The austere reggae of \u201cRedondo Beach\u201d is like a three-minute film treatment, a story of overcast beachgoers grieving a girl, the narrator\u2019s lover, lost to \u201csweet suicide\u201d: \u201cYou\u2019ll never return into my arms cause you were gone, gone,\u201d she despairs, though the tune\u2019s overall effect is bewilderingly playful. In live shows, Smith would reportedly introduce the song saying it was about \u201ca beach where women love other women.\u201d She rejected Horses\u2019 queerness as autobiography, but the songs still created new paradigms, inventing roles in the schema of rock for women seducing women, women mourning women, women protecting women, women intoning \u201cOhh, she looks so good, oooh she looks so fine\u201d and \u201c20,000 girls\/Called their names out to me,\u201d aware that in its way it was radical.<\/p>\n
\u201cFree Money\u201d was the first song Smith and Kaye penned together, and Smith wrote the lyric \u201cScoop the pearls from the sea, cash them in and buy you all the things you need\u201d with another woman in mind: her mother. Smith had watched her parents struggle all her life. The song\u2019s blazing dream of winning some fantastical lotto and making something from nothing feels rooted intuitively in a working-class consciousness. The steadiness and structure of \u201cFree Money\u201d mirror the relief she longs to deliver; its ecstatic build becomes the voyage she’s desperate to share. As a kid, Smith\u2019s own aesthetic inspiration was free, from trashed issues of Vogue, stolen poetry volumes, and public art museums. That Blondie eventually echoed \u201cFree Money\u201d\u2019s message\u2014dreaming is free<\/a>\u2014underscores its perfect distillation of an essential punk virtue.<\/p>\n The apotheosis of Smith\u2019s ambition, \u201cLand,\u201d is an epic nine-minute triptych and semi-apocalyptic hero\u2019s journey, a cut-up of angels and ancient wisdom and a band called Twistelletes. The first act weaves three Smith vocal takes into an unnerving inner monologue about \u201cJohnny,\u201d a boy who is viciously assaulted, depicting the stampede of brutal reality as \u201chorses, horses, horses.\u201d Next a hairpin turn takes us suddenly to a dance hall. Smith quotes from the live-wire abandon of Chris Kenner\u2019s 1962 classic \u201cLand of a Thousand Dances,\u201d a parade of teen dance crazes: \u201cDo you know how to Pony like Bony Moronie?\u201d she hollers. \u201cThen you mashed potato!\u201d \u201cDo the alligator!\u201d \u201cDo the Watusi!\u201d \u201cLand\u201d is ultimately an action painting of jaunty keys and single hammered chords and pure corporality, circling the fact that \u201clife is filled with holes,\u201d \u201cfull of pain,\u201d Smith sings, but it\u2019s worth living. (A Creem reporter, Tony Glover, was present for the Horses sessions, and after watching Smith spend seven possessed hours mixing \u201cLand,\u201d her fingers at the controls, he wrote, \u201cI had trouble sleeping for several days.\u201d)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The austere reggae of \u201cRedondo Beach\u201d is like a three-minute film treatment, a story of overcast beachgoers grieving…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":280734,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[88,148628],"class_list":{"0":"post-280733","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-sunday-review"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280733\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/280734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}