Horses

33⅓ Main Series #55

by Philip Shaw, Γιάννης Νένες (Foreword), Ζήσιμος Τρυφίδης (Translator)

Μια παράξενη σύγκρουση υψηλής τέχνης και μαζικής κουλτούρας

Η διάσημη σειρά μουσικών βιβλίων «33⅓» συνεχίζει να μας προσφέρει μέσα από τις εκδόσεις Οξύ νέους τίτλους και στα ελληνικά. Σειρά έχει το βιβλίο του Philip Shaw για το άλμπουμ Horses της Πάτι Σμίθ.

Έχοντας οργώσει μποέμικα τους δρόμους της Νέας Υόρκης με το μαύρο της παλτό και τα ποιήματά της, η Πάτι Σμιθ, αυτή η ανδρόγυνη, ατημέλητη φιγούρα με το αταλάντευτο βλέμμα και τη λατρεία για τον Ρεμπώ, οδηγείται το 1975 στη δημιουργία και την ηχογράφηση του πρώτου της άλμπουμ, του Horses.

Είναι ένας δίσκος που ξεχειλίζει από συναίσθημα, πρωτοτυπία και προσωπικές αναφορές, αλλά κι ένας δίσκος που άνοιξε μια εντελώς νέα σκηνή στο πεδίο της μουσικής όσο και της γυναικείας έκφρασης –αν όχι και της no gender καλλιτεχνικής ερμηνείας– δίνοντας την καθαρή ροκ έκφραση της εποχής μέσα στο χαοτικό συνονθύλευμα που θα γεννούσε, τις ίδιες εκείνες ημέρες, το πανκ.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Biography, Essays

208 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2008

Reviews

[Ruth · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh- there is way too much Freud in here, and I wasn't sure whether to take seriously all the stuff he says about "the power of the phallus". This record is great because it's straight-up rock and roll poetry, and all that psychoanalysis is way too distracting, and almost offensive- there must be other way to approach a close reading. I did like knowing the background of what all the songs were about, though, especially my favorite, Kimberly, and now when I hear it I can imagine a young girl holding her baby sister in the middle of a storm & having this Huck Finn moment when she decides she won't go to heaven if there is no art there. I hadn't known about all the references to dead rock stars, either, or about all the particulars of the inspirational visions and dreams. But I probably could have gotten that info somewhere else. I think this guy was just trying too hard.

[Clarice · Rating 3 out of 5]

drinking game idea: take a shot everytime the author mentions the “phallus”

[Mallory · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cannot believe someone had the audacity to disrespect Patti Smith with so much poststructuralist theory.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found Phillip Shaw’s close reading of Smith’s album to be astonishing and entertaining. From the cover art to the lyrics, Shaw tackles the album with academic rigor and fan, well, fanaticism. Just as Horses mixes high art references with low-art rock ‘n roll ones, so does Shaw blend high theory with low rock ‘n roll journalism. He points out that by openly referring to her inspiration, Smith effectively handed her critics a context in which to situate her:
“But by placing herself alongside Brecht and Johnny Ace, Genet and Gene Krupa, she did more than challenge artist boundaries: she also created a context for the ‘correct’ reception of her work. When, in late 1975, journalists embarked on the task of explaining and evaluating the record, not surprisingly they too cited an eclectic range of artistic precedents” (139).
As less of a “lyrics guy” than a “sounds guy,” I hadn’t given Smith’s poetry a lot of attention besides the sounds of the words. I appreciated the Shaw’s detailed criticism and know that I’ll hear the words anew the next time I listen to the album. I hope he writes more music criticism!

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

" In this book I have tried to convey something of this emotional freedom: I associate Horses with intense feelings of pleasure and excitement, even, at times, with states of rapture; it would be disingenuous of me to deny this. But Horses also lends itself to intense and rigorous thought. It is, after all, a record born out of a strange collision of high and low art: for the purposes of shorthand, the poetics of French symbolism and the raucous rhythms of early rock n roll. For Smith, there is no significant distinction between Hendrix and Rimbaud, Blake and Little Richard, T.S. Eliot and Jim Morrison. The sense of audacity, of challenging the listener's expectation of what a rock n roll record should do, is sustained in Horses' conceptual range: from the struggle between liberty and authority ("Gloria") to the unsettling effects of desire ("Redondo Beach," "Kimberly"), and then again from the evocation of dreams and altered states of mind ("Birdland" "Free Money" "Land") to the unexpected beauty of melancholy and loss ("Break It Up" "Elegie"). Underlying all of this is a concern with the relations between the spoken and written word, the poem and the song; in a final dialectical twist, Horses is about what happens when we listen as well as read."

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

These 33& 1/3 books are as addictive as--well . . . . But they are uneven affairs. Some of them are extremely most tedious subjective appreciations masquerading as "creative" writing. Others are solid and well researched. Shaw's book on the great Patti Smith album falls mostly into the latter category. But, unfortunately, Mr. Shaw discovered Lacan and Kristeva in graduate school and acts as if his armchair psychoanalysis might actually interest someone without a Ph.D

Since I have a Ph.D, I can say that despite his trying to be the village explainer (good if you were a village, but if not, not---as Stein said of Pound)--Patti Smith's masterpiece survives his exegesis, and because of his historical and biographical information and decent bibliography I feel that I got my money's worth.

[Matt Lohr · Rating 3 out of 5]

The 33 1/3 series varies fairly drastically in quality and style from book to book. Philip Shaw's volume on Patti Smith's 1975 proto-punk classic HORSES chooses to go the egghead intellectual route, mostly addressing Smith's work as it relates to classical poetry, constructions of celebrity, and myth. It's also very heavy on gender studies with a smattering of queer theory, so anti-Freudians might do best to steer clear (the word "phallus" gets tossed around a lot). An engaging enough read, and it did make me want to hear the album, but if you like your music criticism loose and rangy, this will not be your cup of tea.

[Jonathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love this album--why else would I read this book?--but the book is pretty lame. The biography is better gotten from Smith's "Just Kids" and the analysis is worse than Patti at her most pretentious.

[Amelia · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dude! Not everything is about the phallus!

[Vincent · Rating 2 out of 5]

Based more on assumptions than research.

[Frank Jude · Rating 4 out of 5]

The 33 1/3 series from Bloombury Publishing has produced a series of over 100 books (so far) detailing the context (personal, historical, cultural) of mostly "landmark" albums such as Bitches Brew, Parallel Lines, Marquee Moon, Unknown Pleasures and Pet Sounds as well as albums that may not have had huge popularity, but did have huge cultural impact such as Trout Mask Replica and then others that are more quirky personal favorites of the authors involved. Along with the historical narrative, each book gives a mostly song by song critical analysis.

I picked up Horses about the making of Patti Smith's 1975 debut at the Sub Pop store in the Seattle airport. It's a bit confounding to me that this album that is 22-years old sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday, it's that fresh and relevant! Happily, I can say this about most of my favorite albums and is telling when held up against albums like Meet The Beatles (my first LP buy with my own money!) which, though cool sounds like the time it was made.

I've a confession: while all my female friends were in absolute awe and love of Patti and this album at the time of its release, I didn't fully get it. I totally LOVED the opening with the bass/piano ostinato over which she sang the still-unsettling, confrontational AND liberating "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine / Meltin' in a pot of thieves / Wild card up my sleeve / Thick heart of stone / My sins my own, they belong to me." And I liked the more "song-lke" "Kimberly," "Redondo Beach," "Break It Up" with Tom Verlaine's vertiginous lead guitar and the poignant closing "Elegie." But I just didn't get the two long centerpieces of the LP, "Birdland" and "Land," both just over nine-minutes each.

Between not being able to make out many of the words and the non-linear narratives, compounded by the imagistic poetics, I was lost. So, though I bought the album, I didn't listen to it as much or as deeply as I listened to an album like Blank Generation or The Velvet Underground and Nico for instance.

This book, by Philip Shaw was eye-opening to me. He connects the dots from Smith's poetry, inspired by Rimbaud and Baudelaire as well as her enthrallment with Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix' early deaths, through her alignment with the Beats as well as her familial relationships and her drive towards transcendent spirituality influenced by her growing up a Jehovah's Witness and listening to the album today was simply revelatory!

If you already love the album, I think you'll love this book. If you were confused by the album or actively didn't like it, I think this book will be as revelatory to you as to me. Over 40-years on, as Philip Shaw writes:

Pati Smith enters into the realm of the simple present. It is a moment of pure indulgence, a temporary, yet, for me, vital suspension of the drive to critical accountability -- all the time I am mindful that what I am listening to and what I am describing is documentary evidence that I am listening to events that happened a long time ago, and that I am trying to reconstruct them, fruitlessly no doubt, in 'the present time of playback.'

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

This 33 1/3 series set out its stall to delve into these albums beyond the mere bio or tittle-tattle and Philip Shaw does just that. It's an erudite close-reading sprawl over the electrifying, fascinating and wordy sprawl that is Horses. Yes, Shaw overuses the concept of the phallus and he sometimes travels down some winding alleyways that smack of sophistry, but remember he is tackling a work that brings together so many contradictions in one place that is hard for any of us to have the same idea about it from one day to the next. Patti Smith played a Bowie-like gender tease, summoned the ghost of Rimbaud openly and unashamedly while delving into her own history/mythology with a poetic flourish and also clambering onto the shoulders of rock titans current and deceased. Rather like her ex-lover Tom Verlaine, she transcended punk while modelling its freedom, but she did so in 1975, before punk even made it onto the runway. No one who has heard the urgent arrival of the "horses, horses, horses" chant and the attendant "sea of possibility" ever forgets it. More than that, digging deeper into this album, as this slim book allows one to do, makes Horses' achievements even more astonishing, just like digging into Television's Marquee Moon does. This music was smart and visceral, challenging and heartfelt. It did not take the easy route to target audiences. It can stand the withering glare of academia and the fist-pumping wordless joy of fanhood both. Almost 50 years on it is still fresh. It can take you to so many places in your own past and still accompany you into the future for more. You never ever ever get tired of it. At least I do not. And it appears that Shaw does not either. So whether this is because Patti was challenging the phallus, running it down, grabbing it, milking it, kicking it, aching for it or spurning it matters little. She was there, plugged in, exploding in so many dimensions at once - not just onto the page - and making us feel that "sea of possibility" so very deeply. Shaw seeks to ride along with her through those roiling waves, brandishing his own skill set proudly. In the end, he gives her his brainiac-amour, does her various kinds of justice and illuminates yet more listening by us to this extraordinary album.

[Brad · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think a bigger fan of the album would rate this higher (though other reviews here suggest otherwise). As for me, this reading provided some context to Patti Smith's shift from poet to poet/musician and taught me more about her influences which indeed extend beyond her Rimbaud worship into Rolling Stones worship and death fascination. I can't say I understand the album any better or why it is so highly regarded today, despite my best efforts. It feels a product of its time and place more than anything.

[Francesco · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of the books in the Series 33 1/3, short volumes dedicated to famous albums from the point of view of a fan. This one is about Patti Smith's first record Horses. The part that describes the songs is a bit too intellectual, although it guides you through the otherwise rather obscure meaning of the lyrics. It is more readable and fascinating in the description of the 70s West Village's context in which Smith was living and writing.

[Kori May · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was the 2nd 33-1/3 book I've read and this one felt much more academic than the first one (which felt more like a story about an album and it's influence on music as a whole). Was still a decent read and I enjoyed learning more about one of my favorite albums. Patti Smith is a force to be reckoned with and this served to illustrate how many layers her writing has and has had since the very beginning.

[Graham Catt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the historical details of Patti Smith’s debut and information about song evolution, but there is far too much of this:

‘For what the father offered was a sense of the allure of the phallus, not to be confused here with possession of the penis, an actual physical organ, but rather as the master signifier of the Symbolic order…’

Seriously?

[Dean Wilcox · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the better ones in this series. A good balance of personal reflection, historical context, and theoretical observations (Lacan, Kristeva, Butler, Barthes).

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read most of this on the train today and there's some great arguments I would love to explore more and develop

[Jaz · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was really heavy going in places, notably the bits where the author critically analyses Patti's poetry. Me, I'm all about the rock'n'roll, I'm afraid!

[Agnes Andersson · Rating 1 out of 5]

För att vara en bok om Horses är det fascinerande lite Horses och fascinerande mycket Freud

[Zach Minuto · Rating 4 out of 5]

one of the better entries in the series. shaw’s analysis brings an appropriate amount of academic heft without losing the thread of immediacy that makes this album such a joy to listen to.

[Yannis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Υπέροχο και καμένο. Έμαθα τα πάντα για το Horses. Μερικά δεν ήθελα καν να τα ξέρω.

[alex valdes · Rating 3 out of 5]

phallus

[Tal · Rating 2 out of 5]

pretentious garbage with some great anecdotes

[Camiel Leake · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this, despite the amount of freud. Shaw loves horses, you can read that in every sentence.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love these 33 1/3 books. Subjective to be sure, but that's part of their charm - their sheer geekiness and evident passion for their subject tempered by a light touch and a wink that acknowledges the indulgence (and "release"?...) of finally being able to share with the world a teenage obsession which, in the end, as both reader and author know, is still just a pop record.

Sadly, Shaw's effort illustrates none of this insouciance and gives the impression of taking himself, and his "material", rather too seriously (Freudian pun fully intended). At their best, the series can give fresh new insight into well-loved tracks, at their worst it can ruin favourite songs by exposing them to over-analysis and undermining the listener's own personal attributed meanings and fantasies. (A bit like the disappointment of first-time sex with the class hottie you've always fancied, one might say, or is that just me?)

In my opinion, this book falls somewhere closer to the second category. An example: "Kimberley", for me, is one of the most beautiful and powerful expressions of love, sibling or otherwise, I've ever listened to. I appreciated learning about Patti Smith's early childhood experiences that so obviously contributed to the writing of the song. But surely that's just it. I failed to follow Shaw's argument that the song actually represents "an attempt to occupy, possess and displace the power of the phallus". Really??! I've listened and thought about this song so many times, yet neither have I picked up the supposed "ironic" coda. Maybe I'm a sucker (ahem), but far from leaving me with a sense of "uncertainty and unease", I've always thought the power of the song comes from its very simplicity and genuine heart-felt sentiments.

In contrast to this, somewhat anticlimactically(oh dear...), Shaw hardly even scratches the surface of the complexities and multiple layers of "Land". This is probably just as well; the song maintains its ambiguity and thus its mystery and power. After all, no amout of intellectualisation or speculation can enhance the experience of listening to that terrifying passage where Smith maniacally intones "Horses, Horses, Horses, Comin' in in all directions". Makes me shiver every time. Nevertheless, it's disappointing that so little is said about some of the most arresting and disturbing images of the entire album. Whilst it's clear that the author aims to illustrate the multiple-self and gender ambiguity aspects of the album as a whole, it seems a bit naive to ignore everything else completely. I'm thinking specifically of the many references to heroin in "Land". It's what I thought the thing was about in the first place. For chrissake, the whole 9 minutes sounds like an aural (oral?) version of Naked Lunch!

On the plus side, the book gave me a fascinating insight into the social context, early biography and art/music/literature that informed and inspired the record - but I get the feeling this would add nothing new for existing fans of Smith. The section on the songs themselves, usually the most enlightening parts of the 33 1/3 books, is too short and comes right at the end (that's what she said...), almost as if the music is too complex and escapes the commentator's grasp. I had the distict impression that Shaw was making up for this lack of interpretability under a blanket of uni-student pseudo-Lacanian philosophising. In fact you might say this book represents an attempt by Shaw to impose his psycho-analytical interpretive "structure" (this is equivalent to a phallus, I've learnt) onto what, thankfully, remains a beautiful and mysterious record that refuses to give up completely its darkest meanings. Ultimately, I'm secretly quite glad he fails to penetrate Patti Smith's depths with his over-intellectualised probings. On the other hand, perhaps I'm reading waaay too much into this thing...

[Vaughan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been "currently reading" this one for months. Another one in this series that is way too cerebral and "let me justify all my college degrees by mentioning lots of structural theory. And did I mention the Situationists yet?" Yeah, one of those. A shame too as this is, well, a desert-isle album for sure. Some interesting historical stuff about the times but too much egg head philosophizing. Oh well, it's short and I'll finish it at some point.

August 12, 2009: I may never finish this one. Not because it's horrible (though it errs away a lot of the books in this series do by being really pretentious and really navel-gazing at the same time.) If you're a fan of hers, you probably know all this stuff anyway. I wanted to find out if it was true that Ms. Smith was pleasuring herself during the "go, Johnny, go!" part of "Land," but this, sadly, doesn't seem like it's gonna do it.

[Patrick McCoy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I recently read Philip Shaw’s 33 1/3 book length essay on Patti Smith’s seminal album Horses. Shaw is a Reader in the English Department at the University of Leicester; therefore his analysis is rife with theorists like Lacan, Benjamin, Freud, Jung, and others. But I think the real strength of his book lies in the biographical sketches he provides about her early life and development as an artist. Shaw does an admirable job with explaining how Smith got tot eh point where she could record an album like Horses and provided insight into the background and lyrics of the songs. For example I was unaware that “Redondo Beach” was code for a gay beach in the LA area. It was interesting to hear about her past with people like Sam Shepard and the whole downtown scene. I find a many of Smith’s songs timeless-and the ones from this album include “Land,” “Gloria,” and “Redondo Beach.”

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book...I learned more about Patti's youth and can now understand some of the influences in her life that come through in Horses. At times Shaw is too technical and we really don't need to know what key the song is written in, but he dives deep into the lyrics of Patti's epic album. Without Patti's validation to the meanings behind the lyrics it may be all speculation, but it is interesting and thought provoking. If your a fan of the album and Patti Smith...it's definitely worth the read.

[Tom Schulte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another great, slim exegesis of a great album. I spent about 4 hours reading this and flipping the LP, listening over and over. The first third, roughly, is a personal biography of Patti taking her from Illinois to Chicago, after preface material and remembrances of her early rock poetry solo performances. Then comes a band, recording biography taking us up to Horses. The conclusion before references is a track by track analysis of the album. This is a fine balance of heady musicology with big words ("oneiric", etc.) and historical background and setting.