The austere reggae of “Redondo Beach” is like a three-minute film treatment, a story of overcast beachgoers grieving a girl, the narrator’s lover, lost to “sweet suicide”: “You’ll never return into my arms cause you were gone, gone,” she despairs, though the tune’s overall effect is bewilderingly playful. In live shows, Smith would reportedly introduce the song saying it was about “a beach where women love other women.” She rejected Horses’ 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 “Ohh, she looks so good, oooh she looks so fine” and “20,000 girls/Called their names out to me,” aware that in its way it was radical.
“Free Money” was the first song Smith and Kaye penned together, and Smith wrote the lyric “Scoop the pearls from the sea, cash them in and buy you all the things you need” with another woman in mind: her mother. Smith had watched her parents struggle all her life. The song’s 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 “Free Money” mirror the relief she longs to deliver; its ecstatic build becomes the voyage she’s desperate to share. As a kid, Smith’s own aesthetic inspiration was free, from trashed issues of Vogue, stolen poetry volumes, and public art museums. That Blondie eventually echoed “Free Money”’s message—dreaming is free—underscores its perfect distillation of an essential punk virtue.
The apotheosis of Smith’s ambition, “Land,” is an epic nine-minute triptych and semi-apocalyptic hero’s 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 “Johnny,” a boy who is viciously assaulted, depicting the stampede of brutal reality as “horses, horses, horses.” Next a hairpin turn takes us suddenly to a dance hall. Smith quotes from the live-wire abandon of Chris Kenner’s 1962 classic “Land of a Thousand Dances,” a parade of teen dance crazes: “Do you know how to Pony like Bony Moronie?” she hollers. “Then you mashed potato!” “Do the alligator!” “Do the Watusi!” “Land” is ultimately an action painting of jaunty keys and single hammered chords and pure corporality, circling the fact that “life is filled with holes,” “full of pain,” Smith sings, but it’s worth living. (A Creem reporter, Tony Glover, was present for the Horses sessions, and after watching Smith spend seven possessed hours mixing “Land,” her fingers at the controls, he wrote, “I had trouble sleeping for several days.”)
