E Miss tells us about a time when literature and music, art and culture were not yet dematerialized products sold on Amazon and the iTunes store by the "content industry". An era where analog a book, disc, an array does not consume in two clicks and could radically change your life , make you a writer, artist, without going through the box "Star Academy" .
For Patti Smith it was a meeting at age 16, Arthur Rimbaud :
"His haughty look on the cover of 'Illuminations' hung mine. He was gifted with intelligence which inflamed me irreverent, and I adopted as my compatriot, my brother and even my secret lover. Since I did not even have 99 cents to buy the book, I broke ", she says in " Just Kids " its beautiful autobiography coming out in French Denoël ( see the criticism of "Inrocks" and that of "Telerama" ). Away from fists in torn pockets of his coat, the young poet would have doubtless loved the idea of being stolen by a bohemian sister to a century apart. 
For me - who have not become a rock star;) - it was the punk revolution and then the first icon Patti Smith accurately. I was not fourteen when a friend gave me "Horses". "Jesus Died for Somebody's sin but not mine" ( "Jesus died for the sins of somebody but not mine" ): manifesto shouted into the microphone, the slow piano, the rise of voice full of tension, before the blast liberating a furious guitar riff ... his great cover of "Gloria" by Van Morrison picked me like an uppercut. And everything that my musical tastes were forged in stems. A first class trip to London and the punk fury of The Clash and the Sex Pistols received as a shock. New York's trendy and bohemian fantasy CBGB's listening to the rock bit of the Ramones and the Talking Heads so sophisticated ... To understand the slap those of my generation were the simplest way is to listen to Patti declaim "Gloria" before an audience took guts, flabbergasted. Here in 1979:
If I speak now Patti telling us about Rimbaud, is that "Just kids "is not an autobiography more rock. It is a true literary object, poetry and art that owes nothing to any negro. And a more passionate testimony and nervous in my direction as the craggy old Stone Keith Richards, who has also just released his memoirs - "Life" in French in Robert Laffont - to spread out over 600 pages to illuminate his legend "Sex and drugs and rock'n roll" ... But "Just Kids" is mostly a touchstone, a transition between two generations that vinyl and the digital music . The punk poet does not tell us: "It was better before in my time." It just works transmission plunging itself in the hard disk memory. "I can still connect to the person I was at all ages in my life, from childhood to today" ...
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| Patti and Robert, 1970 fire escape |
Patti Smith first wrote this book to keep the memory crucified by the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe , the great love of his life, disappeared in 1989, to 42 years to AIDS. "The day before Robert's death, I had promised to write a book about friendship, love that we servings (...). I also wanted to write a book about loyalty, the discovery of self through poetry, rock photography. And it inspires other generations .
For use by generations Orphaned utopia, if reasonable and resigned that followed hers, she tells a rock star's chaotic life underground, entirely dedicated to art. An initiation to the outline of a personal Truth, began unwed mother at 17, wandering in the bohemian and a miserable flight to New York where she slept on the street and knew hunger by LA encounter with a Robert Mapplethorpe on acid. Baudelaire in his writing, the description of the trip gives this: "He noticed the blood that ran through the veins in his wrist and the brightness of the edge of his shirt. He began to see the room in separate planes, sirens and dogs, the pulse-pounding walls (...). He noticed his own breathing sounded like a god collapses (...). A thread of memories, which bled its own solitude with the Apocalypse of the world stretched before him like a fudge.
wire memories of Patti pass the Summer of love the assassination of Martin Luther King and Bob Kennedy put his duffel bag at Chelsea Hotel with Robert in full revelation ... gay epicenter of bohemian New York in the year 1969, "The Chelsea was like a dollhouse in limbo " We will encounter the ghosts of past and present Oscar Wilde, Dylan Thomas, Tom Wolfe, Bob Dylan and muse Edie Sedgwik fucked. Zero cult of celebrity, "was my friend William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg taught me a lot," says it. A passage in the famous Andy Warhol Factory does the rest. But it is a stranger who will reveal his fate by making him listen to the Byrds' song "So You Want to Be a rock'n'roll star. Robert drift prostitutes on the Lower East Side but encourages Patti "I want to be a poet not a singer" , "she said. "One does not preclude the other" , Retorted he.
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| Patti photographed by Robert for Horses |
the day of the anniversary of Rimbaud's death in 1973, Patti Smith gave his first concert Rock and Rimbaud " with guitarist Lenny Kaye in a backyard near Times Square. All together: in 1975 released his debut album "Horses" where she reinterprets therefore "Gloria" Van Morrison's classic, so masterful in weaving the song with one of his poems. The criticism is subdued: "By the abundance its promises, as in takeoffs and silences the most glowing of Horses, the music of Patti Smith connects on deep sources of emotions that very few artists, rock or elsewhere are able to reach , "wrote Lester Bangs in the magazine" Creem "." Horses "is a cartoon ... and now a turning point in rock history. With the Ramones and others as groups like Television, Patti Smith became the figurehead of Punk that will be the star system bloated 70's a real revolution without degrees (the word means "rascal", meaning "without value "in every sense of the term). Initiated in 1969 in Detroit by Iggy and the Stooges, the movement blossomed in the famous New York club CBGB to explode a few months later in London with the Pistols and many others .
The rest of the careers of Patti Smith belongs to the history of rock . And one that still haunts the scene of his long black silhouette of Shamanic High Priestess does not extend there. She prefers to dedicate the last pages of "Just Kids" in memory of Robert dying that erases nearly that of the other man in her life, guitarist Fred Sonic Smith MC5 (legendary protopunk Detroit) married in 1979, disappeared in 1994. "My last image of him was like the first. A young man asleep, bathed in light, which opened his eyes with a smile of recognition to those who had never been a stranger" .
Rimbaud, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, Robert Mapplethorpe and others ... " Heroes Patti may have disappeared, but she is still with us and for us, so strongly that his music is finally something (...) " , summed up one day gonzo-critical Lester Bangs. says it all. Generation to that of vinyl music dematerialized Patti Smith made setter memory of his rock and roll pantheon, and poetical staff become universal today ... Hopefully, "Just Kids "will be read by kids today who will find the springs of eternal youth and rebellious art and rock'n'roll, strength and utopia.
Jean-Christophe Féraud
* "Just Kids" Patti Smith was awarded a National Book Award (Non Fiction category) Nov. 23 United States
** Youth is eternal ... I can not resist the pleasure to offer you bonus this wonderful recent cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" Kurt Cobain. Patti, who looks more and more like a shaman, sings like an Indian prayer:
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