Do You Have a Band? by Daniel Kane

Author:Daniel Kane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

recalls the vocal idiosyncrasies of Mick Jagger, as Smith parodies Jagger’s individualistic vocal swagger, itself so indebted to black American singing style. Her use of a confident low register seems oddly appropriate in a song where a female singer co-opts the role of a purportedly male-gendered sexual conqueror.61

Smith’s potpourri of deranged sounds simultaneously paid homage to and critiqued male power through an inherently playful series of incantatory, “hard nasal,” and yelping noises.

There is, as Daley recognizes, a spirit of play behind Smith’s performance, one that “suggests a certain bodily pleasure in the sound and sensation of singing. Play becomes significant here not just for its own sake; it also functions as a critique and a grab for power … and she does it with a smile on her face.”62 Smith’s smile stretched over a number of other songs in Horses, as if to provide a counternarrative to the arena rock–style songs on Horses like “Free Money” that would prove the rule rather than the exception on Smith’s subsequent albums in her 1970s tetralogy (Radio Ethiopia [1976], Easter [1978], and Wave [1979]). Take the song “Kimberly,” for example. Opening portentously with images of the speaker holding her recently born sister Kimberly in front of a barn, Smith became Prospero-like as she prophesied a practically apocalyptic vision of the sky splitting, the universe cracking, life ending. At the first iteration of the chorus beginning with “Little sister,” the guitar and bass are modulated down to B-flat, then ascend in unison half a step to get back to the original key of the verses. Matching the instruments’ ascension up the fretboard, Smith purred out an “Ahhhh” in a low register that slid into an ever-higher pitch over the course of about two seconds. Suggesting a kind of blasé attitude at odds with the mystic position adopted initially, Smith’s “Ahhhh” contrasted with the insistent sincerity that characterized the song up to that point.63

These self-ironizing gestures were at play even in “Land,” arguably her most ambitious and moving of songs. A boy assaults the character Johnny, introduced at the start of the song by Smith in a practically breathless whisper. Smith increased her pitch and tempo in sympathy with the cumulative violence, layering her narrative with overdubbed lines from the song to create an eerie echo chamber. The section climaxes with the vision of Johnny surrounded by horses. The apocalypse announced, the world afire, Smith practically panting the repeated word “horses” in a tone of rapturous surrender, it was hard for a first-time listener to figure out where Smith was headed next. What, then, do we make of where she went?

“Do you know how to pony”? Did Smith really just ask that? Not just that, but “Do you know how to pony like bony maroney.”64 Sung as gleefully and rhapsodically as the Equus-type narrative that opens the song, it is tempting to interpret Smith’s use of lines from the R&B hit “Land of a Thousand Dances” as a kind of affectionate spoof on her own lament-like vision.

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