“To me, punk rock is the freedom to create, freedom to be successful, freedom to not be successful, freedom to be who you are,” punk Jedi Patti Smith once said. “It’s freedom.”
In 1975, Smith released the album “Horses,” which would go on to shape the visions of future punk rockers throughout the late 1970s and beyond. To some, this groundbreaking album, touching on subjects from sex to suicide, LGBT experiences to extraterrestrials, signified the beginning of punk rock’s dominant musical reign.
Looking back at Smith’s iconic “Horses” 40 years later, one can easily see that punk rock and punk art were never too far apart. The cover of the album itself, a slightly blurred black-and-white portrait of Smith in androgynous menswear, was snapped by Robert Mapplethorpe. In her collection of essays “Sex, Art and American Culture,” Camille Paglia called the unassuming yet revolutionary image “one of the greatest pictures
Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/19/bowery-98-punk_n_7305372.html