Research Notes: Just Kids

Poncho and Lefty (heh).

A few years ago, I was at Book Expo, which is basically a boat show but with books. The best part of Book Expo this particular year was that they'd scheduled a conversation between Neil Young and Patti Smith. Young was about to publish his memoir, and Smith had just won all the awards ever for hers. The talk was in the basement of the Javitz Convention Center, which is kind of like a Holiday Inn ballroom, only dark and industrial. The two of them, pretty obviously stoned, sat in plush chairs and just talked about, you know, whatevs. Model trains, Lou Reed, Kent State.

It was when the last of those came up that I got a bit of a shock, which, looking back on it, is sort of where this current project started. Because when they talked about the 48-hour turnaround between news of the shooting at Kent State and acetate copies of "Ohio" hitting the hands of DJ's, it became clear that Young and Smith were not, as I had in my mind, talking across a generational divide. They were contemporaries, affected by that moment in similar ways. Of course, by the time Smith's first album was released, Young was almost a decade into his musical career. But they were both (just) kids who came out of nowhere and created themselves in the middle sixties.

And yes, not realizing this sooner indicates a lack of thinking on my part. Got it, noted, thanks.

I should say right off that Just Kids is as fantastic as people say it is. I made the excellent life choice to consume it via audiobook, read by Smith in her amazing Midwest-meets-New York accent (side note: if you can track it down, listen to Amy Goodman interviewing Smith. Their voices are remarkably similar. It's kind of awesome), a sort of slow, soft speech pattern that runs at odds with the auditory idea I had of Smith from her recordings. In fact, the book as a whole runs counter to my conception of Smith, which was revelatory and really opened up my thinking regarding what I'm working on.

I'm really interested in female anger and the way it's "dealt with". Being a dude, it's always been clear to be that anger is an acceptable tonality in which to operate. Male artists are allowed to affect/perform anger as a sort of base state; it doesn't need to be explained or justified. I'd say music and stand-up comedy are the easiest fields where you can spot this. I can think of a half dozen male comics whose personas are basically anger-schtick, and Angry Young Man is practically a musical genre. But female anger in the arts is different, and I mean this not just for artists, but for characters. I'm not going to argue that Patti Smith invents the idea of the Angry Female Artist, but certainly the way she enters the cultural landscape is unique.

There's the fact of her independence, the fact she is not connected to or guarded by a male. Even when her band gets billed along with her, it's the Patti Smith Group: the boys in the band belong to her. Think about this in contrast with, let's say, Debbie Harry or Chrissie Hynde. And she is staunchly playing on male turf. There is a prescribed role in the culture for the female singer-songwriter by 1975, but it's located within the folk tradition. Rock is for the boys. Smith shows up at the party not playing anyone's game. She doesn't present as a sexual commodity (a la Harry). Not only is she not a chanteuse, she opens up Horses by warping "Gloria", a song that provided hits for Van Morrison's Them and The Doors which is basically one of rock's iconic "Hey, Look At That Girl" tunes. Smith injects the song with a female subjectivity it had previously lacked, then screamingly melds that with Gloria as a visual object, owning the song, eclipsing every other version of it.

The anger on those early records is largely absent from the book, which is sweet without being cloying, warm without being nostalgic. Smith is brutally, brilliantly honest about the difficulty of living in New York at this time (she's also great on the economics of it, detailing the myriad jobs she had to work to make her rent) and the complex relationship with Mapplethorpe as the two of them became their best selves, even as this evolution moved them apart. But it's not an angry book, and the cynical part of me wonders if it would have been as widely praised had it been a little more vicious.

To return to the other side of the anger issue, I've been finding that people respond strangely to angry females in fiction. The project I'm currently editing (not this one, a different one) has at its core an Angry Young Woman. Now it was my belief when I started, that she could just be angry. Because some people are just fucking angry: it is almost always a valid response, if not a long-term healthy one, to one's environment, or to the social conditions one finds themselves in, or just the existential suck-fest that is your limited time on this planet. But the response to the character from some of my early readers has been, "What's she so mad about?"

This is a (fictional) nineteen year-old girl growing up an environment with almost no opportunities for women to advance socially, no roles for women that are not dependent on men. A smart girl who has her education truncated at age seventeen because it is illegal at the time to educate women past high school age. Who cannot own property, who has virtually no legal rights. And I have to explain where her anger comes from.

But here's Patti Smith. Amazed by the world, in love with everything, and struggling to find her place in it. Looking back, she seems almost bemused at her hardships. She is, perhaps, softened, or maybe only changed to a person who no longer needs to snarl and spit. And here's Patti Smith, coming up on thirty years old, part of a scene that is almost exclusively male (both the music scene and the poetry scene). And she grins, and spins. And she snarls and spits. And feels no need to tell you why, because the why is obvious and permanent and all around her, always.