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#AlternateFridayMusic
Sept 13 2024
The prompt is Sin
Patti Smith, Excelsis Deo/Gloria from Horses, 1975
“Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.”
The first line of the first track of the first album by #PattiSmith.
What an entrance. The world would never be the same.
Patti wasn’t repudiating Christianity here as much as owning her every act, every intention, as human, as hers, as her art. She ends this solemn, solo piano accompanied intro with “My sins my own, they belong to ME” [guitar chord], repeating ”ME” for emphasis, again underlined with #guitar crunch. And she was off and running, melding her own #poetry with the #GarageRock classic “Gloria” by Them. She would continue this paradigm several more times on record and to this day in live performance, her incantations bleeding into the music that inspired her to incorporate #LennyKaye’s guitar backing into her first #poetry reading performance at St. Mark’s church in the #Bowery
