"A lot of rock 'n' roll right now is very personalized; it's not really reaching out to any world view," said Smith in a recent phone interview from her studio in New York.
Smith's songs have always had a global perspective. Her album "Peace and Noise" in 1997 featured the song "1959" about the invasion of Tibet, and her album "Gung Ho" contained songs about Vietnam. Smith, who first performed in Russia in 2005, will be performing at B1 Maximum on Tuesday.
Unlike many performers, Smith doesn't overstate the importance of rock and roll. "In the end, rock 'n' roll is a powerful medium, but it's the people who make the change," she said. "All it takes is one person to step up and inspire others, it's a chain reaction. There are possibilities in rock 'n' roll, but rock 'n' roll can't change anything."
The role of rock music was different when Smith, a politically minded artist who has a Barack Obama ad on her web site, grew up in the 1960s.
"When I was young in the 1960s, there weren't a whole lot of ways that you could learn about your culture or feel a oneness with it," she said. "There was the radio and there were records, and to buy a record was very important."
She describes listening to the albums of artists such as Bob Dylan and Neil Young as getting a glimpse of the rest of the world. "That was our window and our cultural link. Now people have music TV, they have all these magazines, they have videos. There's so much right now that it's almost like the power [of music] is diluted."
Smith's music career began in the late '60s. After moving to New York, she met photographer Robert Mapplethorpe at a hotel, and he partly financed her first single "Hey Joe/Piss Factory." In 1978, Smith released one of her most-famous songs, a single co-written by Bruce Springsteen called "Because of the Night."
Her latest two albums are an interesting contrast. The most recent, "The Coral Sea," contained a long prose poem dedicated to Mapplethorpe, recited under guitar improvisations provided by My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields. Last year's "Twelve" was an album of covers of songs with messages, mostly from the 1960s. There were anti-war songs like "Gimme Shelter" and anti-corporation songs such as "Everybody Wants to Rule the World."
"They were just songs that I knew, so I wasn't thinking about what era they were from. One of the reasons I chose the songs was ?€¦ [that] I thought they expressed something lyrically that was important."
Patti Smith performs on Tues. at 8 p.m. at B1 Maximum, located at 11 Ulitsa Ordzhonikidze. Metro Leninsky Prospekt. Tel. 648-6777.
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