Horses

33⅓ Main Series #55

by Philip Shaw

Described as the perfect fusion of poetry and garage band rock and roll (the original concept was "rock and Rimbaud"), Horses belongs as much to the world of literary and cultural criticism as it does to the realm of musicology. While Horses pays homage to the record's origins in the nascent New York punk scene, the book's core lies in a detailed analysis of Patti Smith's lyrics and includes discussions of lyrical love, sex, gender, death, dreams, god, metamorphosis, intoxication, apocalypse and transcendence. Philip shaw demonstrates how Horses transformed the possibilities of both poetry and rock music; and how it achieved nothing less than a complete and systematic derangement of the senses.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, Essays, Biography

176 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2008

Reviews

[Ruth]

Oh- there is way too much Freud in here, and I wasn't sure whether to take seriously all the stuff he says about "the power of the phallus". This record is great because it's straight-up rock and roll poetry, and all that psychoanalysis is way too distracting, and almost offensive- there must be other way to approach a close reading. I did like knowing the background of what all the songs were about, though, especially my favorite, Kimberly, and now when I hear it I can imagine a young girl holding her baby sister in the middle of a storm & having this Huck Finn moment when she decides she won't go to heaven if there is no art there. I hadn't known about all the references to dead rock stars, either, or about all the particulars of the inspirational visions and dreams. But I probably could have gotten that info somewhere else. I think this guy was just trying too hard.

[Mallory]

Cannot believe someone had the audacity to disrespect Patti Smith with so much poststructuralist theory.

[Clarice]

drinking game idea: take a shot everytime the author mentions the “phallus”

[Amelia]

Dude! Not everything is about the phallus!

[Adam]

I found Phillip Shaw’s close reading of Smith’s album to be astonishing and entertaining. From the cover art to the lyrics, Shaw tackles the album with academic rigor and fan, well, fanaticism. Just as Horses mixes high art references with low-art rock ‘n roll ones, so does Shaw blend high theory with low rock ‘n roll journalism. He points out that by openly referring to her inspiration, Smith effectively handed her critics a context in which to situate her:
“But by placing herself alongside Brecht and Johnny Ace, Genet and Gene Krupa, she did more than challenge artist boundaries: she also created a context for the ‘correct’ reception of her work. When, in late 1975, journalists embarked on the task of explaining and evaluating the record, not surprisingly they too cited an eclectic range of artistic precedents” (139).
As less of a “lyrics guy” than a “sounds guy,” I hadn’t given Smith’s poetry a lot of attention besides the sounds of the words. I appreciated the Shaw’s detailed criticism and know that I’ll hear the words anew the next time I listen to the album. I hope he writes more music criticism!

[Rob Gifford]

Horses is a very cool album — one of the coolest, and one of the best — and this offers a decent and succinct explainer of how that came to be; the biography of Smith is brief but meaningful, as is the exploration of the grimy creative explosion surrounding the early-70s CBGB scene. the analysis of the music itself is on the whole insightful, describing how Smith married modernist poetry to punk-rock stylings, although the author has a slightly-annoying Academic Brain tendency to insert invasive passages of Lacanian analysis along the lines of, “…it might more sense to consider ‘Redondo Beach’ as yet another attempt to engage with the conceptual hegemony of the phallus.” I for one am always engaging with the hegemony of the phallus and am glad to know Patti Smith is too.

[Corey]

I cannot agree with Shaw that Horses is the best rock and roll album ever made, but it is a damn good one. I'm not sure he got at what's great about it though he dug deep. I could have used a little less academia and a little more punk rock. ("At best, in moments of ecstasy, she appears to mark a potential space beyond the control of the patriarchal gods; as the Lacanian Real, she thus emerges....) But he does do a nice job of explaining how the misfit/poet Smith became the rock star who recorded Horses.

[Matt]

" In this book I have tried to convey something of this emotional freedom: I associate Horses with intense feelings of pleasure and excitement, even, at times, with states of rapture; it would be disingenuous of me to deny this. But Horses also lends itself to intense and rigorous thought. It is, after all, a record born out of a strange collision of high and low art: for the purposes of shorthand, the poetics of French symbolism and the raucous rhythms of early rock n roll. For Smith, there is no significant distinction between Hendrix and Rimbaud, Blake and Little Richard, T.S. Eliot and Jim Morrison. The sense of audacity, of challenging the listener's expectation of what a rock n roll record should do, is sustained in Horses' conceptual range: from the struggle between liberty and authority ("Gloria") to the unsettling effects of desire ("Redondo Beach," "Kimberly"), and then again from the evocation of dreams and altered states of mind ("Birdland" "Free Money" "Land") to the unexpected beauty of melancholy and loss ("Break It Up" "Elegie"). Underlying all of this is a concern with the relations between the spoken and written word, the poem and the song; in a final dialectical twist, Horses is about what happens when we listen as well as read."

[Richard]

These 33& 1/3 books are as addictive as--well . . . . But they are uneven affairs. Some of them are extremely most tedious subjective appreciations masquerading as "creative" writing. Others are solid and well researched. Shaw's book on the great Patti Smith album falls mostly into the latter category. But, unfortunately, Mr. Shaw discovered Lacan and Kristeva in graduate school and acts as if his armchair psychoanalysis might actually interest someone without a Ph.D

Since I have a Ph.D, I can say that despite his trying to be the village explainer (good if you were a village, but if not, not---as Stein said of Pound)--Patti Smith's masterpiece survives his exegesis, and because of his historical and biographical information and decent bibliography I feel that I got my money's worth.

[Matt Lohr]

The 33 1/3 series varies fairly drastically in quality and style from book to book. Philip Shaw's volume on Patti Smith's 1975 proto-punk classic HORSES chooses to go the egghead intellectual route, mostly addressing Smith's work as it relates to classical poetry, constructions of celebrity, and myth. It's also very heavy on gender studies with a smattering of queer theory, so anti-Freudians might do best to steer clear (the word "phallus" gets tossed around a lot). An engaging enough read, and it did make me want to hear the album, but if you like your music criticism loose and rangy, this will not be your cup of tea.

[Jonathan]

I love this album--why else would I read this book?--but the book is pretty lame. The biography is better gotten from Smith's "Just Kids" and the analysis is worse than Patti at her most pretentious.

[Vincent]

Based more on assumptions than research.

[Frank Jude]

The 33 1/3 series from Bloombury Publishing has produced a series of over 100 books (so far) detailing the context (personal, historical, cultural) of mostly "landmark" albums such as Bitches Brew, Parallel Lines, Marquee Moon, Unknown Pleasures and Pet Sounds as well as albums that may not have had huge popularity, but did have huge cultural impact such as Trout Mask Replica and then others that are more quirky personal favorites of the authors involved. Along with the historical narrative, each book gives a mostly song by song critical analysis.

I picked up Horses about the making of Patti Smith's 1975 debut at the Sub Pop store in the Seattle airport. It's a bit confounding to me that this album that is 22-years old sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday, it's that fresh and relevant! Happily, I can say this about most of my favorite albums and is telling when held up against albums like Meet The Beatles (my first LP buy with my own money!) which, though cool sounds like the time it was made.

I've a confession: while all my female friends were in absolute awe and love of Patti and this album at the time of its release, I didn't fully get it. I totally LOVED the opening with the bass/piano ostinato over which she sang the still-unsettling, confrontational AND liberating "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine / Meltin' in a pot of thieves / Wild card up my sleeve / Thick heart of stone / My sins my own, they belong to me." And I liked the more "song-lke" "Kimberly," "Redondo Beach," "Break It Up" with Tom Verlaine's vertiginous lead guitar and the poignant closing "Elegie." But I just didn't get the two long centerpieces of the LP, "Birdland" and "Land," both just over nine-minutes each.

Between not being able to make out many of the words and the non-linear narratives, compounded by the imagistic poetics, I was lost. So, though I bought the album, I didn't listen to it as much or as deeply as I listened to an album like Blank Generation or The Velvet Underground and Nico for instance.

This book, by Philip Shaw was eye-opening to me. He connects the dots from Smith's poetry, inspired by Rimbaud and Baudelaire as well as her enthrallment with Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix' early deaths, through her alignment with the Beats as well as her familial relationships and her drive towards transcendent spirituality influenced by her growing up a Jehovah's Witness and listening to the album today was simply revelatory!

If you already love the album, I think you'll love this book. If you were confused by the album or actively didn't like it, I think this book will be as revelatory to you as to me. Over 40-years on, as Philip Shaw writes:

Pati Smith enters into the realm of the simple present. It is a moment of pure indulgence, a temporary, yet, for me, vital suspension of the drive to critical accountability -- all the time I am mindful that what I am listening to and what I am describing is documentary evidence that I am listening to events that happened a long time ago, and that I am trying to reconstruct them, fruitlessly no doubt, in 'the present time of playback.'

[Rob]

This 33 1/3 series set out its stall to delve into these albums beyond the mere bio or tittle-tattle and Philip Shaw does just that. It's an erudite close-reading sprawl over the electrifying, fascinating and wordy sprawl that is Horses. Yes, Shaw overuses the concept of the phallus and he sometimes travels down some winding alleyways that smack of sophistry, but remember he is tackling a work that brings together so many contradictions in one place that is hard for any of us to have the same idea about it from one day to the next. Patti Smith played a Bowie-like gender tease, summoned the ghost of Rimbaud openly and unashamedly while delving into her own history/mythology with a poetic flourish and also clambering onto the shoulders of rock titans current and deceased. Rather like her ex-lover Tom Verlaine, she transcended punk while modelling its freedom, but she did so in 1975, before punk even made it onto the runway. No one who has heard the urgent arrival of the "horses, horses, horses" chant and the attendant "sea of possibility" ever forgets it. More than that, digging deeper into this album, as this slim book allows one to do, makes Horses' achievements even more astonishing, just like digging into Television's Marquee Moon does. This music was smart and visceral, challenging and heartfelt. It did not take the easy route to target audiences. It can stand the withering glare of academia and the fist-pumping wordless joy of fanhood both. Almost 50 years on it is still fresh. It can take you to so many places in your own past and still accompany you into the future for more. You never ever ever get tired of it. At least I do not. And it appears that Shaw does not either. So whether this is because Patti was challenging the phallus, running it down, grabbing it, milking it, kicking it, aching for it or spurning it matters little. She was there, plugged in, exploding in so many dimensions at once - not just onto the page - and making us feel that "sea of possibility" so very deeply. Shaw seeks to ride along with her through those roiling waves, brandishing his own skill set proudly. In the end, he gives her his brainiac-amour, does her various kinds of justice and illuminates yet more listening by us to this extraordinary album.

[Pegasus & Chrysaor]

I really enjoyed Shaw's academic engagement with Smith's work here- it was quite detailed and touched upon a lot of interesting concepts and subjects from Cultural/Gender/Queer Studies. While densely written, it was thoughtful and exciting.

However:
- many paragraphs were unnaturally long
- analysis/in-depth discussion of Smith's album only started around page 100 (out of 143...)
- The "phallus" point, though well described, was overused near the end- to the point of misrecognition and exhaust.

Overall, it's an involved and dedicated work, but goes a bit off topic in some places and would have needed more structural editing.

[Brad]

I think a bigger fan of the album would rate this higher (though other reviews here suggest otherwise). As for me, this reading provided some context to Patti Smith's shift from poet to poet/musician and taught me more about her influences which indeed extend beyond her Rimbaud worship into Rolling Stones worship and death fascination. I can't say I understand the album any better or why it is so highly regarded today, despite my best efforts. It feels a product of its time and place more than anything.

[Francesco]

This is one of the books in the Series 33 1/3, short volumes dedicated to famous albums from the point of view of a fan. This one is about Patti Smith's first record Horses. The part that describes the songs is a bit too intellectual, although it guides you through the otherwise rather obscure meaning of the lyrics. It is more readable and fascinating in the description of the 70s West Village's context in which Smith was living and writing.

[Kori May]

This was the 2nd 33-1/3 book I've read and this one felt much more academic than the first one (which felt more like a story about an album and it's influence on music as a whole). Was still a decent read and I enjoyed learning more about one of my favorite albums. Patti Smith is a force to be reckoned with and this served to illustrate how many layers her writing has and has had since the very beginning.

[Graham Catt]

I enjoyed the historical details of Patti Smith’s debut and information about song evolution, but there is far too much of this:

‘For what the father offered was a sense of the allure of the phallus, not to be confused here with possession of the penis, an actual physical organ, but rather as the master signifier of the Symbolic order…’

Seriously?

[Freddie Barnes]

Fascinating case study on an album I like but don't often revisit. I enjoy how Shaw provides a biography on not just Smith and how she got to where she was to release the album, but also on her influences, both musical and intellectual. The song by song breakdown of Horses is a nice round ending to probably the best one of the 33 1/3 books I have read yet.

[Dean Wilcox]

One of the better ones in this series. A good balance of personal reflection, historical context, and theoretical observations (Lacan, Kristeva, Butler, Barthes).

[Amy]

Read most of this on the train today and there's some great arguments I would love to explore more and develop

[Jaz]

This was really heavy going in places, notably the bits where the author critically analyses Patti's poetry. Me, I'm all about the rock'n'roll, I'm afraid!

[Agnes Andersson]

För att vara en bok om Horses är det fascinerande lite Horses och fascinerande mycket Freud

[Zach Minuto]

one of the better entries in the series. shaw’s analysis brings an appropriate amount of academic heft without losing the thread of immediacy that makes this album such a joy to listen to.

[Panikoval500]

Υπέροχο και καμένο. Έμαθα τα πάντα για το Horses. Μερικά δεν ήθελα καν να τα ξέρω.

[alex valdes]

phallus

[Tal]

pretentious garbage with some great anecdotes

[Camiel Leake]

I really enjoyed this, despite the amount of freud. Shaw loves horses, you can read that in every sentence.

[Effy]

The author absolutely abused the word phallus throughout the book and kept quoting Freud, Žižek and Lacan. Need I say more? Just listen to the album and read Patti's own words on it.