Patti Smith Group - Wave

Tom Carson's Rolling Stone review of Wave by Patti Smith Group is crap. Granted it's from 1979 when the album came out, but the overwhelming critical sentiment at the time was always to call everything a let down, an overwrought piece of self-indulgent hackery. The whole thing comes across as Tom Carson gleefully getting his chance to say shitty things about Patti Smith. Doesn't tell me anything about the album, it tells me there was some personal reason to put down whatever she did on whatever album she made. Criticism doesn't tell us about the subject, it tells us about the person narrating. 

First, Wave is not even close to being a mainstream album by any standard you care to mention. It is all over the place, the things she sings are not immediately understandable pop gemstones you can pick up and put in your pocket like pretty rocks, whether you want to tackle it or not, there's a difference between Patti Smith and Patti Smith Group and this is the last album from the latter in the middle of the former's long and eclectic career. Not every wave is surfable, you know? 

Second, if all you really want out of an album is something you can look good while enjoying, then why even bother? Oh no, Tom Carson says i'm a schmuck with poorly refined taste if i like this. 

Third, religiousness in some form or other is omnipresent throughout the entire album, how can you listen to it and come to the conclusion that the final title track is a literal daughter/dad monologue? John Paul I was Pope for a month before he died. Not a hit single, but as an artistically experimental eulogy it's fascinating. 

The album is about waves. Waves of emotion, experiences that push you along and wash you up on some new beach, hello/goodbye moments that are what they are and eventually end. It does exactly what it intends to do, and therefore it's a great album. You like it or hate it because that's how you're predisposed to react to it, but as i like to point out you are in no way required to agree with yourself. 

Then again, Wave is by my standards a Random Crap concept, so it readily lends itself to picking out your favorite vignettes, and Revenge is by far my favorite. The excessively overwrought indulgence is exactly what makes it so delicious. 

I think you should listen to it as what Punk wanted to do in defiance of what the Mainstream machine wanted to define as Punk in 1979, because remember that Punk isn't a sound or a recipe, it's an attitude of rejecting authoritative ideologies in favor of feeling how you feel because you feel it. Punk, right or wrong, is an attempt to be honest in the moment. The moment isn't simple, it's a barrage of experiences that all contradict each other, and trying to mouthwash that conflicted experience away with dogma almost always feels intellectually offensive.