The track Patti Smith wrote as an “anti radio song”
Patti Smith’s career was never going to be typical or mainstream. As the poet laureate of the punk world, her work has always been rich with deeper meaning and a true literary streak. Even at the height of her commercial success, Smith always dived deeper than what was on the surface.
In music history, it’s common for artists to disguise the true meaning of their music. Especially in the 1960s and beyond, the topic of drugs has always been buried by more radio-friendly implications. Tracks like The Beatles’ ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’ or the Rolling Stones’ ‘Brown Sugar’ disguise their illegal subject matters behind vague topics of love or lust.
But in 1976, Patti Smith did exactly the opposite. After her debut album Horses gained attention, shooting her from the buzzy New York punk scene to wider notability, she was suddenly face to face with the music machine. Tackling expectations of what a female artist should do or be, the attention on Smith proved strange to handle.
While many would have used their newfound success to push it further, gain more fans and break into the mainstream well and truly, Smith stuck true to her alternative route. Instead, she used the topic of drugs and music’s complex relationship with the subject to turn her lyrical gaze right on the industry itself.
“Goin’ on the corner, I’m gonna score,” she sings on ‘Poppies’. From the title to the references in the lyrics, the track appears as another drug-infused track, as poppies are the source of opium used to make heroin. The lyrics did what many other rock songs did, hinting at drugs just enough to pass through the radio’s moral filters. But underneath, Smith was hiding a veiled attack on those stations, letting the track slip through like a disguised killer.
Amidst the lyrics, the true meaning is revealed. “Heard it on the radio, it’s no good,” she sings as ‘Poppies’, but it instead becomes a track about bad music, radio fodder, and the expectations placed on artists.
“It’s a song against shit on the radio,” Smith told New York Rocker, adding, “but I was disguising it as a drug song, since it seems to be more accepted to take drugs than to talk against the radio.”
“I was disguisin’ my anti-radio song as a habitual blues song,” she continued. Likening the 1970s mass drug use to the influx of bad pop songs or connecting the dots between a cheap score of heroin and a meaningless radio track, she got the radio to play an attack on itself.
Throughout the song, when Smith sings about wanting to “score”, she’s using the drug terminology to instead consider the complex relationship between wanting to score a hit and having the world hear her art, versus the way that the radio and mainstream music seemed to cheapen what she does.
“He’s delighted to love me, but you know / I just don’t know what to say to him,” the song begins, sounding like a conversation between an artist and an industry head desperate to make a star. The song seems to capture Smith’s cynicism towards fame and radio success in an industry obsessed with quick hits.
Not only did ‘Poppies’ say how she felt, but it actioned it out. After Horses, all eyes were on what Smith would do next, with the expectation being that her sophomore album would attempt to build on her success and help her enter the rock world in a more commercial and clear way. Instead, she released Radio Ethiopia, a ten-track tour of her weirder side.
Complete with a ten-minute long title track, a lead single that couldn’t be played on radio stations due to the obscene title of ‘Pissing In A River’ and a generally edgy feel that isolated less dedicated fans, her second album wasn’t the mainstream hit people were looking for. Amidst its tracklist, ‘Poppies’ sits as a manifesto as Smith saw the success she could have but wanted something more meaningful, singing, “Baby got it, but baby want more.”
