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Patti Smith: Just Kids (2010)
They're so very young when they meet up, seemingly the definition of wide-eyed idealists; Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe run into each other on a street corner in New York in 1967, both 20 years old. One would go on to reinvent rock music, being hailed as the godmother of punk; the other would become one of the most controversial photographers of the 1970s and 80s. Of course, they didn't know that then; they just knew they had to express... something.
Patti Smith's memoir begins and ends with Robert Mapplethorpe's death in AIDS in 1988, and is as much the story of Robert as it is of Patti, at least during the 10 years they spent as off-and-on lovers, friends, and collaborators before their careers took off for real and they went their separate ways (their actual careers are barely mentioned). But it's not just your typical "I'm a celebrity, here's my life" story; it's very much a part of Patti Smith's ongoing work. There was always something transcendent about her writing, both as a songwriter and a poet; she wears her influences on her sleeve (Dylan, Rimbaud, Morrison, Ginsberg, Richards, Blake, Coltrane - for a supposed punk rocker, she was never so much a radical destroyer as a fundamentalist rebuilder) but she treats them not just as influences but as mythic writing to be ground up, mixed up and used to spell out herself. Just listen to her debut album Horses, with lyrics that freewheel dervish-like from poetry to r'n'b to prose to punk to religious visions, picking it all apart and putting it together in a brand new way that somehow makes them one.
YouTube - Patti Smith- Gloria
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They're so very young when they meet up, seemingly the definition of wide-eyed idealists; Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe run into each other on a street corner in New York in 1967, both 20 years old. One would go on to reinvent rock music, being hailed as the godmother of punk; the other would become one of the most controversial photographers of the 1970s and 80s. Of course, they didn't know that then; they just knew they had to express... something.
Patti Smith's memoir begins and ends with Robert Mapplethorpe's death in AIDS in 1988, and is as much the story of Robert as it is of Patti, at least during the 10 years they spent as off-and-on lovers, friends, and collaborators before their careers took off for real and they went their separate ways (their actual careers are barely mentioned). But it's not just your typical "I'm a celebrity, here's my life" story; it's very much a part of Patti Smith's ongoing work. There was always something transcendent about her writing, both as a songwriter and a poet; she wears her influences on her sleeve (Dylan, Rimbaud, Morrison, Ginsberg, Richards, Blake, Coltrane - for a supposed punk rocker, she was never so much a radical destroyer as a fundamentalist rebuilder) but she treats them not just as influences but as mythic writing to be ground up, mixed up and used to spell out herself. Just listen to her debut album Horses, with lyrics that freewheel dervish-like from poetry to r'n'b to prose to punk to religious visions, picking it all apart and putting it together in a brand new way that somehow makes them one.
YouTube - Patti Smith- Gloria
She's become more linear and slightly less intuitive with age, but that intensity and lateral thinking still remains. So in Just Kids we get the story, of course; Robert and Patti coming into their own both personally, artistically and sexually (Robert, as would become clear, is gay but raised so strictly it took him years to come to terms with it). But you also get the how and the why; the constant search for something that they can catch but never hold, flitting from idea to idea, from artform to artform, immersing themselves in one idea after another until they find their own voice to say what they need. And the way they depend on each other. And then he's gone.
As Robert Mapplethorpe lies dying, he asks her "Did art get us?" He became a famous artist, he found his voice, he died barely 40 years old. Art makes promises of immortality, and in one way she can do that by writing the book, but in another he's still very much dead. Just Kids is a memoir by a rock star; it's an ecstatic exploration of what art is, should be, can't be; but at its heart, it's a very intimate story about two kids who, in various ways, loved each other. And as all of the above, it's one of the best memoirs I've read recently.
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