jordan_tar's Full Review: Easter [Remaster] by Patti Smith Group
"Easter" was released a year after a fall from a stage that almost killed Patti Smith, which remains me of an equally famous deadly accident in the history of rock music: Bob Dylan's motorcycle accident. It seems that for both Dylan and Smith (artists near one another in my personal pantheon), their near-death experiences pushed them in an altogether different direction, right at points in their career when it seemed like they could push their own radical art no further.
Such a judgment of Patti Smith - an enigmatic and somewhat inconsistent figure - might seem odd, but it's appropriate: her debut album "Horses" invented rock poetry (real rock poetry, not the ridiculous posturing of Jim Morrison). The three late-'70s albums that followed "Horses", leading up to Smith's ten-year seclusion, explored different aspects of Smith's relation to the mainstream, and "Easter" is the most successful of the three, both in terms of artistic coherency and in terms of mainstream appeal. Quite simply, this album is gloriously commercial at times, and that's not as bad as it might seem to imply.
It's as if during her fall, Smith saw the face of God and spent the remainder of her career trying to make herself worthy of the sight in the only way that a musician can do so - via noisy praise. "Easter" is full of moments which, taken on their own, are sublime and important to Smith's artistic vision as a whole. Her most popular and successful song, "Because the Night", is here. Written in collaboration with Bruce Springsteen, it's an almost-painful song of yearning to be united with one's lover. The song begins with a quiet piano and Smith's vocal of abstract passion -
Take me now, baby, here as I am
Hold me close, try and understand
Desire is hunger is the fire I breathe
Love is a banquet on which we feed
- and then with a drumbeat, it spirals upward into a sudden moment of open emotion, leading into the anthemic chorus. The song alternates between these modes, with a darkly poetic bridge adding an artful touch to what is otherwise an accessible, straightforward pop song.
Sadly, the remainder of the album isn't quite as consistently good. The songs vary in tone in a way that's not diverse, but simply disjointed at times (though that's not to say they're not individually enjoyable). Here, Smith moves away from the angular, freewheeling poetic manifestos that typified her early work, into an altogether different exhortative style. With its infectious riff, its swaggering melody, and its lyrics touched with religious reverie, is perhaps the most successful song in this regard. As it progresses into its final verse, with lyrics such as "Rend the veil and we shall sail / The nail, the grail: That's all behind thee", it becomes clear that this follows in the tradition of Smith's earlier songs such as "Gloria". But like that song, this is saved from pretension by its sheer power - Smith's exuberant belting of the lyric is one of the album's best moments.
Other successful tracks in this regard include "Babelogue", a live poetry reading that confusingly mixes metaphors (one moment, Smith is "a crazy and sleepy Comanche", next "a Muslim", next "an American artist") and the anti-conformity rant "Rock 'n' Roll Nigger".
On first listen, the bombast of many of these songs is simply sound and fury. Some of the best songs are flawed by their lyrics, which seem infused with a deliberate artsiness that's a little unworthy of Smith. The shambolic Indian chant "Ghost Dance" is just a dull, depressing break in the album's flow. "25th Floor/High on Rebellion" mixes straightforward rock and poetic reading, but just renders the poetry inaudible and ineffectual. Even "Rock 'n' Roll Nigger", one of the album's better moments, is problematic: clearly Smith is using the word for shock value and for its value in identifying a societal outsider. But she goes on to identify figures such as "Jesus" and "Jackson Pollock" as "niggers" - and their status as outsider is distinctly different from that of one disenfranchised for his race. I'm sure these are exactly the kinds of things Smith wants her listener to think about, and I really shouldn't buy into it. Argghh!
In the end, I can only picture this album bolstering the listener's prejudices about Smith. Those who are skeptical about the real depth of her work will be endlessly annoyed by the high-sounding pocket manifestos; those who think she's a goddess will love every moment of eloquent shouting and anthemic guitar; I go back and forth between the two. But the fact that this album has endured despite Smith's questionable relevance (which, fortunately, her new album "Trampin'" has reestablished) is testimony to her staying power, her sincerity, and the simple compellingness of most of what she does. Even when she's being pretentious, she's doing it with style and unselfconscious fervor.
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