Why Patti Smith didn’t consider herself a musician: “I don’t really play anything with any aptitude”
The most excellent musicians tend to take to their instruments as if it’s second nature. Throughout every song they play, it’s almost as if the music is channelled through some kind of artistic funnel, with the artist serving as the emotional translator. Although most people like to translate their emotions through a guitar or drums, Patti Smith knew how to channel that energy by having her unique voice in rock.
Coming out of the late 1960s, Smith had started to think rock had begun losing its edge. Rather than the artistic revolution that seemed to signal great change in the 1970s, the Flower Generation slowly became irrelevant as trends began to change and the highfalutin dreams that had appealed so richly dulled in the dawn of a new decade. With giants like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin passing away and leaving the rest of the world to soldier on, the ideals of the 1960s were gone.
Smith saw her chance to enact her own change, and going into the studio with her backing group, Smith created a landmark achievement with Horses, taking the building blocks of rock and roll and using them to channel those feelings of desolation. Throughout tracks like ‘Land’ and ‘Gloria’, Smith was trying to take the tools used in traditional rock music and use them as a platform for her poetry.
Then again, this was nothing new. As far back as Bob Dylan, artists were using their lyrics as a platform to talk about the more significant problems of the world or paint visual pictures in the listener’s mind, like Lou Reed had done when working with The Velvet Underground. As much as Smith admired those artists, she thought that her main message was to make poetry rather than music.
When talking about her approach to rock music, Smith quickly said that she doesn’t consider herself a performer in the usual sense, recalling to Harvard Business Review, “I don’t really think of myself as a musician. I don’t really play anything with any aptitude. I think of myself as a performer and a songwriter. My aim with my album Horses was to let outsiders like me—the weird kids, the gay kids, the kids whose parents disowned them—know they weren’t alone and to create space for new generations. I never expected to make any more records”.
As opposed to artists that lead with their best foot forward, the entire appeal of Horses was about making things messy, showing the human side of the performance rather than just another sleek rock record coming out of the scene. Arriving a few years before the punk revolution, Smith also became mislabeled as one of the few progenitors of the punk movement when she was trying to bring rock and roll back to its essence.
While Smith would eventually make albums that roared with rock and roll grandeur thanks to producers like Jimmy Iovine, her primary focus was continuing to use her prose to inspire those around her. When branching out to other ventures, Smith understood the power of the written word before anything else, trying to point out the injustices of the world as well as strengthen those on the fringes of society. Words can easily be used as weapons, but even with the album Horses, Smith knew that she gave her listeners a sonic friend over 40 minutes.
