Patti Smith Group
Nympholepsy–the state of violently longing for impossible ideals–is best known in its most sensationalistic form, nymphomania; it’s been most commercially viable when it manifests itself as rock ‘n’ roll. But every poet has it too, and every politician and every preacher–in short, every performer who’s ever hankered for a pulpit hopes to hone his or her particular version of the sound of desire. And if Patti Smith’s version, her idiosyncratic fusion of rhythmic, linguistic, and phantasmic flights with crude 70s punk-inflected rock, has never quite been perfected, it’s always been more than sharp enough to leave me wanting more: nympholepsy can be contagious.
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But after a while desire wants fulfillment. This is a crisis poets cope with all the time: poetry is a solitary art form that hungers for the communal. Be it Dylan Thomas learning all too well that his musical verse delivered in his Welsh accent led men to offer drinks and women to offer themselves; Allen Ginsberg reveling in the notoriety brought on by his riotous tangle of religious imagery, explicit gay sexuality, and leftist politics at the height of McCarthyism; or San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer basing a book around poems written explicitly for magazines he knew would reject them; 20th-century bards have a long tradition of simultaneously courting and sparring with the very notion of audience.
Smith’s 90s work, on record, is drastically different in tone from her better known (and better loved) 70s output: more contemplative and somber and less prone to wild, rickety flights. But live she integrated the two periods reasonably well: “About a Boy,” (1996) an elegy for Kurt Cobain, wound up as a long rhythmic litany about Blind Lemon Jefferson, who bore the name of the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence but never got around to freeing his slaves, freezing to death in a Chicago snowstorm. “Summer Cannibals” (1996), which appears to address the vampiric backlash possibilities in too much fan love, featured fans chanting, “Eat, eat,” into the outstretched microphone as they feasted; many of those fans also filled in the words to “Free Money” (1975) with the same gusto. Smith rendered the rather dubious “People Have the Power” (from her very dubious 1988 album Dream of Life) as a breathless a cappella recitation, which somewhat mitigated its preachiness–then undercut her own subtlety with a full-throttle version of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” a hamfisted bit of post-Live Aid bitterness that, strangely enough, is always good for a feel-good fist-pump. But Smith’s always been a true believer, and when a nympholeptic has had her dreams of escape from the factory, artistic success, stardom, and true love come true already, what else is there to lust for but world peace and crowd control?
