I just do my work, and I work every day, and my ambition is just to do something better than I last did.
Patti SmithRead
Music television is all about the media-oriented version of what it is to be a rock star; it's not about what Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix were about - which included great images, sure, but they had spiritual and political and revolutionary content, too.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote critiques how modern music television emphasizes superficiality over the deeper artistic messages present in legendary musicians' work.
Patti Smith highlights the difference between the modern portrayal of rock stars on music television and the more profound, politically and spiritually charged messages conveyed by artists like Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix. She argues that while great imagery is part of music, the true essence and impact of these artists lie in their revolutionary content that seeks to inspire change rather than merely entertain the audience.
Themes
MusicRock StarArtPoliticalSpiritualRevolutionary
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech about the evolution of music and its cultural impact.
More from Patti Smith
All quotes →My small torrent of words dissipated into an elaborate sense of expanding and receding. It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination. This process was especially magnified within the fevers of influenza, measles, chickenpox, and mumps. I got them all and with each I was privileged with a new level of awareness. Lying deep within myself, the symmetry of a snowflake spinning above me, intensifying through my lids, I seized a most worthy souvenir, a shard of heaven’s kaleidoscope.
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For everything bad, there's a million really exciting things, whether it's someone puts out a really great book, there's a new movie, there's a new detective, the sky is unbelievably golden, or you have the best cup of coffee you ever had in your life.
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Eyeing the traffic circulating the lobby hung with bad art. Big invasive stuff unloaded on Stanley Bard in exchange for rent. The hotel is an energetic, desperate haven for scores of gifted hustling children from every rung of the ladder. Guitar bums and stoned-out beauties in Victorian dresses. Junkie poets, playwrights, broke-down filmmakers, and French actors. Everybody passing through here is somebody, if not in the outside world.
Patti SmithRead
I've always felt outside of things; I've always felt different.
Patti SmithRead
No matter what anybody thinks about any of them, every record I've done has been done with the same amount of care, anguish, pain, suffering, and joy.
Patti SmithRead
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