Pat­ti Smith has always aligned her­self with artists who were out­siders and exper­i­men­tal­ists in their time, but who have since moved to the cen­ter of the cul­ture, where they are often reduced to a few bio­graph­i­cal notes. Arthur Rim­baud, Vir­ginia Woolf, William Blake…. As much moti­vat­ed by art and poet­ry as by the aggres­sion of rock and roll, Smith’s 1975 debut album reached out to peo­ple on the mar­gins of pop­u­lar cul­ture. “I was speak­ing to the dis­en­fran­chised, to peo­ple out­side soci­ety, peo­ple like myself,” she says, “I didn’t know these peo­ple, but I knew they were out there. I think Hors­es did what I hoped it would do. It spoke to the peo­ple who need­ed to hear it.”

It’s hard to imag­ine who those peo­ple were. In the process of its can­on­iza­tion, unfor­tu­nate­ly, punk has come to be seen as a rejec­tion of cul­ture, a form of anti-art. But Smith’s amal­gam of loose, rangy garage rock brims with arti­ness, mak­ing it “the nat­ur­al link between the Vel­vet Under­ground and the Ramones,” writes Jil­lian Mapes at Pitch­fork, “in the con­tin­u­um of down­town New York rock.” Pitch­fork sit­u­ates Smith’s first record at the top of their “Sto­ry of Fem­i­nist Punk in 33 Songs,” more “influ­en­tial in its atti­tude” per­haps than in its par­tic­u­lar style. “Her pres­ence at the fore­front of the scene was a state­ment in itself,” but a state­ment of what, exact­ly?

One of the fas­ci­nat­ing things about Smith was her sub­ver­sion of gen­dered expec­ta­tions and iden­ti­ties. In the epic med­ley “Land: Horses/Land of a Thou­sand Dances/La Mar (De),” her pro­tag­o­nist is an abused boy named John­ny. She slides into a sin­u­ous androg­y­nous vamp, por­tray­ing a “sweet young thing. Hump­ing on a park­ing meter” with the dan­ger­ous sex­u­al ener­gy she appro­pri­at­ed from idols like Mick Jag­ger. Yet in her twist on the per­for­mance of a clas­si­cal­ly mas­cu­line sex­u­al­i­ty, vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty becomes dan­ger­ous, sur­vival a fierce act of defi­ance: “Life is filled with holes,” she sings, “Johnny’s lay­ing there, his sperm cof­fin, angel looks down at him and says, ‘Oh, pret­ty boy, can’t you show me noth­ing but sur­ren­der?”

John­ny shows the angel, in a grit­ty West Side Sto­ry-like scene that illus­trates the razor edges at the heart of Smith’s musi­cal poet­ry. He gets up, “takes off his leather jack­et, taped to his chest there’s the answer, you got pen knives and jack knives and switch­blades pre­ferred, switch­blades pre­ferred.” Hors­es is so foundational—to punk rock, fem­i­nist punk, and a whole host of oth­er coun­ter­cul­tur­al terms that didn’t exist in 1975—that it’s unfair to expect Smith’s sub­se­quent albums to reach the same heights and depths with the same raw, unbri­dled ener­gy. Her 1976 fol­low-up, Radio Ethiopia, dis­ap­point­ed many crit­ics and fans, though it has since become a clas­sic.

As William Ruhlmann writes at All­mu­sic, “her band encoun­tered the same devel­op­ment prob­lem the punks would—as they learned their craft and com­pe­tence set in, they lost some of the unself-con­scious­ness that had made their music so appeal­ing.” The music may have become man­nered, but Smith was a pro­found­ly self-con­scious artist from the start, and would remain so, explor­ing in album after album her sense of her­self as the prod­uct of her influ­ences, whom she always speaks of as though they are close per­son­al friends or even aspects of her own mind. Who is Pat­ti Smith speak­ing to? Her heroes, her friends, her fam­i­ly, her var­i­ous selves, the men and women who form a com­mu­ni­ty of voic­es in her work.

We get to lis­ten in on those con­ver­sa­tions, and we find our­selves torn out of the famil­iar through Smith’s detourn­ment of clas­sic rock swag­ger and beat­nik pos­es. You can hear her many voic­es devel­op, refine, and some­times stum­ble into cre­ative mis­steps that are far more inter­est­ing than so many artists’ suc­cess­es in the playlist above, a com­plete 13-hour chrono­log­i­cal discog­ra­phy (save some rar­i­ties and live albums that aren’t on Spo­ti­fy) of Smith’s work—a life­time of what her father called a “devel­op­ment of the coun­try of the mind” as she remarked in a 1976 inter­view. “He believed that the mind was a coun­try, and you had to devel­op it, you had to build and build and build the mind.”

These are not the kinds of sen­ti­ments we might expect to hear from the so-called “God­moth­er of Punk.” Which might speak to how lit­tle we under­stand about what Smith and her mot­ley com­pa­tri­ots were up to amid the grime and squalor of mid-sev­en­ties down­town New York.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

33 Songs That Doc­u­ment the His­to­ry of Fem­i­nist Punk (1975–2015): A Playlist Curat­ed by Pitch­fork

Hear Pat­ti Smith Read the Poet­ry that Would Become Hors­es: A Read­ing of 14 Poems at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, 1975

Pat­ti Smith’s New Haunt­ing Trib­ute to Nico: Hear Three Tracks

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

What is it about objec­tive­ly ter­ri­ble works of art that so cap­ti­vates? Cults form around Tom­my Wiseau’s The Room, the “Cit­i­zen Kane of bad movies,” or ama­teur girl-group The Shag­gs, “the best—or worst—band of all time.” Such utter art­less­ness can­not be faked, but it can, com­pos­er Gavin Bryars found, be delib­er­ate­ly orches­trat­ed, to quite enjoy­ably ter­ri­ble effect. In 1970, Bryars staged a three-day tal­ent show at the Portsmouth School of Art, with come­di­ans, ven­tril­o­quists, musi­cians, etc. His own entry was the Portsmouth Sin­fo­nia, now right­ly known as the “world’s worst orches­tra.” The Sin­fo­nia, writes Dan­ger­ous Minds, “wel­comed musi­cians and non-musi­cians alike, though peo­ple of tal­ent were expect­ed to play instru­ments on which they were not pro­fi­cient.” The first iter­a­tion of the group con­sist­ed of 13 stu­dents who could hard­ly play at all.

Lat­er ensem­bles fea­tured more dra­mat­ic dis­par­i­ties in tal­ent. But no mat­ter their lev­el of abil­i­ty, “all mem­bers were expect­ed to play the reper­toire to the best of their abil­i­ties. The result was a spe­cial kind of cacoph­o­ny: every famil­iar theme (Also sprach Zarathus­tra, the William Tell Over­ture, Beethoven’s Fifth), though played as inept­ly as pos­si­ble, was approached with respect and even care. You will instant­ly rec­og­nize every tune they attempt, and you will prob­a­bly bust a gut,” adds Dan­ger­ous Minds.

Maybe it’s the earnest­ness that gets us, the best of inten­tions pro­duc­ing the most ridicu­lous of results. Though formed as a “one-off joke,” Atlas Obscu­ra notes, the Sin­fo­nia con­tin­ued after an “out­pour­ing of enthu­si­asm,” and even attract­ed Bri­an Eno, who joined on clar­inet, an instru­ment he’d nev­er played, and pro­duced and record­ed with the group on their debut 1974 album, Portsmouth Sin­fo­nia Plays the Pop­u­lar Clas­sics.

The group’s num­bers swelled by the mid-sev­en­ties to include, Eno wrote in the album’s lin­er notes, “a mem­ber­ship of about fifty.” He lets us know in his dead­pan intro­duc­tion that the Sin­fo­nia took its work seri­ous­ly. The orches­tra “tends to gen­er­ate an extra-ordi­nary and unique musi­cal sit­u­a­tion where the inevitable errors must be con­sid­ered as a cru­cial, if inad­ver­tent, ele­ment of the music.”

It is impor­tant to stress the main char­ac­ter­is­tic of the orches­tra: that all mem­bers of the Sin­fo­nia share the desire to play the pieces as accu­rate­ly as pos­si­ble. One sup­pos­es that the pos­si­bil­i­ty of pro­fes­sion­al accu­ra­cy will for­ev­er elude us since there is a con­stant influx of new mem­bers and a con­tin­u­al desire to attempt more ambi­tious pieces from the realms of the pop­u­lar clas­sics.

This is dif­fi­cult to read with a straight face, but Bryars “was adamant,” the blog Clas­si­cal Music Reimag­ined explains, “that the musi­cians shouldn’t play for laughs – they hon­est­ly had to play to the best of their abil­i­ty, and atten­dance at rehearsal was manda­to­ry. Footage of the orches­tra in action shows an incred­i­ble lev­el of con­cen­tra­tion and focus (if not results).” A few mem­bers do seem be hav­ing fun with Han­del’s Mes­si­ah in the short clip of a live per­for­mance below, fea­tur­ing a seri­ous Eno. But most of them are gen­uine­ly giv­ing it their all.

Exper­i­men­tal the­ater, con­cep­tu­al art, or prac­ti­cal joke, it makes no dif­fer­ence. There is tru­ly some­thing “extra-ordi­nary and unique” about this “musi­cal sit­u­a­tion,” you must agree. The so-bad-it’s‑goodness of the Sin­fo­nia comes not only from their lack of tal­ent, but also from the enor­mous gap between inten­tions and results—a uni­ver­sal­ly rec­og­niz­able con­di­tion of the human com­e­dy. We cel­e­brate the excep­tions, those whose great efforts tru­ly pro­duce great­ness. But in the Sin­fo­nia, we may encounter the less-great parts of our­selves, enno­bled in their inep­ti­tude by the fool­har­di­ness of this tragi­com­ic dar­ing.

via Atlas Obscu­ra +  Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Exper­i­men­tal Piano Jazz Album by Come­di­an H. Jon Ben­jamin — Who Can’t Play Piano

The 15 Worst Cov­ers of Bea­t­les Songs: William Shat­ner, Bill Cos­by, Tiny Tim, Sean Con­nery & Your Excel­lent Picks

Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Out­er Space: “The Worst Movie Ever Made,” “The Ulti­mate Cult Flick,” or Both?

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness