Why Patti Smith Matters
Caryn Rose FABER
In celebration of a true rock’n’roll one-off
There have been biographies of Patti Smith written in the past, but, especially in terms of the poet and singer’s early days, most of them were made entirely redundant by her magnificent memoir Just Kids, a master class in the art of rock autobiography. It read more like a novel, and in it she painted a picture of downtown New York City in the 1970s so vivid that the reader could almost smell CBGB from the comfort of their own living room.
With this in mind, music journalist Caryn Rose has made the smart move of telling Smith’s story by looking at her wider importance, not only to the punk scene, but also to poets, rebels and outsiders everywhere. It’s refreshing to read a take on Smith’s significance through the female gaze (the vast majority of books on her are written by men) and her importance as a feminist icon – although Smith herself wouldis particularly thoughtful on that front, pointing out how radical it was, at the time, for a female musician to be photographed with no make-up, messy hair, men’s clothing, not smiling or pandering to the camera… just exuding an aura of complete, calm, confident control. “Horses was a signal to the rest of us that there was a way out,” Rose writes.