Introduction

When Patti Smith released her first album, Horses in 1975, most critics heard a new and exiting voice in rock music. Later rock critics and historians have hailed her with such titles as "high priestess of punk", "the godmother of punk". But her debut album was also debated for other reasons than the music, most notably because of the cover art. On many rock covers at that time, women were usually depicted as objects of desire for male sexuality, revealing and exposing as much as possible of the female body. The black and white photograph on the cover of Horses, taken by Robert Mapplethorpe, shows Patti Smith in a rather androgynous pose, dressed in traditional male clothes: black trousers, white shirt, a bowtie loose around her neck and holding her jacket causally over her shoulder. Her gaze, whether confrontational or careless in a "I don"t give a damn"-manner, is definately disturbing. Reportedly, her record company had a hard time accepting it also because they thought they could see hair on her upper lip (Bracewell 1996). In her Complete Lyrics (Smith 1998), Patti describes her pose as "Sinatra-style, hopefully capturing some of his casual defiance" (p 5). In an earlier interview, she explain that she wanted to dress like the French poet Baudelaire (Bracewell 1996).

This leads us to a characteristic element in much of Patti Smith"s work that I will pursue in this paper, namely how she appropriates texts and images of others, from Jesus Christ to Rimbaud and further to John Cotrane, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, in creating her own artistic personae. In this paper, I will look at some examples of how Patti Smith appropriates such texts and play with different identities. In concluding, I will look more closely on "Easter" from Easter (1978). [1] But first, I will briefly present my doctoral project with the working title "rock/theology. theological interpretation of rock music". This will hopefully help construct an impression of whom I am and situate the context of my involvement with the work of Patti Smith.

rock/theology
Traditionally, western theology has been involved with the study and interpretation of texts, not only the texts of the Bible, but also the texts of almost two thousand years of Judeo-Christian thinking from the so-called chuch fathers to contemporary theologians. Such texts tend to be systematic, rational, logical and linear, with the aim to present and pursue a thought or a theme as complete as possible. They are structured along a logical line of thought. The favoured mode of writing and interpretation is doctrinal and normative. These texts are mostly produced from a privileged position, either from an ordained position of ministry, or from an academic position at a university or theological seminar. They are texts from "above". And theological texts are long texts, books, volumes.

Rock texts " and I use the term "rock text" in the wider sense refering to all the auditive and visual elements in the sounding of a rock song " seems to be very different. They are short and intended for performances that last from two to five minutes, maybe up to ten or fifteen minutes. And while lyrics might be written down or stored electronically,

they are meant to be heard, listened to, danced to and are thus structured according to sounds and rythms. And while there might be rock texts that can be interpreted in a doctrinal or normative mode, rock texts generally offer ground for multiple, explorative and playful interpretations. Finally, rock texts are not necessarily produced from non-privileged positions, but there is a notion that they are produced at the outside of what is generally thought of as the establishment, the cultural, social and political structures of power. Rock music is situated in "the popular" and as such they are texts from "below" the cultural elite.

But rock texts can also be interpreted as theological texts, texts that in some way or another are "god-talk" or discourse concerning a "god reality". You don"t need to go deep into rock music before you find words, images, sounds, concepts that are familiar to a theologian. There might be singular words like, "heaven", "hell", "angel", "pray". There might be musical elements that evoke church organs or choirs or visual elements that suggests influence from traditional christian iconography. But you will also find substantial quotations from the Bible and liturgical texts, and lyrics that are formed as dialogues with god, as prayers or as statements of belief or disbelief. My initial interest for rock music started when I discovered the abundancy of religious elements found in rock music. I also discovered that rock texts are used as theological texts. As an example, working as a minister, I experience quite often that people ask for particular songs to be played in a funeral, songs like Claptons "Tears  in Heaven", Dire Straits "Brothers In Arms", songs by Jon Bon Jovi, [2] or as happened to me just a few weeks a go, where the family of the deceased wished to hear the recording of "Lester Leaps In", with Lester Young and Count Basies Orchestra from 1937, and you could feel that the congregation experienced the holy communion of foot-tapping.

Thus, in my project "rock/theology. theological interpretation of rock music", I study the works of Patti Smith, Nick Cave and U2. These are artists whose work are very rich with religious elements. My task is not only to identify these elements, but to offer a theological interpretation. By this I mean a reading that sort of lifts up the theological possibilities of the text. This might be banal to you, but it"s important for me to stress that I don"t want to pass judgement on wether the songs or the artists are christian or not, a type of analysis wich are often found in christian media. In line with Roland Barthes and others, I don"t consider a text as providing us direct access to the author"s intention, with an objective, true meaning of a song. I would rather see how possible theological readings are in dialogue with other possible readings, like for instance feminist readings, wich of course could also be a theological reading.

"Rock/theology", being based on songs, not books, might resemble what the South African theologian Gerald West calls "incipient theologies" (West 1995:236) or "working theology", wich reflects lived faith. These theologies might differ from public theology, the theology of the official institutions of the church, it might even be a threat to the official institutions. But it might also be closer to how people experience their own life, and it might bring theology to areas seldom explored.

Patti Smith and textual appropriations
The theme of this paper refers to Patti Smith"s uses of other texts in her poetry and songs. Sometimes there are just references to names, as if she were using the names to enforce her own text " much in the same way that Hannah Arendt described what scholars are doing in footnotes, calling up external gods to enforce their texts. At other times, it is as if Patti Smith slips into their identities, creeps into their minds and bodies, or projects them as imaginary lovers. A common feature of these other identities is that they often signifies transgression; they are often thought of as being outsiders, rebels, revolutionaries, extremists, people that transcends the boundaries of everyday life or what is commonly thought of as being art. A good example is her song "rock"n"roll nigger (from Easter), where she states that:

Jimi Hendrix was a nigger
Jesus Christ and grandma too
Jackson Pollock was a nigger...
Outside of society, they're waitin' for me
Outside of society, if you're looking
that's where you'll find me

Although the most provocative about this statement may not be that Jesus Christ was a nigger, but that the n-word is uttered by a white person, it still gives a clear idea of the notion of the artist as an outcast, outside of society, a "nigger". This conforms with what I percieve as her aesthetic program, that art is something that transcend, transgress, transform. In the opening line of the poem "babelogue", wich are spliced into the beginning of "Rock"n"roll Nigger", she says "i haven't fucked much with the past, but i've fucked plenty with the future". She is not exploring the known, that of the past, but the unknown, something that is not yet, something that belongs to the realms of the future. The unexpectedness, the uncontrolled is also pointed at near the end of the poem: "we worship the flaw the belly, the belly, the mole on the belly of an ex-quisite whore". The title "babelogue" points to the biblical narrative of the tower of Babel, (Genesis 11:1-9) where the Lord "made a babble of the language of the whole world". On her sleeve notes to Radio Ethiopia, Patti Smith writes that the building of the tower of babel was an attempt to "create beyond landscape" and she refers to another outcast, the ultimate outcast I would say, Satan, as the "first true artist-the first true nigger... he was the first to have a vision of existence beyond what was imposed on him". The way I read this, is that Patti Smith as artist has to explore the babble, the primary language of pure sound and rythm that existed before Babel.

There"s also a possibility that Smith"s quest for a pre-Babelian language, an intuitive language of rythms and sound, could also be understood as an attempt to create a feminine language, a babe-logue. Joy Press and Simond Reynolds point to this, with reference to Hélèn Cixious' concept of ecriture feminine (Reynolds and Press 1995:360). A similar argument can be developed from Sheila Whiteleys reading of Julie Kristeva in her chapter on Patti Smith in her recent book Women and Popular Music. Sexuality, Identity and Subjectivity (2000:96-100).

It has often been commented that Smith mostly identifies with male persons. In She Bop Lucy O"Brien cites Arthur Rimbaud, Bob Dylan, Jean Genet, Hank Williams and John Coltrane as some of the "roster of men" in Patti Smith"s "mental pyramid of heroes", and continues to write that "Her only real female hero, Joan of Arc, was de-sexed as if Smith felt that true revolution rested on being male, or at least asexual" (O"Brien 1996:112). Sheila Whiteley makes a similar statement (Whiteley 2000:100). I"m not fully in agreement with these positions. First, I don't feel Patti Smith"s version of Jean d"Arc is de-sexed or asexual at all. On the contrary. In the poem named after her, Patti Smith phantasizes on how the martyr at the moment of her death want to loose her virginity. Let me just quote from the ending:

get the guard to
beg the guard to
need the guard to
lay me
get all the guards to lay me
if all the guards would lay me (...)
if one god would lay me
if one god

There is also a "roster" of women figuring in Smith"s work, some of them charged with sexuality. For instance, there are whole poems for such remarkable women as the model Edie Sedgwick, the terrorist Patti Hearst, the painter Georgia O"Keefe, the pilot Amelia Earheart, and the singer Marianne Faithfull " just to name a few. [3]

Identity and gender ambiguity
I highlight these women in the texts of Patti Smith because the reception of her work seems to focus solely on her appropriation of male identities, which in some cases also leads to a dismissal of her as a female role model (see O"Brien 1996:115 for some examples). But I don"t want to downplay the significance of Patti Smith"s playing with male identities. Being male, and interpreting her songs and poems from a twenty to thirty years distance, it"s easy to overlook the impact her many male postures had when these poems and songs were first performed. One of her poems from Seventh Heaven reads "female, feel male/ever since I felt the need to chose/I"d chose male". And she opens Witt by stating that she is "without mother, gender or country". Statements like these, combined with appropriations of texts by male authors, "male" posures " for instance with her guitar in the place of male genitals " and song lyrics and poems about having sex with women, create a gender ambiguity. This also affect the interpretation of her work. For instance, when she sings about having sex with a woman, like she does in her version of Van Morrison"s "Gloria", (Horses 1975) is she then constructing herself as a heterosexual male or as a lesbian female? Some writers argue that Smith is describing a lesbian phantasy ("an anthem of lesbian desire" as described in Reynolds and Press 1995:357), while others argue that she explores male sexuality (I read Whiteley this way, though she stresses the gender ambiguity. See Whiteley 2000:101). Both assumptions are problematic, especially since they are not developed any further. For what is "male sexuality"? what is "lesbian"? In her article "Imitation and Gender Subordination", Judith Butler problematizes the concept of being lesbian, and argues that

identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes, whether as the normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression (Butler 1997:301).

In her groundbreaking work Gender Trouble (1999), Butler problematizes the very notion of "gender" and "sex", of "man" and "woman":

The notion that there might be a truth of sex, as Foucault ironically terms it, is produced precicely through the regulatory practices that generate coherent identities through the matrix of coherent gendernorms. The heterosexualization of desire requires and institutes the production of discrete and asymmetrical oppositions between "feminine" and "masculine", where these are understood as expressive attributes of "male" and "female" (Butler 1999:23).

According to Butler, "identity" is an effect of discursive practices, thus Patti Smith are able to construct a variety of gender identities through her discursive practices. As she says in an early interview: "I get into so many genders I couldn"t even tell you" (Gross 1975). Whether she plays with "male" or female identities, Patti Smith challenges gender stereotypies and notions about sexuality. I believe that Patti Smith in her various textual appropriations, puts the practice of identity construction in the same realm as the babelogue, in the realm of not-being yet. of becoming, of transforming. transgressing the known. Her various identity constructions is about having a "vision of existence beyond what that is imposed" on us.

Easter
The intertextuality of Smith"s work does not only refer to texts by others, but also to her own work, as shown in "Gloria". This is also the case of "Easter". It is the concluding song on the album Easter, but the title refers also to other texts by Patti Smith. For instance, on the album cover, there is a poem called "Easter- la ressurection" which is completely different from the lyrics to the song. There"s another text on the cover with the heading "easter", which is more like a commentary on the song. Then there is another poem called "easter" in the book Babel, a totally different text than the poem written on the cover and the lyrics to the song. This poem is also found in her Early Works, which again has alternative wordings. Patti Smith comments on her self, expands, improvise on earlier texts, makes different texts play with each other.

Musically "Easter" is not what one would typically characterize as punk. There are no pumping bass lines, no agressive drumbeating, no riffs with heavily distorted guitars, and the vocal delivery has few if any traces of the urgency resembling yelling that characterizes many punk performances. The general mood of the song is soft, mellow and introspective. The drummer plays a simple figure, marking the eighth notes on his cymbal and emphasising the two and four on the snare. The bass is taken care of by the organ, which, with its repetitive lines on the beats, are decisive in creating a meditative atmosphere. Patti Smith's vocal delivery is soft, sometimes elegical in character. The song is structured around three slightly different themes. The first theme is heard in the instrumental introduction and the first vocal part, with slow repetitive, descending melodic lines. The following instrumental part is slightly different in character, with more emphasis on harmonic movement and sustained chords in the organ. This adds a sense of hightened tension, also underlined with the addition of chimes. Then comes the third theme, introduced by the words "Isabella, all is glowing/Isabella all is knowing". At this point the electric guitar is entering, playing the melody with slight ornamentation, along with the vocals.

It"s tempting to say that the organ and the chimes gives the song a sacral atmosphere. Certainly the organ is an instrument associated with the church, but the electric organ is also frequently used in rock and other popular musics. It might as well resemble the use of electric organ by groups like the Doors, or in soul music like Percy Sledges "When a Man Loves a Woman". So, instead of confining the associations of the organ to a strictly liturgical use, I will prefer wider, more emotional terms, like "longing", "loss", "desire", "mystery". The "mystic" is underlined by the repititive, chant-like melodic figures. With its narrow pitch-range and wavy movements, the melody resembles a traditional lullaby " music that leads us into the realms of dreams and visions. And approximately two thirds out in the song, we hear something that might resemble a vision. Patti Smith turns from singing to recitation, with a calm distanced voice, very different from the extatic performance of for instance "babelogue" on the same album. This "vision" consists of sentences starting with "I am". After the recitation something happens with the music, unabruptly; but slowly there arise new sounds out of the mix, church bells, bagpipes, and the guitar starts to imitate the bagpipe. Here the sacral, religious references are stronger. The church bells chimes like it is customary in Catholic churches on Easter Sunday, celebrating the ressurection of Christ. The bagpipe might refer to something traditional, or something festive or solemn, but any way they makes the texture thicker, with strange sounds and melodic figures that are hard to grasp.

In short, the music transforms slowly during the performance, not to something completely different, but to something else, something that has a new dimension to it. It"s like the music gets a new body.

This musical transformation corresponds well with what can be seen as the overall theme of both the album and the song. "Easter", the celebration of the ressurection, the transformation from death to life, to the new, trancendental body. Patti Smith explores this central theme of Christian faith, but in a way that differs from traditional, hegemonical theology. Part of the difference is her use of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. [4] Several rock poets have been inspired by Rimbaud in one way or another, most notably Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison (see Fowlie 1995). Carrie Jaurès Noland, in her essay "Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance", shows how many rock artists and especially punk artist relate to the myth of Rimbaud, providing a model of "countercultural" rebel and "antisocial innocence" But Smith, she continues, also found inspiration in his texts, and alludes to them as well as emulates certain stylistic features. (Noland 1995:584).

Just listening to "Easter", and with little knowledge of Rimbaud, this connection might be hard to see. But on the album"s inner sleeve, there is a picture of Arthur Rimbaud and his brother Fredric taken at their first communion. On the same sleeve there is also a short text by Patti Smith, a sort of commentary poem that refers to this communion:

one morning about a hundred years before little richard baptised america with rock n roll, arthur and frederic and their sisters isabelle and vitalie labored thru the streets of charleville in white ribbons and cloth of blue to receive their first communion. close to the church it was arthur who broke formation and called to the other rimbaud children to come run with him thru the field, past the chapel off a bridge into the cold and finite waters of a river that led to the warm and infinite blood of christ

Listening again to the song, one can imagine that Patti Smith takes on the voice of Arthur Rimbaud, calling upon his sister Vitalie and brother Fredric to take part in a spiritual experience. In the context of this song, the spiritual experience takes place outside of church, in the "cold and infinite waters of a river that led to the warm and infinite blood of Christ". "Saviour dwells inside of thee", she sings. Not in the chapel, or at least not necessarily in the chapel where the first communion is supposed to take place.

It is at this point Patti Smith changes her voice, reciting what I have called a mystical "vision". I"m not sure wether it"s still Arthur Rimbaud talking through her " maybe as a transfigured Rimbaud " or if it is a new "inner voice" that are revealed to all the Rimbaud children. There are several references to mystic traditions and to Christ in this part, for instance "spring of the holy ground", "seed of mystery", "prince of peace", and "the sword, the wound, the stain". All this gets an interesting turn in the line "the scourned transfigured child of Cain". In her commentary poem, Patti Smith offers an interesting etymology: The word cain means worker...slayer...smith". Here Patti Smith touches upon a very old tradition going back to early gnostic sects. In his book, Against Heresies, probably written around 180, Irenaeus tells us about a certain group called the cainittes, who believed that cain and later Judas Ischariot was the true messengers of God, and that their holy book, The Gospel of Judas, revealed the deepest "mystery of betrayal" (Against Heresies, Book 1, chapter 31 [5] ). Argentinian author Jorge Lois Borges elaborates on this tradition in his short story "Three versions of Judas".

Patti Smiths" appropriation of the Easter narrative, the life, work and myth of Arthur Rimbaud and ancient gnostic traditions, creates a very different issue of "identity construction". Who is "the Saviour that dwells inside of Thee"? Is it Christ, is it Cain, is it Arthur Rimbaud or even Patti Smith as "the scorned transfigured child of Cain"?

It could be all of them. More presicely, I think it"s the true artist, the one that is in touch with the primary, pre-babelian stage of language, "the gas in a womb of light" " the artist that transforms, transgress every concepts.

Sources
Rimbaud, Arthur (2001) Collected Poems. New translations with parallel french text by Martin Sorrell, Oxford University Press, Oxford
Smith, Patti (1998) Patti Smith Complete. Lyrics, Reflections and Notes for the Future. Doubleday, New York 1998
         (1994) Early Works 1970-79, W. W. Norton Company, New York
         (1978a) Babel G. P. Putnam"s Sons, New York
         (1978) Easter Arista Records,
         (1975) Horses Arista Records
Horses and Easter from The Patti Smith Masters, Arista Records 1996

Them (1988) Them, Decca Record Company

*Bracewell, Michael (1996) "Woman as warrior", Guardian Weekend 22 June, 1996
Bockris, Victor (1998) Patti Smith. Fourth Estate, London
Butler, Judith (1997) "Imitation and Gender Insubordination", pp 300-315 in Nicholson, Linda, ed (1997) The Second Wave. A Reader in Feminist Theory. Routledge, New York and London
         (1999) Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, New York and London. First published 1990

Fowlie, Wallace (1995) Rimbaud and Jim Morrison. The Rebel as Poet. A Memoir. Duke University Press, Durham and London
         (1965) Rimbaud. Chicago University Press, Chicago

*Gross, Amy (1975) "Introducing Rock"nRoll"s Lady Raunch: Patti Smith" in Mademoiselle, September
Johnstone, Nick (1997) Patti Smith. A Biography. Omnibus Press, London
Middleton, Richard, ed (2000) Reading Pop. Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Noland, Carrie Jaurès (1995) "Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance", pp 581-610 in Critical Inquiry, vol 21, nr. 3, Chicago
O'Brien, Lucy (1996) She Bop. The Definite History of Women in Rock, Pop and Soul. Penguin Books, New York
Opsahl, Carl Petter (1997) "Å lete etter liturgi i rock. Patti Smiths og U2s versjon av Gloria", ss 62-67 i Opsahl, Carl Petter, ed. Liturgisk teologi. Temanummer Nytt Norsk Kirkeblad nr 8 1997
Reynolds, Simon and Press, Joy (1995) The Sex Revolts. Gender, Rebellion and Rock"n"Roll. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts
West, Gerald (1995) Biblical Hermeneutics of Liberation. Modes of Reading the Bible in the South African Context. Cluster Publication, Pietermaritzburg
Whiteley, Sheila (2000) Women and Popular Music. Sexuality, Identity and Subjectivity. Routledge, London and New York
         (1997) Sexing the Groove. Popular Music and Gender. Routledge, London and New York

*Interviews found in the archive of a patti smith babelogue, http://www.oceanstar.com/patti/
( Webster, Fiona and later j.BOLt., site managers)