The Feminine Musique: “Gloria: In Excelsis Deo”

In the first heartbeats of punk, Patti Smith reinvents Van Morrison’s garage rock classic to highlight the inherent misogyny of the early rock ‘n’ roll era.

The Feminine Musique is a series where writers analyze portrayals of women in music.

Written by Zac Weiss

Photo courtesy of Arista Records

It’s hard to tell that the person staring out from the grainy cover of Horses is a woman. Her clothes, appearance, and posture are perfectly androgynous, and her defiant stare bores  straight through the camera to the viewer. Like the record itself, Patti Smith’s physical portrayal was far from the typical presentation of female singers in 1975. The sound of Horses is the sound of the ‘punk poet laureate’ shattering prejudices, baring her soul, and reinventing rock ‘n’ roll.

Horses smashed dozens of cliches and launched punk rock, but it’s steeped in history. It mourns Smith’s heroes Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and the entire age they represented by taking its best-known songs — Van Morrison’s “Gloria” and Wilson Pickett’s “Land of a Thousand Dances” — and reinventing them for a new era. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the album’s opener, “Gloria: In Excelsis Deo.” The song starts with a minimalist piano intro, a slower, almost mournful version of the theme from Van Morrison’s original “Gloria,” Then Patti Smith croons the lines that forever ended the rock of the 1960s and birthed punk:

Jesus died for somebody’s sins

But not mine

True, she is defining the independent aesthetic of the punk movement, but she’s doing more than that, too. She’s reclaiming the artistry and identity that the record industry tried to strip from her. The guitar enters as she growls “my sins my own / they belong to me.” In this one line, she proves that music has grown beyond the bloated excess of the ‘60s and ‘70s while turning her back on the crippling addictions that took the lives of her idols. Smith takes responsibility for her actions and their consequences, unlike previous rock stars.

Photo courtesy of Arista Records

Like so many of the songs on Horses, and like its original incarnation, “Gloria: In Excelsis Deo” is about desire, but Smith’s version is decidedly darker than the original. By singing from a male perspective, she reveals the womanizing nature inherent in so much of that era’s music. Her sneer “I’m gonna make her mine / Put my spell on her” wouldn’t be out of place in any 60s pop song, but her version allows her the autonomy of which she would have been stripped by a male vocalist. As her gasped and crooned ambitionsto dominate an unnamed girl transition into Van Morrison’s famous “G-L-O-R-I-A” chorus, the listener realizes something terrifying: it’s impossible to tell where Morrison’s contribution ends and Smith’s begins.

The horror of “Gloria: In Excelsis Deo” is that there’s almost no difference between the original song and Smith’s dark reflection. Morrison’s lyrics:

Comes a-walkin' down my street

Then she comes up to my house

She knock upon my door

And then she comes to my room

Yeah, and she make me feel alright

are almost identical to Smith’s:

Walkin' down the street

Here she comes

Comin' through my door

Here she comes

Crawlin' up my stair

Here she comes

Waltzin' through the hall

In a pretty red dress

And oh, she looks so good, oh, she looks so fine

And I got this crazy feeling that I'm gonna ah-ah make her mine

Patti Smith’s rendition reveals the true desires that Morrison cloaks in the vagueness of “she make me feel alright.” It’s more than just sexual passion. It’s submission to the narrator, who is only concerned with their own gratification. While this misogyny may shock us now, it was a fairly common attitude in the early rock ‘n’ roll era. From the “let me know you’re mine” of “Twist and Shout” to the disturbing and domineering “Under My Thumb,” the 1960s music scene casually dismissed and objectified women. Possession was everything, and desire was synonymous with love. 

Smith’s version of “Gloria” reveals what lies beneath the radio-friendly veneer of the original. Like other early punks, she embraces the rhythms and simplicity of early rock ‘n’ roll, but adds her own gritty honesty to the lyrics. Censorship removed, the original intent of the garage rock classic is painfully obvious. Van Morrison’s “Gloria” is emblematic of its era — a time when even the most innocent of songs were founded on systematic sexism. Patti Smith’s version also is of its time. Her lust-soaked lyrics lose shock value when compared to today’s explicit hits, but their impact forces audiences to think about the ugliness and sexism beneath the sheen of the rock ‘n’ roll classics.