's history of the 1970's NYC scene, Please Kill Me, exemplifies the worst tendencies of "I was there" myth-making while simultaneously misunderstanding the fundamental significance of its subject. Representing themselves as ground-floor participants in an important artistic movement, they strike me more as clueless documentarians bragging about their proximity to genius rather than perceptive and skeptical critics cruising through a creatively fertile period of time. While entertaining, the book ultimately fails to see its own most important point--that the original punks of the 1970's in the US and the UK were not really that punk rock, but just regular old rock stars playing at smaller venues. Although nobody in the scene embodied the plain old rock god more than Lou Reed or Iggy Pop, Patti made her bones by attaining notice as a hanger-on at the Max's Kansas City scene and she began to climb the ladder by becoming friends with the famous and fabulous. Whether dating Sam Shepard and Robert Mapplethorpe, or chilling with William Burroughs, Patti's radar was finely attuned to the methodology of success and fame. She was not alone in this endeavor, and as the newspapers and magazines of New York City began to descend on the CBGBs crowd, bands like the Voidoids, the Dead Boys, and Television tried to outdo each other in terms of public intoxication and dissipation, safe in the knowledge that their excesses (though possibly damaging to overall life expectancy) would be widely reported by the trend-followers of the media. These actions of course helped establish "credibility" for the bands.
It's not really Patti Smith's fault, that all of these supposed aesthetes were little more than media whores with guitars and syringes, but I do find it ironic that the further one gets from the date of punk rock's birth in 1976/77, the more one finds artists whose lives were more fully in agreement with the demanding ideals of the punk movement. Anti-stars are still stars of some kind. This statement is lost on the hero-worshipping writers of books like Please Kill Me and the UK's The Boy Looked at Johnny. They prefer that their readers view musicians as tangential and insignificant as Stiv Bators and Poly Styrene as hugely important figures instead of the footnotes to history that they deserve to be. Bands like Black Flag, the Minutemen, Scratch Acid, Bad Brains, Mission of Burma, the Fall, the Ex, the Butthole Surfers, and Sonic Youth are the real punk rockers, artists who were committed to the performance and creation of their music despite economic hardships and being relatively ignored by the radio and print media in their countries. Patti Smith, on the other hand, was well known to a wealthy and sophisticated audience while she was active in the 1970's--as well as being someone who perfectly fit the prototype of the USA/UK music star. After all, she'd spent much of her life preparing to act out the tired stereotype of a really famous person--her only twist on this corniness was that she was a woman. If that is why she deserves to be celebrated, then so be it--I have no problem recognizing her as the first of a generation of women who decided that rock was no longer the property of men. But songs do not become more poignant or more significant if they are written about the musician's famous friends, unless of course the listener is a credulous and cautious rock critic.
posted by alyosha mcbain at 8:59 AM
1 Comments:
Thank you ffor sharing
Post a Comment
<< Home