Send "Patti Smith " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Blogcritics |
 If you are looking for the definitive overview of Patti Smith's legendary career, the just released Legacy Recordings compilation Outside Society is not it. The closest thing out there to that sort of comprehensive retrospective of Smith's groundbreaking work, complete with prerequisite rare tracks and alternate takes, remains the Land (1975 - 2002) compilation — and that set focuses mainly on her years with Arista Records. However, as a brief introduction to Patti Smith, Outside Society works well enough as a sampler. You might even call this album a kind of greatest hits set from an artist who really didn't have any (save for "Because The Night," the collaboration with Bruce Springsteen that remains her most famous song). Outside Society (which takes its name from a lyric to her song "Rock And Roll Nigger") is mostly notable because it draws equally from all phases of Patti Smith's 35 years as a recording artist. It brings material from both the Arista and Columbia Records eras together for the very first time on a single disc. The only real complaint here, is that by following the sort of "greatest hits" mentality that apparently went into the making of this collection (despite the active participation of Patti Smith herself), Outside Society really only skims the surface. The way that longer, more expressive pieces like "Birdland" and "Land" (from Patti Smith's brilliant 1975 debut album Horses), are glossed over in favor of shorter, more radio ready songs is likely to be a disappointment for longtime fans....full text |
| Slantmagazine |
| Critical discussions occasioned by Patti Smith's recent winning of the Swedish Academy's Polar Music Prize and the National Book Award for Just Kids (a memoir of her adventures in bohemian New York with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, in which she revealed her fondest memories of youth and, along with them, a handsome, romantic prose voice) invariably focus on Smith the icon and what she embodies, scratching away at the essential connection between her poetry, her music, her political activism, and even the personal grief that motivated her return to music in 1996. It's the type of generous reevaluation that most artists only receive on the occasion of their death. What emerges out of it is a Patti Smith who's a disciple of Rimbaud and a friend of Allen Ginsberg, and whose participation in the relatively undignified activity of writing rock and pop songs seems to lend so much dignity to the profession that it's almost besides the point to ask whether or not she's any good at it. Outside Society therefore contributes something important to the Smith revival, which is to remind us that she was, at least for a short while, one of the best rock n' roll musicians, and that she's continued to make challenging and totally singular records even after her commercial relevance had flatlined for good. That is, at least, to make the most generous case for Outside Society, which stands a good chance at translating all those highbrow headlines into new fans. The album is harder to justify from the standpoint of Smith's longtime followers, who probably own 2002's Land, a best-of-plus-rarities set which contains 13 of Outside Society's 18 tracks. The album's liner notes include Smith's personal recollections on each song, which adds some new value for completists, but beyond that, Outside Society is clearly aimed at the uninitiated. It skimps on Land's bonus material so as to remain a svelte, single-disc set, and makes a genuine improvement on the older comp by arranging the material chronologically, which is especially appropriate for an artist who on two occasions took the better part of a decade off between releases. Sony has made a point of announcing that Smith herself had a hand in curating Outside Society, but promotional minutiae aside, the tracklist is nearly the same as Land's. The selections from Smith's first four albums are identical save for one addition: "So You Want to Be a Rock N Roll Star," a middle-tier Smith song by any measure that gives a somewhat unmerited weight to 1979's underwhelming Wave. Her three strongest albums get just two songs apiece, meaning that the best period of Smith's career as a musician is dispatched within the first third of the album. "Best of" comps are always imbalanced in the favor of an artist's post-peak material, though in this case there's some justification: Horses, Radio Ethiopia, and Easter all ought to be heard as albums, interludes and epic recitations intact. The excerpts here present Smith's most memorable riffs and her best vocal melodies, suggesting that Outside Society is less interested in Smith the liminal figure between rock, poetry, and performance art, than in Smith the fully committed rock n' roller, doing punk, blues, and fiery folk as well as any musician of her generation....full text |
| Pitchfork |
| When considered as a cultural figure, Patti Smith is as amazing as they come: an ecstatic poet who turned herself into the bolt connecting New York City's fine art and punk rock scenes in the mid-1970s, and an underground freak who not only scored an enduring pop hit ("Because the Night", co-written by Bruce Springsteen) but has kept her flag flying well into her sixties. Lou Reed is maybe the only other figure of her kind and caliber, and Smith's a better writer than Reed, at least as far as words without music go. Unlike Reed, though, Smith isn't the kind of pop musician whose work lends itself to anthologizing and cherry-picking. Her one real earlier stab at a retrospective, 2002's Land (1975-2002), got over by supplementing its greatest hits with live stuff, demos, and outtakes-- the interstitial, idiosyncratic material that's a crucial part of Smith's weird gift. But now that she's won a National Book Award for her extraordinary memoir Just Kids, a just-give-us-the-good-songs-c'mon one-disc thing was apparently called for. Hence this straight-ahead, chronologically arranged collection of singles and standards. Thirteen of its 18 tracks appeared on the greatest-hits half of Land, and two of the others are lead-limbed covers of "So You Want to Be a Rock N Roll Star" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit". As Simon Reynolds points out in Retromania, Smith's declaration that "I don't fuck much with the past but I fuck plenty with the future" couldn't have been further from the truth: Very few artists from the punk wave have been so persistently, deeply devoted to a pre-punk idea of rock. (The A-side of her first single was a cover of "Hey Joe".) If she has an Achilles' heel as an artist, it's not that she overreaches (she does, but that means she grabs the stars occasionally), it's that she relies too much on what Spinal Tap called "the majesty of rock, the mystery of roll."...full text |
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