Patti Smith
During my mercifully short tenure as an editor at Rolling Stone, one of my more tedious tasks was compiling the results of the 1995 critics poll. By a ridiculous margin of eight or nine to one, Patti Smith claimed “Comeback of the Year.” Yet her last original recording had been released in 1988. It should come as no surprise that now that there’s a new album–Gone Again–critics are falling all over themselves to give enough accolades.
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Part of the credit for the hoopla is due to the fem-crit movement, which rightly celebrates punk poetess Smith as the godmother of 90s artists such as Kathleen Hanna, Polly Jean Harvey, Liz Phair, and Courtney Love. Another reason is the sympathy vote (the Yoko factor, if you prefer), which judges Gone Again in the light of Smith’s personal losses–among them her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith; her brother Todd; her longtime friend Robert Mapplethorpe; and her keyboardist Richard “DNV” Sohl. But finally, it comes down to the fact that critics and fans miss the Patti Smith of “Gloria” and “Free Money,” of “Dancing Barefoot” and “Rock n Roll Nigger,” and even of “Because the Night,” the song Smith wrote with Bruce Springsteen and her only Top 40 hit. And this is where I have a problem, because rock ‘n’ roll’s biggest enemy is nostalgia–whether it’s for the halcyon 60s or the punk-rock 70s.
This isn’t to say that after 17 years in self-imposed exile as a suburban housewife and a period of tremendous grief and loss Smith isn’t allowed to come back as a different person or to reinvent herself as an artist. But it’s certainly fair to judge her new offerings by the standards she set with her own work. Smith has dealt with the issue of mortality before–for instance, on “Gloria,” the first song on her first album–but in the past her inclination was to celebrate life with all the energy she could muster, even on the quieter songs, rather than to withdraw and quietly meditate. As a musing on death and dying, Gone Again is a better album than Lou Reed’s Magic and Loss, but it doesn’t contain anything as eloquent and powerful as “Pale Blue Eyes,” let alone as life-affirming as “Gloria” or “Rock ‘n’ Roll.”
