14.11.11



As it turns out, I do have something more to say about the Grantland article on Patti Smith, and specifically the song "Land." Here's what the article says:


"Land" opens with Smith narrating in a flat, drowsy hush. It starts out as another rock cliché, a throwaway moment out of a James Dean movie. There's a boy in a hallway by a locker. Another boy is coming down the hallway. A scratchy guitar starts up, faint and not quite in sync with the voice, in the background. Smith's voice, backed by ghostly snippets of half-heard, multitracked phrases, gets more urgent as the second boy comes nearer. What takes place is either a violent rape or an eerily erotic stabbing: "The boy took Johnny, he pushed him against the locker / He drove it in, he drove it home, he drove it deep in Johnny." The music locks into place, and the drums kick in as the dying or injured Johnny falls into a vision in which he's surrounded by horses, "white, shining, silver studs with their nose in flames," foaming all around him. Then Smith's voices rises to a yowl as she belts out the first line of "Land of 1000 Dances," one of the most immortally silly '60s dance hits, now chillingly transfigured: "Do you know how to Pony / Like Boney Maronie?" Johnny sees an angel, then strips off his leather jacket to reveal the jackknives and switchblades taped to his chest, then spirals away into another vision. And so on for five more minutes, until the song whispers out on a quiet allusion to the death of Jimi Hendrix.

And here's where this gets meaningful for punk, because the implication of "Land," and by extension the rest of Horses, is that this this stuff was in the music all along. Early rock was always in league with ecstasy and violence, even when the lyrics suggested otherwise. A cheesy party track like "Land of 1000 Dances" (or "I Like It Like That," another goofball classic alluded to in "Land") concealed pathways to self-escape worthy of Rimbaud. If you knew enough to look, nostalgia for the cozy yearbook memories of Happy Days was actually a covert longing for the genuinely freaky shit that surges behind the rock scenery of "Land." Every leather jacket is a threat, and also a beacon.


The key to the song's uniqueness is in its length. Most pop or rock songs are designed to be about two-and-a-half minutes to five-and-a-half, and in most cases the music and the lyrics share equal importance. Sure, sometimes there are long solos, or repetitive lyrics (usually a chorus, hey "Hey Jude"), but the balance usually remains. Once things begin to get longer than this, a band shows off its real belief about its own abilities. On the one hand there are the epic Bob Dylan-type of song, where the chords remain constant for 12 verses over eleven minutes, no distracting solos; the other are the Jimi Hendrix-esque, where the lyrics disappear for long stretches while the music goes to strange and interesting places. (Interestingly, the Rolling Stones are at the Dylan end of the spectrum: they have one long song, "Goin' Home" from Aftermath is eleven-plus minutes of Mick Jagger speak-singing over a pretty boring chord structure)

"Land" is a rare exception to this tendency: the lyrics are very clearly important, and so over the entire song, but the music drives the song too, setting and reflecting the mood of the lyrics, where each of the components of Smith's band is at least briefly tasked with moving the song forward. Part of this is attributable to the simplicity of the song's structure: it's just A, D and E all the way through, and entirely without solos. The intensity must be built and maintained through things like tempo and dynamics, a more difficult task because it leaves less room for trickery; it forces a bunch of talented musicians to avoid many of the things that make them talented. The surprising thing about the song, I think, is not that Patti Smith never wrote anything this good again, but that it was ever written at all.

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