Smith, Patti (1946—)
Poet, performer, and "queen of punk" Patti Smith made her mark in the disparate worlds of punk, rock and roll, and poetry, with seven albums, six books of poe...
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Critical Essay by Tony Glover
The four plays in [Mad Dog Blues and Other Plays] all tend to be basic (most with little scenery), and full of street talk and rock-and-roll images….
[The] main re...
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Critical Essay by Marianne Partridge
Patti Smith certainly has one hell of a lot to answer for. Not only does she unashamedly use her band as a backcloth for her pretentious "poetic" ram...
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Critical Essay by R. Meltzer
[There] really ain't no way I'm gonna be anything but thrilled to my shorthairs by a Patti LP and [Radio Ethiopia is] no exception. Altho the last one was a ...
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Critical Essay by Dave Marsh
On [Radio Ethiopia] Patti Smith lays back, refusing to assert herself as she did on last year's Horses. The key is in the billing: on Radio Ethiopia, her group domi...
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Critical Essay by Robert Christgau
Patti Smith is in trouble. She's caught in a classic double bind—accused of selling out by her former allies and of not selling by ner new ones. Maybe ...
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Critical Essay by Albert H. Johnston
Rock star Patti Smith is one of the newer phenomena on the far-out youth scene, one of the most brilliantly gifted pop performers and poets since Dylan. Here [in &...
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Critical Essay by Rochelle Ratner
[Babel is composed of] fast-paced, visionary poems and prose poems, but the fact that the visions seem to be drug-induced makes them frequently difficult to follow. I...
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Critical Essay by Jonathan Cott
The writer Grace Paley once talked in an interview about the fact that many women missed the sense of boyhood when they were children, "the freedom and excitemen...
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Critical Essay by Ken Tucker
Patti Smith's pretensions are as important to her as feedback—both give the music the kind of kick and quirk that makes falling off a stage a transcendent ex...
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Critical Essay by Charles M. Young
Patti Smith has set about creating a movement to free the world through rock & roll. Her personal charm, when she wants it to be, is enormous. Her followers are ...
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Critical Essay by Simon Frith
"Wave" is a much better record than I expected, but to explain why I'll have to go back a bit.
Patti Smith's problem is that what was touching...
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Critical Essay by Tony Glover
[There's] a new kind of poetry being made—a poetry that exists in equal partnership with the rhythm and sound of music, poetry that needs performing to make...
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Critical Essay by Stephen Holden
Over the past three years, Patti Smith … has developed into a New York legend. Onstage …, she exudes an inimitable aura of tough street punk and mystic w...
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Critical Essay by Steve Lake
You'll find Patti Smith, poetess, in the Gotham Book Mart, New York's hippest bookstore, where her slim volumes of manic poetry nestle snugly between volumes...
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Critical Essay by Tony Hiss and David Mcclelland
Patti's music [is] a unique combination of fairy tales, gleeful excitement, melodic singing, spitting, unshed tears of childhood, hypnotic reite...
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Critical Essay by John Rockwell
Patti Smith is the hottest rock poet to emerge from the fecund wastes of New Jersey since Bruce Springsteen. But Smith is not like Springsteen or anybody else at all.
S...
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Critical Essay by Paul Nelson
If critics are having nightmares these days, one of the worst of them will undoubtedly be about not liking "Horses," Patti Smith's ubiquitous debut a...
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