When considered as a cultural figure, Patti Smith is as amazing as they come: an ecstatic poet who turned herself into the bolt connecting New York City's fine art and punk rock scenes in the mid-1970s, and an underground freak who not only scored an enduring pop hit ("Because the Night", co-written by Bruce Springsteen) but has kept her flag flying well into her sixties. Lou Reed is maybe the only other figure of her kind and caliber, and Smith's a better writer than Reed, at least as far as words without music go.
Unlike Reed, though, Smith isn't the kind of pop musician whose work lends itself to anthologizing and cherry-picking. Her one real earlier stab at a retrospective, 2002's Land (1975-2002), got over by supplementing its greatest hits with live stuff, demos, and outtakes-- the interstitial, idiosyncratic material that's a crucial part of Smith's weird gift. But now that she's won a National Book Award for her extraordinary memoir Just Kids, a just-give-us-the-good-songs-c'mon one-disc thing was apparently called for.
Hence this straight-ahead, chronologically arranged collection of singles and standards. Thirteen of its 18 tracks appeared on the greatest-hits half of Land, and two of the others are lead-limbed covers of "So You Want to Be a Rock N Roll Star" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit". As Simon Reynolds points out in Retromania, Smith's declaration that "I don't fuck much with the past but I fuck plenty with the future" couldn't have been further from the truth: Very few artists from the punk wave have been so persistently, deeply devoted to a pre-punk idea of rock. (The A-side of her first single was a cover of "Hey Joe".) If she has an Achilles' heel as an artist, it's not that she overreaches (she does, but that means she grabs the stars occasionally), it's that she relies too much on what Spinal Tap called "the majesty of rock, the mystery of roll."
And when you strip away most of Smith's maddening and brilliant experiments, her passionate stumbles and ungainly glories-- when you reduce her to a greatest-hits entity-- what's left is a rock'n'roll throwback that's sturdy but not particularly flexible. She simply isn't a singles artist, "Because the Night" and maybe 1988's "People Have the Power" (with production that now makes it sound like a cousin of "Don't You Forget About Me") notwithstanding. To understand Smith's power, you have to take the tunes and the sprawling poetic gestures together; Horses' "Free Money" topples over unless it's got the nine-and-a-half minutes of "Land" near it.
For Smith's first four albums, Outside Society is an abridgement that doesn't really do her justice. For the six that followed them, it's a salvage job, and not a convincing one (2000's "Glitter in Their Eyes" still sounds pretty good, though). If the idea of a great poet fronting a rock band appeals to you, and you've somehow never heard "Dancing Barefoot" or "Gloria", make haste to do so, and be aware that they initially appeared on better albums than this. But when an artist famously begins her first album by bragging about how the old orthodoxies don't apply to her, it's not entirely surprising that some of her own work doesn't age well.
