The Street Symbolist Finds Her Ark

SHE is a symbolist, working in an age of symbols. The imposing and inculating role symbols play in our lives--all the flags in the world, cigarette brands, fast-food chains and supermarkets, groupies, cliques and teams and fetishes and Brooks Brothers and every manner of damned patriotism--has sprung forth a new kind of cynicism.

What's wrong with these kids, these kids who wantonly scrawl their names all over newly-constructed, immaculate subway stations, who are proud to be sadists and masochists, who make too much noise and don't take advantage of their opportunities, who never seem to smile except in ther own discontent?

Perhaps this is an ontological question, in which case you and I have something to settle. I'm sick of my social security number and political arguments. I can't make it into Studio 54 and meet Bianca Jagger. I need some shelter, some cleavage.

You may think that Patti Smith has much cleavage, but think on it. Patti Smith is something of a genius. Five years ago she took tired ole rock muzak and pumped out "Gloria," "Horses," "Set Me Free," a re-done "My Generation," "Break It Up," "Piss Factory," a re-done "Hey Joe," "Redondo Beach," and a host of refurbished Lou Reed songs. She took a pickaxe and buried it deep into the "new apathy," re-defined the ME generation.

"My sins they only belong to ME"

Along with Lou Reed and Blondie and eventually The Sex Pistols and Elvis Costello--plus a whole new wave of bands from The Ramones to The Clash--Patti Smith brought home a new message, and it had nothing to do with war or the draft.

"UmmmmmUm...I think, I think...that...kids have always had things to bitch about in this country; it's like, the war was one thing, staying out too late is another, and they don't look similar but they are. This world is so controlled that everything happening has some effect on your life. And I think that when it seems that everyone's runnin' your life, you have to scream. You know? Scream to hear you're there," she said in a high, quiet, somewhat squeamish voice. She was talking mostly about punk, about her first album, "Horses," and the musical movement with which her music has evolved.

SHE ONCE described punk as the scream of a newborn baby, and sooner or later, the baby must learn to talk. Patti has a terrible voice. But the rock instinct in this wiry, imp of a person has made that voice quite a tool, a very arousing and expressive voice so honest in what it is saying and how it is cowling that suddenly, you find cleavage. Besides, no one ever seriously suggested that a rock and roll star had to sing like Frank Sinatra. People like that belong at discos and behind TVs. Got tell Robert Zimmerman.

"Jim Morrison was a poet, but he didn't live out his vison," she said. "I always had the idea that poetry and music were partners, you know, and it's really true that one implies the other. Youyouyou you can't read three stanzas of poetry without setting a musical pattern of some kind, and any kind of music makes you feel a certain way, you know, a certain way you can describe in words."

And all Rolling Stone can say about this woman is that she masturbates to her own photograph.

The media has treated the punk kind like a troupe of naughty, hyperactive children, with reports of trends and fads and strange costumes and ultimately, it all boils down to social satire and pure rock fun. But there is something more to punk--and the broader genre of rock known as new wave--than release. It is the angst itself. You won't feel it in a record store or even at concert, but at the cheap bars where you can hear the music in its own native setting, it's more than fun.

A woman approaches me at The Rat. She is small and comely, her thin black dress, cut in strips that hang from her waist, revealing in a flash. Saucy red lipstick and a flower painted on her cheek, she is a smiler, coming right up to me and asking if she can illustrate my entire body. She is a body illustrator. Her name is Cretin Hop. At home she gives me cleavage, shows me a giant watercolor illustration of Patti Smith--slightly smudged by sweat--marked painstakingly beneath the knap of a breast.

"Id like to think that I'm turning you on, you know. It's a good thing that "Because the Night" sold well and got on the radio because I was able to make more people happy that way, you know...and um...get them...involved in the rest of my music, "Patti says.

"Becaus0e the Night" marked the end of Patti Punk, a performer whose appeal was strong but limited. It marked the end of her raw scream-and-simmer tactics at the microphone too, because smooth, technosyncratic, polished albums mean similar concerts. The days when you could see Patti Smith wail out with Lenny Kaye at The Rat or The Bottom Line are gone. She was known to spit at her audiences, to jump on tables and kick drinks into the abyss. Patti Smith is now banned from The Bottom Line.

It would be easy to conclude that Patti Smith is being produced and retouched by the invisible, massive forces of the record industry. And it is true that mastermind technician Todd Rundgren produced her newly-released album, Wave. But it still isn't Boston, and that is because of the angst.

The angst has always been with Patti Smith, from Horses to Radio Ethiopia to Easter and even to Wave. If not present in pure noise, it is present in her whimpering and babelogue. Listen carefully. Behind the music of Patti Smith--behind her mesmerizing God-licks and Christ soliloquys--the seemingly mindless energy of punk is made indelibly clear and mindful.

"I feel like some misplaced Joan of Arc...oh God give me something, give me something to give, a reason to live, set me free...I don't need your fuckin SHIT!....I HAVE NOT SOLD MYSELF TO GOD BABY WAS A BLACKSHEEP-BABYWASAWHORE! BABY GOT BIGERRNBIGGERNBIGGA! BABY GET SOMETHIN' BABEEGETMORE--BABYBABEE BEEBEE WAS A ROCKNROLLNIGGA! [outside is society a waitin' for me] are you ready to be heard?

THE SKEPTICS will always wince at cliches about youth rebellion and yarns of repressive society, but perhaps it is because they are the ones in control. The truth is that any society sets standards, and ours sets quite a few. When those standards become so complex and exacting that your mind feels full of pins and needles and your life is spent on everything but yourself...

When I first met her she was so full of sex and gyzm, a real enchantress, she able to charm old winos, animals, and turn the odds on games of chance. We spent all our time in bars that winter, with psychotics and cocaine and morphine and rock'n roll. Me, I was a bit hungover and getting hungry, waiting for tunafish at the counter and she sat near me stuffing her face with coleslaw and milkshakes, dripping down her chin like drool and falling from her mouth.

She finished, exhausted. "Want to party with these pills?" she asked emptily, finally looking up; all her spark departed, sucked back into a syringe, leaving only white, wooden flesh, hanging from her bones and that whole juggernaut of woman so soft and lucid like all the arable nature was now dampened with that phenobarbital glaze..."

"I don't think rock'n roll is more outrageous than what Jimi Hendrix did or Jim Morrison or, um, Jagger, or even Chuck Berry, cause in comparison to the society they were disrupting, they're all pretty outrageous. It's just that as living becomes more difficult...you know, um, it's like you have to go out of your way to have fun these days, and it's so confusing to really spend time doing what you like to do, for some people. So the music has to be more powerful, equally as crazy as the forces keeping you down. "I was a sick kid, I used to get all kinds of diseases...yeah, eating dirt, like...I lived in New Jersey and wrote poetry when I was really young. And I was always thinkin', 'Why don't all these people just leave me alone, andand, and let me read my comics and stare at my hand or write poetry or sing, or or, just take it easy. And I guess it's good that I can sing about it, but it's like a tragedy because there are a lot of people who can't sing and they listen to the radio. I don't know what I'd do..." She looks back on her music now, perceptively, formulating a pseudo-philosophy around it, mending together her thoughts. Some of it seems so contrived, like all the stuff Jim Morrison mumbled in The Soft Parade. But it is all worth looking at, because Patti Smith was a precursor and now a survivor of a unique generation of rock'n' rollers, a generation which is now evolving and turning in new expressive directions. Enter Elvis Costello.

HER NEW ALBUM is softly stated, lacking the rambunctious bitching rancor of her previous work. It is disappointing in a sense. Much of the angst gets lost in the attempted level of sophistication. Patti is no longer wailing and screaming, but then again, she is no longer being spanked.

Wave is the realization of a musical direction which Patti Smith has sought for a long time--the unification of poetry and sound--and commercial success has given her the freedom to do whatever she wants in a studio. And no one can deny her talent, her mind and her music--it still moves. What is a punk, anyway? Where have you seen safety pins put through leather jackets and chains and clashing colors worn with jackboots? It's nowhere. It's nothing. It's a unique look, deliberately designed to resemble nothing else around it: it is an effort to isolate and distinguish, to glorify and attract attention to an otherwise anonymous and lost self:

What does a swastika mean? During World War II, it meant the mechanical annihilation of an entire race of human beings--an act motivated by the highest form of vanity. But on the t-shirt of Sid Vicious, who knows what it means? It is shocking, stomach-twisting, and if nothing else, it is some kind of self-glorification that Vicious and his followers need...the self-glorification he saw in old war documentaries when he was in grammar school, ripping out toilet seats during recess.

Right or wrong, people today need to glorify themselves. And there is a whole world of symbols to do it with, from swastikas to three-piece suits.

"The face of evil is always the face of total need..." --William S. Burroughs

But Patti Smith is one punk who has transcended the need for self-glorification and has instead found her ability to express her angst, however sophomoric it may appear at times.

She first appeared with that worn leather, her straggly, filthy looks could not be avoided. This the woman who thinks that orgasm is the highest state of consciousness, who roots her angst in Burroughs, Rimbaud, Hendrix, Morrison, the Bible--symbolists all. Patti Smith has used the symbols of our time exceedingly well, just as Dylan and Springsteen did before her, towards somewhat different ends. Avoiding the swastika, she has flaunted her hair, her leather, her boots, her sickliness, her chains, her sex...powerful symbols which horrified Rotarians and changed rock'n'roll.

BUT SYMBOLS themselves are meaningless, like words without perceptions. And to cling to any symbol--whether to be mindlessly patriotic or trendgoing punk--is decadent. And this is where the angst either emerges, or turns the knife inward. This is where confused fools lose themselves in their symbols and overdose, and it is where artists use their symbols, change them, flex them, adapt them, to express their angst. It's facing reality: Iggy Pop is a fool, Sid Vicious is dead, Johnny Rotten is dying, and Patti Smith is fucking with the future.*CrimsonLaura J. Levine