Land (1975-2002)

Good as her word, Citizen Smith let the people have the power in selecting the track listing for this Best Of kiss off to/from Arista – if we’re to believe the blurb, she polled some 10,000 core constituents for votes.

Which goes to show that even democracy is arbitrary. Land favours the songs rather than the spiels, so certain key recordings in the Smith repertoire – ‘Land’, ‘Easter’, ‘Going Under’ – have lost out to more trad-arr tunes. That is, if you can consider ‘Gloria’, ‘Free Money’ or ‘Pissing In A River’ remotely traditional.

Years before hip-hop thievery, Smith was stealing from left, right and centre, shredding bogus notions of high or low art. Hers was a feverish headflux where she’d do a cheerleading routine for French symbolists one minute (“Go Rimbaud!”) and shriek “Do the Watussi!” the next, where she could make a blasphemous Latin Mass out of Them’s ‘Gloria’ or rewrite A Season In Hell to include Jimi Hendrix, Jackson Pollock and Jesus Christ (‘Rock ‘N’ Roll Nigger’). Revisionaries may single out ‘Because The Night’ – her hit co-write with Bruce – as an aberration, but nestling next to Gnostic pop beauties like ‘Dancing Barefoot’ and ‘Frederick’, it all makes sense.

That’s the casual browser dealt with. The hardcore will need to buy this collection for a slithery take on Prince’s ‘When Doves Cry’ and an extra CD of rarities including (at last! hallelujah!) her 1975 Mer label single ‘Piss Factory’. To tell you the truth, your reporter would shell out 25 smackers for this tune alone, just to witness how she synced up boogie-woogie piano to post-Beat pre-punk poetics and filed it somewhere between Velvet-een jive talk, The Basketball Diaries and Last Exit To Brooklyn.

Other highlights, just so you know: drummer JD Daugherty anchoring the incredible flight of fancy that is ‘Birdland’ live. Or the Holy Shit Batman rendition of Ginsberg’s ‘Footnote To Howl’ in ‘Spell’. Sure, there’s some flim-flam, particularly the string of platitudes that is the closing live-from-Saint-Mark’s reading of ‘Notes To The Future’, but elsewise brethren, your buck should stop here.