When Patti Smith rallied against censorship: “Tell the kids not to buy it”
The core ethos of any good musician is about singing what they feel in their heart. Even though there are plenty of people who may get offended by what is coming off a record, it’s better to have them say what they feel rather than cater to what they think their audience might want. While Patti Smith never defined herself as a musician in the traditional sense, she knew that she had no time for censorship.
When Smith first arrived on the scene, though, she was on the precipice of what would become punk rock. Shortly after she unleashed her debut album Horses, bands would be popping up left and right, laying waste to the original scene, with everyone from Ramones to The Clash making songs that felt like a call to arms compared to the surface-level progressive rock cluttering up the charts.
While Smith may have gotten pigeonholed as a punk rocker, she was more interested in the value of poetry in music. Throughout her first handful of records, Smith dwells on topics that hit the core of the human experience, whether dealing with the fallout of death across Horses or getting in touch with spirituality on her third outing, Easter.
At the same time, the rock world was getting a little too dirty for many parents’ taste at the time. With artists like John Lennon making songs with profanity, concerned authority figures were under the impression that this new approach to music was a lot more destructive than it was revolutionary, calling for many people to censor what they put into their music.
From Smith’s perspective, though, asking her to stifle herself deliberately was the equivalent of her asking to lose a part of her soul. Poetry has always been about the humanity of the listener, and often, that manifests itself into songs that might be seen as unsavoury by many. When putting out her first single ‘Gloria’, the B-side cover of The Who classic ‘My Generation’ was initially going to get bleeped when Smith screams, “I don’t need your fucking shit.”
When asked about whether she was onboard with the censorship, Smith was appalled that anyone would think of stifling her, telling Mick Gold, “Tell the kids that I say not to buy it. It’s against my wishes. They bleeped it, and that’s not how it’s supposed to be. It’s two American slang terms. It’s just words.”
While Smith stood her ground against the bleeped version of the track, the laws of censorship would only get more pronounced as the years went on, leading to the creation of the Parental Advisory sticker being put onto albums that were deemed too vulgar for mass consumption. For many fans, though, that would become an advertisement for potentially interesting music, usually going against their parents’ wishes and buying the records anyway.
When talking about her role against art being stifled, she thought that rock and roll wasn’t to be trifled with, explaining, “Rock and roll is my art. The government doesn’t know shit, whether it’s art or not. Rock and roll is warfare. All the time…still fighting.” Even though Smith may be more of a poet than a singer, it took the instrumentation around her to bring her brilliant pieces to life.
