Exaltation of Patti Smith while listening to Horses

Originally published in the print edition of El Cultural (08/07/2016) 

When rock shows itself to us being reborn, innocent in the sense that a poisonous flower or an avalanche is, and transforms into the shining sweat that runs down the furrows of ordinary people's faces to rush down their skin in their art of living every day; when it sheds the strategies of those who want it to serve as a rhythm for the rite of passage from childhood to imposed obligation and necessity, and, instead, sabotages the machine (the mechanisms of the factory and the mechanisms of war) with sticky ingots of carmine and glitter; when, thus, it ceases to be the macho song to the brute force of the solid to become invisible magic (or tenuous, like, say, a white veil waving in the desert, under the full moon); when its decibels invert the values that guarantee that changes continue to favor the rich; That is to say, when with its three chords and a clatter of bass and treble it dampens and blurs the paper of advertisements and rusts with a fog of noise the trap of class roles; when it becomes determination beyond the blues of a battered woman who sighs, moans, and protests before a society built on myths of omnipotent power; when, we say, rock transforms with Hulk-like energy the sound of ageless youth, the mad youth yearning to find unconditional love and dreaming that it's free (free money free money free money free); when it mates with the poetic beasts of Rimbaud or Blake, with the Beat angels, the tenderness of Saint Francis of Assisi, the interior monologue of Woolf, or the icy gaze of Anna Kavan, then the shaman Patti Smith appears in her Baudelaire-Sinatra suit, looking at us from the black and white of the cover of Horses, his debut album in 1975.

Looking at that Mapplethorpe photograph (on the left), one can't help but think that perhaps Camille Paglia is right, and that it is one of the best photographs ever taken of a woman. But perhaps it is also one of the best of that ever-present, barefoot, and begging, newborn rock scene that seizes, from another angle, the fury, the glory, the word, and the art. Horses It contains a dedication to the future from a 28-year-old Patti Smith. It's what came after a sickly childhood that turned into a dream in rural southern New Jersey (marbles, owls, the Bible, and Jehovah's Witnesses), after an adolescence spent studying art and enduring the hardships of a factory assembly line ("36 dollars a week, but it's a salary"), only saved by the nasal specter of Dylan and the Lighting From Rimbaud to her voluntary exile to enlist in the army of the living who announce “the constant baptism of newly created things,” in late 1960s New York. The young Smith would arrive at rock from poetry, when around 1973 she began to set her verses to music, accompanied by Lenny Kaye’s guitar or Richard Sohl’s piano, musicians who struck in Horses.

Here, a young writer who loves rock music speaks to other young people who feel that no one cares that they can't find their place in a society gripped by atomic terror. She speaks to the misfits and those discriminated against because of gender, race, sexual orientation, physical or economic condition, who no longer believe in the possibility of a great revolution of peace and love but who try to twist what's given and squeeze it until they find gold among the overflowing garbage cans, in the cracks of cold and heat in the streets of the big city. Rock is reborn in Horses It is, above all, a poetic cry for emancipation that says "it's very simple: being free is our responsibility.".