Banga - Patti Smith

 BANGA - PATTI SMITH

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a cd? Is it a book? Whatever you might call it, Banga by Patti Smith is surely confusing for the anally retentive and the fastidious librarian. How to categorise it is the question? And where to keep it? Well, first and foremost as it's in book form the only place to keep it is obviously on your bookshelf even though it is as well Patti Smith's eleventh album released/published in 2012 as both a cd with a book and a book with a cd. More importantly than all this, however: Is it any good?

The first thing to acknowledge is that just about anything created by Patti Smith is going to be of interest due to it simply being by Patti Smith, which means it's almost guaranteed to be a work of art. Banga is no exception. Written over a period of three years, the twelve compositions (including a version of Neil Young's 'After The Goldrush') work equally well as both poems and lyrics. Not that this should come as a surprise, of course.

The subject matter of the compositions are in many ways typical Patti Smith fare, reflecting her current travels, concerns and meditations. The featured characters and scenarios ranging from Mikel Bulgakov, Nikolai Gogol, Andrei Tarkovsky, Amerigo Vespucci, Maria Schneider, Johnny Depp, and Amy Winehouse, to the discovery of America, the Tohoku earthquake, the stations of Saint Francis of Assisi's life, and the threat of environmental devastation.

One of the problems Patti Smith has always had to contend with is that her debut album, Horses, has always been her masterpiece and so has been near impossible to surpass. Not that she hasn't tried and often come close, it should be said. How do you follow what is, in fact, one of the greatest albums of all time? The poem/song 'Amerigo' in/on Banga is quite possibly one of the best things she's ever written and that's obviously no mean feat, and for this alone makes Banga an important addition to her canon. It concerns the exploits of the navigator Amerigo Vespucci, from whom America got its name, and him coming to the New World with the intention of baptizing and bringing salvation to the natives. "Ah the salvation of souls," writes/sings Patti "But wisdom we had not. For these people had neither king nor lord and bowed to no one, for they have lived in their own liberty." Come the end, rather than converting the natives, Amerigo himself is transformed. "And the sky opened, and we laid down our armour. And we danced naked as they, baptized in the rain of the New World." In its depth of subject matter and its ambitious scope - it works. As does the whole collection.  With its beautiful design and its array of accompanying black and white photographs taken by Patti on her old polaroid camera, Banga is without doubt a work of art from one of the world's true artists. 

And whilst on the subject of Patti Smith, it's interesting that she's one of the very few artists who has been with me throughout almost the whole of my life. From my very first introduction to her via a cassette tape of Horses at the age of seventeen whilst living on the southeast coast of Crete through to the present day and being given a copy of Banga as a present. I've seen her playing live a number of times and though we've never spoken our paths have crossed, from backstage at the Glastonbury festival, to the Van Gogh museum, to the streets of Amsterdam with us passing each other by, looking straight at each other almost as if to see who would blink first.

A thing to appreciate about her, I've always thought, is her lack of pretension which of all things might appear to be a strange thing to say given her penchant for namedropping and her range of oft-cited influences? What should be remembered, however, is that essentially Patti Smith is of working class origin and that what elevated her to renowned artist level was and still is her love of reading. She's an autodidact. She's the living proof of how by simply reading, the world becomes a much more wondrous place and life becomes a much more fascinating and beautiful experience.

As Patti puts it in a final sign-off at the end of Banga: Believe or Explode.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                      John Serpico