‘Piss Factory’: Patti Smith’s defiant take on the gloom of capitalism
Patti Smith has never been scared of work. In her world, work is honourable, glorious, and essential. She’s found beauty in hard work, and now she’s grafting away at her calling in the realm of the artist. But that doesn’t mean all labour is so pretty. Smith knew that well, too, as she dedicated her debut single, ‘Piss Factory’, to the gloom of her prior working life in the hope of finally being able to break free of it.
‘Piss Factory’. The name really says it all. It’s visceral, disgusting, harsh and bleak, just like how Smith saw life as a teenage girl stuck doing monotonous labour while her dreams bubbled inside her. “I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one,” Smith wrote in Just Kids of her youth as she drew and danced and wrote poems, always hoping that she was destined for something special. But, coming from a small town near Philadelphia, her hopes were balanced. She looked around at her blue-collar parents and her working-class town of hard grafters, and she knew she saw honour in it, but that didn’t mean she wanted it.
As she grew up and had to join the ranks of the workforce, there was always another ticking clock inside of her, not only waiting for the end of the day but waiting for something to change, some hang to pick her up and out and drop her into the life she hoped to be destined for. Day by day, she doubted it. “I wondered if I had really been called as an artist. I didn’t mind the misery of a vocation, but I dreaded not being called.”
That dread coloured her youth. With no calling and a capitalist society demanding work, she got a job. “Sixteen and time to pay off / I get this job in a piss factory / Inspecting pipes / Forty hours / Thirty-six dollars a week / But it’s a pay-check, Jack,” she announces in ‘Piss Factory’ as half fact, half fiction.
She did take a job in a factory, although not quite a piss one. Hers was a job in “a nonunion factory, inspecting handlebars for tricycles,” but it was piss all the same as Smith said for the teenage dreamer, “it was a wretched place to work.”
“Nonunion” is the key word here because the workers, including Smith, were getting abused. The pay was abysmal, the conditions were awful, and the summers Smith spent working there seemed to suck all the sun from the sky and cast those months in an impenetrable gloom. All of that is captured in the song as she growls her way through spoken word verses, spitting out stanzas like they’re punches thrown at her old boss and old colleagues.
It’s a two-fold attack. On the one hand, ‘Piss Factory’ is a hit out at the exploitative nature of jobs like this as she talks about the workplace being “So hot in here, hot like Sahara / You could faint from the heat,” and how the workers, in need of pay, were “Too goddamned grateful to get this job to know they’re getting screwed up the ass.”
On the other hand, this was Smith’s chance to stick her middle finger up at that era of her life when she was launching into a new one, and after that, the calling finally came. Now living in New York after running away from her factory life and about to launch her music career after making a name for herself in the city’s poetry and art scene, she gets in one clear dig at her old boss and the way that capitalism often keeps workers trapped.
“Floor boss slides up to me and he says ‘Hey sister / You’re just moving too fast / You’re screwing up the quota. You’re doing your piece work too fast,” she says, highlighting the irony of being told you’re working too hard, while highlight that it was never about graft, it was about control; ticking boxes and filling quotas with workers operating like robots. But as she mimics the voice of her old boss, who spent years ridiculing her dreams and intellectual interests, she takes a direct shot. “Now you get off your Mustang, Sally, / You ain’t going nowhere / You ain’t going nowhere,” she says in his voice.
Now on her platform in the big city, having done somewhere and standing on the cusp of her greatness, the reference to ‘Mustang Sally’ is pointed, choosing to mention a song about slowing or stopping a woman’s dreams and potential by threatening, “I guess I’ll have to put your flat feet on the ground, huh”.
With her glare pointed straight at the old bosses who doubted her and the work life that tried to hold her back or keep her trapped in the monotony of traditional labour, Smith is putting a finger up at the men who tried to curtail her dreams. She’s defying it, stating, “But I will never faint / I will never faint / They laugh, and they expect me to faint / But I will never faint / I refuse to lose / I refuse to fall down,” as a statement that she was always planning to break free from that trap.
“I got something to hide here / Called desire / And I will get out of here,” she says, recalling her mantra back then from her position now as she dedicated her debut single to proving a point; she did get out, she got on her Mustang and rode, fast, into her future and her freedom. Patti Smith has never been scared of work, but on ‘Piss Factory’, she made it clear that she would never gain work in a place like that.
