Patti Smith grows old too gracefully

‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins/ but not mine’: the opening lines of Patti Smith’s 1975 debut album, Horses, find a young woman marking her territory with fierce conviction. Raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, she was (or was treated as) an invalid for much of her New Jersey childhood. The restrictions were physical and spiritual. But in her twenties the androgenous daughter of blue-collar workers used her punk poetry to reclaim the freedoms North American culture had stolen from her. And while she relieved Jesus of responsibility for her sins, she certainly didn’t count her compulsion to write and lust and holler among them.

Her Collected Lyrics, updated by Bloomsbury this month, mark her transition from the ‘moral schoolgirl hard-working asshole’ who yearned to ‘smell the way boys smell’ to incandescent stage poet, driving herself to ‘go Rimbaud!’ with the rawest kind of rock’n’roll. Later lyrics give outraged human voice to those who are still oppressed.