WINGS WEITED DOWN

When Patti Smith first came lurking out of the hallways of paralyzed slogans, her power rhymes and stark verbal movieolas were peacefully flawed sensations playing with the soul of some long forgotten American dangers. Her littered images grabbed the gaudy tremors of language and soaked them in a trilling human fog of mass attack hysteria. She was a dream Cleopatra who sent a shock wave of stammering energy right to the core of a Shanghaied generation who were (and still might be) amoebic boobs of boredom, nuncios of the nod, Rotwangs of why, aborigines of absent-mindedness. When she hit the right word lick, she made everyone count the goose bumps as they formed street corner bunds along arms long atrophied of nervous excitations. But that was in the beginning, and in all beginnings there are endings.

When Patti is good, she's great; when she's bad, she's boorish, and therein lies her contradiction, her genuflect to the grimace of art, her trothplight to the truancy of her age. When she is up on stagfe, and totally incensed by the feedback fantasy of words eons lost, words arranged so differently that they hit the spine in a cerise spark of racial memory, when Patti is making magic like that, she's like the cold chill only a city can give you—a sweet rhapsody in concrete—she's like nothing else in rockdom.