Patti Smith is 60 years old and if she were any other AARP member she would be applauded not only for making this album, but for just continuing to record. The Rolling Stones keep on releasing greatest hits collections but we chuckle and give them a grin for still being out there. Paul McCartney hasn’t had a charting single in years, but we still welcome anything he puts out with a “bless his heart” kind of fondness.
Then there’s Patti Smith – always radical, fearless and unyielding in her desire to create anything and everything outside of the mainstream. The fact that a woman like this, undergoing a career renaissance having been chosen to play CBGBs final show and finally getting inducted into the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame, would choose to release an album of cover songs, famous familiar songs at that, has incited reactions that range from confusion to near violence. But like it or not, the album is here and we have to deal with it so here it goes.
Patti Smith is the kind of person you couldn’t get to cross the street if she didn’t want to so I’ll go with the assumption that this is, indeed, the album she wanted to make and that she wasn’t forced into it by a record label who wants to clean her up (no more spitting young lady!) and repackage her for middle America. That being said, the album isn’t revolutionary in any way, but it doesn’t deserve to be vilified either. It’s a fun bit of filler that presents Smith as a woman who appreciates good old classic and modern rock songs and enjoys singing them.
None of the songs really get a complete makeover except for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” which is slowed down and twanged up a little so that it’s more mournful than scathing. In tackling some of rock’s greatest anthems of yester year, Smith, perhaps inadvertently, shines a light on which ones will stand the test of time. Her take on Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” doesn’t add anything to the original, but it’s hard to imagine this track ever living outside of the psychedelic 60s anyway. On the other hand Smith’s version of The Rolling Stone’s haunting “Gimmie Shelter” finds the track getting a new lease on life, as the punk priestess grows the song away from its roots as a comment on seething paranoia of youth and into an even more impassioned rant on the desperation that comes with aging.
And “yes”, there’s the white elephant on the album, a cover of Tears for Fears 80s pop hit “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”. It does stick out like a sore thumb but everyone has that guilty pleasure song that they sing in the shower. Patti Smith just isn’t afraid to put hers on an album. |