Saturday, September 12, 2015

Thirty Days of Fifty # 12 Patti Smith


First song, second side of Horses, one of the most significant and best rock albums ever made. It's currently enjoying its Fortieth Anniversary and Patti is enjoying a sort of mainstream reverence and undimmed acclaim that she could probably never have imagined. It's an odd shift in the culture. Here's one of her best. Lester Bangs, the great critic, wrote in his contemporary review of the record:

"Kimberly" is the most haunting song I’ve heard in a long time (enough so that by the time I’d had the record 48 hours it was pulsating straight through not only my days but my dreams at night), a sort of Ronettes bolero cum "Waiting For the Man" celebrating the act of giving birth as cataclysm (as it is) in stunning lyrics: "Oh baby I remember when you were born/It was dawn and the storm settled in my belly/And I rolled in the grass and I spit out the gas/And I lit a match and the void went flash/And the sky split/And the planets hit...And existence stopped/Little sister, the sky is falling/I don’t mind..."

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