It isn't hard to make the case for
Patti Smith
as a
punk rock
progenitor based on her debut album, which anticipated the
new wave
by a year or so: the simple, crudely played
rock & roll
, featuring
Lenny Kaye
's rudimentary guitar work, the anarchic spirit of
Smith
's vocals, and the emotional and imaginative nature of her lyrics -- all prefigure the coming movement as it evolved on both sides of the Atlantic.
is a
rock
critic's dream, a poet as steeped in '60s
garage rock
as she is in French Symbolism;
"Land"
carries on from
the Doors
'
"The End,"
marking her as a successor to
Jim Morrison
, while the borrowed choruses of
"Gloria"
and
"Land of a Thousand Dances"
are more in tune with the era of sampling than they were in the '70s. Producer
John Cale
respected
's primitivism in a way that later producers did not, and the loose, improvisatory song structures worked with her free verse to create something like a new
spoken word
/musical art form:
Horses
was a hybrid, the sound of a post-Beat poet, as she put it, "dancing around to the simple
song." ~ William Ruhlmann