Words from the New World: Patti Smith’s Banga

Part 1 of a three-part essay on adventure and memory in Patti Smith's later work.

It’s the first week of April. As often happens at this time of year, I’ve had Patti Smith’s ‘April Fool’ running through my head. That put me in mind of the 2012 Smith album Banga, on which ‘April Fool’ appeared. I’ve therefore serialised (in three parts) an essay about Banga and Smith’s later memory work that was first published in 2015.¹ Smith’s most famous album, Horses, will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary later this year. I mention these time markers—April, the decade since my essay, the half century since Horses—because Smith has often expressed her fondness for anniversaries and auguries. I’ve made some slight tweaks to the text for readability and serialisation, but have not otherwise updated it to reflect the many things Smith has produced in the years since I wrote this (including, of course, her popular Substack).

Critics and fans invariably connect Patti Smith’s late work to her ‘classic’ era during the 1970s punk scene, assessing how recent work measures up to, develops, or surpasses the earlier work. Smith herself has been no stranger to such memory work, via her involvement in biographical projects such as her book Just Kids and the film Dream of Life. Memory work has characterised her musical output since the 1990s, not least in several pieces written in response to the passing of friends and family. Much of the 1996 album Gone Again was written as a response to the loss of Smith’s husband Fred ‘Sonic ‘Smith, as well as her brother Todd and her long-term friends and collaborators Robert Mapplethorpe and Richard Sohl; the album also contained the song ‘About a Boy’, an homage to Kurt Cobain. ‘Grateful’, which appeared on Gung Ho (2000) was a song that recalled the late Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, while ‘Mother Rose’ (from Trampin’, 2004) remembered Smith’s recently deceased mother.

Smith has complemented this work with an embrace of new beginnings and adventure, returning to places, themes and styles she’s explored before but looking for fresh angles and new perspectives.

This three-part essay explores the dynamic of adventure, memory and return by listening to Smith’s 2012 album Banga. It’s a work that embraces adventure from its opening track ‘Amerigo’—based on the recalled discovery and witnessing of the New World and its wonders—to the dramatic pinnacle of the album, ‘Constantine’s Dream’, a visionary account of the creative process. Smith tempers the thrill of adventure with moments of reflection. ‘Amerigo’ describes adventure from a spatial and temporal distance, mixing elegy, awe and the distortion of deferred witnessing. Smith follows ‘Constantine’s Dream’ with a brooding take on ‘After the Goldrush’, Neil Young’s paean to nature and transience.

While connecting the narrative concerns in Smith’s lyrics, I’m also thinking of the music on Banga. In the reflective strings of ‘Amerigo’, the yearning guitar work of ‘April Fool’ and the girl group harmonies of ‘This Is the Girl’, textures of longing provide an emotional counterbalance to Smith’s poetry. She utilises a variety of voices, ranging from the declamatory style most associated with her punk phase to the sweeter, more melodically focussed approaches of her later work.

Prior to the release of Banga, Smith had not produced a studio album of self-written music since Trampin’ in 2004. She had, however, been artistically productive during this period. She had engaged in some notable live performances, among them the revisiting of the entire Horses album during the 2005 Meltdown festival (an event for which Smith acted as curator) and an epic set that marked the closing of the legendary New York venue CBGB in 2006. The Meltdown performance celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of Horses and the album was reissued that same year in a deluxe edition which featured a remastered version of the original album and a recording of the 2005 performance. In 2007, Smith released a collection of cover versions under the title Twelve and oversaw the selection of tracks for a retrospective compilation of her work (Outside Society, 2011; an earlier retrospective entitled Land had appeared in 2002).

Smith’s literary and visual work had gained much attention during this time. Just Kids, her account of her long friendship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe, was published to acclaim in 2010 and received the U.S. National Book Award for non-fiction later that year. A new collection of poetry, Auguries of Innocence, appeared in 2005. The 1992 collection Woolgathering was republished in 2012. The same year, Norton published an expanded edition of The Coral Sea, a more elliptical and poetic account of Mapplethorpe’s life and art that had originally appeared in 1996. An audio version of The Coral Sea was released in 2008, comprising two earlier recordings of Smith reciting the work over musical backing from My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields.

2008 also saw the release of Patti Smith: Dream of Life, a revealing documentary filmed over eleven years by fashion photographer Steven Sebring. The film showed Smith not only as a photographic subject, but also as a keen photographer herself. She has continued to exhibited her visual work in recent years and her photographs have been published as separate editions and as illustrations in her books and CD booklets. Smith and guitarist Lenny Kaye also briefly appeared in Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme, released in 2010 and filmed aboard the cruise ship Costa Concordia in 2008 and 2009 (the ship was later to become famous when it was wrecked off the coast of Italy in January 2012). It was during their stay on the ship, which Smith describes as ‘a strange and fruitful voyage’, that Smith and Kaye began writing material for Banga, though Smith had planned the album the previous year.

Banga was mostly well received by critics on its release in June 2012. Many drew connections between the album and Smith’s early work and noted the range of artistic and stylistic references in the album’s twelve tracks. Evelyn McDonnell of the Los Angeles Times referred to ‘an encyclopedia’s worth of literary, mythic, historical, religious and musical references; doo-wop ballads; epic guitars and guitar epics; quivering poems in headstand pose’, while Joseph Stannard of The Wire suggested that Smith’s ‘thirst for the sublime remains unquenchable’. Describing Banga as ‘an event’, AllMusic’s Thom Jurek wrote of Smith that ‘As an artist [she] embodies the highest calling of her vocation: she completely absorbs everything she encounters, then gives it back to the culture in a manner that holistically edifies it’. Most critics wrote about the quality of Smith’s voice, its subtle and often mellow musicality providing what many claimed to be the best singing of her recording career. For others, however, the musical arrangements did not match the ambition of the lyrics and some reviews of Smith’s subsequent concerts made distinctions between the edginess of the live performances and the relatively safe music on the album.

Several accounts of the album highlighted the opening track ‘Amerigo’, the lyrics of which imagine the feelings of Amerigo Vespucci as he recalls the voyage to the continent that would be named after him. The track makes for a dramatic opening to the album with its single, resonant piano note and Smith’s spoken line, ‘We were going to see the world’. From here, ‘Amerigo’ evolves into a medium-paced song, with Smith alternating between a smooth vocal style on the melody and gently narrated spoken word sections. The spoken word adds drama and gravitas while the sung melody moves the song forward in an easier listening style. The interaction also calls to mind the way voiceover is used in film and television, a connection strengthened by the content of the narrative. We come to hear the speaker as a storyteller voicing a tale of grand adventure but with an awed and elegiac tone that hints at lessons learned, experience and nostalgia for the recalled voyage. A string section which alternates between urgent rhythmic pulsations and slower emphasises the mixture of dramatic momentum and reflective, wavering figures.

‘April Fool’, the second track on Banga, was released as a digital download ahead of the album. The date chosen for the release was 1 April, a ‘coincidence’ which would not have come as a surprise to Smith’s followers, familiar as many will be with her fascination with significant dates and anniversaries. ‘April Fool’ is a highly melodic pop song and contains some of Smith’s most beguiling vocals. McDonnell describes the track as ‘an invitation to writerly romance’, a reference to Smith’s explanation of the song’s inspiration, the writer Nikolai Gogol (born, according to the Gregorian calendar, on 1 April). While the song may not be as adventurous as others on the album, there is a subtle exploration of the sea of possibilities that a melody can entail when Tom Verlaine starts playing what Stannard calls ‘seagull-like guitar licks’. As he traces out the trajectories the song might take were it not being reigned in for pop perfection, Verlaine takes on a greater authorial role than Smith herself, unfolding the pleas and longing expressed earlier in the lyrics and suggesting ways to ‘break all the rules’ (a lyric from the song) while staying steadfastly within the norms of the pop format. The guitar work provides a sense of adventure that the song itself does not quite live up to, Verlaine hinting at what might be possible. His clipped emotionality, meanwhile, underlines the impression of a ruthless efficiency found in the whole band, one which emphasises experience and knowledge of craft over adventure.

‘Fuji-san’, written as a response to the Tohoku earthquake of 2011, is more adventurous musically, as Smith adopts an angrier declamatory style against heavier, darker guitar tones and more ferociously rocking drums. Where ‘Fuji-san’ channels anger as a response to grief and loss, ‘This is the Girl’ returns to Smith’s now familiar gentler side, using a 1960s girl-group style to lament the loss of Amy Winehouse. In case the object of its attention were not clear (if one had not read Smith’s accompanying notes or heard her introduce the track in concert or interview), the lyrics offer clues through typically Smithian wordplay: ‘this is the blood that turned into wine’, then ‘this is the wine of the house’. As well as being a ‘girl group lament’—the retro style appropriate for the remembrance of a singer drawn to 1960s soul styles—‘This is the Girl’ is a song of transformation, mixing the religious imagery of transubstantiation with reflections on the transformations of the self, not least those brought about by celebrity and the music business.

Following the pattern of alternating rough and smooth textures, the album’s title track finds Smith resurrecting her trademark chanted/declaimed style on an edgy piece that fits into a lineage of references to punks and dogs. Smith took the title from the name given to Pontius Pilate’s dog in Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, a work she had been sent by a Russian friend and which inspired this track and the Gogol-referencing ‘April Fool’. Both songs were elaborated during a subsequent visit to Russia. Smith’s voice leads the music on ‘Banga’, the chant followed by the drums and guitars even as it relies on them for momentum. Recalling tracks from Smith’s early albums, ‘Banga’ acts as both memory work and continuation. It also carries a touch of pathetic humour, not least in its closing section, which serves to deconstruct what has gone before and, in the final drawled lines—‘night is a mongrel / believe or explode’—to offer a parody of Bob Dylan (albeit Dylan via Joan Baez). Smith once referred to Dylan’s voice as ‘like a motorcycle through a cornfield’ and it is that attention-grabbing sonority she seems to channel here.

Contrasting the brief ferocity of the title track, ‘Maria’ is slow and elegiac, built around three prominent opening chords in a manner that recalls ‘This is the Girl’. Described by Smith as an elegy for her friend Maria Schneider, the song also presents a longing for the time of the two women’s youth. When listening to the album’s songs in sequence, this track is the first to offer obvious echoes of those that preceded it. The line ‘at the edge of the world’ summons up the adventure of discovery hymned in ‘Amerigo’, while ‘you were the girl’ recalls the Winehouse tribute. Here, adventure is life itself, particularly the possibilities of youthful ambition. Age and death bring exile from that world, leaving the still living singer in a strange alliance with the friend she is mourning. Smith’s use of a spoken word elegy and the way her lyrics dwell on the past tense echo the remembered past of ‘Amerigo’: that such things were possible, that the world was once filled with wonder, that one had a purpose and a place in the world. There is the sense, too, of how quickly it could all fade: ‘We didn’t know the precariousness of our young powers’.

‘Mosaic’, built around Jay Dee Daugherty’s evocative mandocello, brings Eastern modality to the album, an explicit reminder of the internationalism that pervades Banga (the Japan-referencing ‘Fuji-San’, the three ‘Russian’ tracks, the hymns to maritime exploration). The lyrics, which refer to the Turkish city of Konya, are among the more abstract on the album; in interviews and promotional materials, Smith described the lyric as being about abstract love and revealed that there is a reference to the film The Hunger Games, which had influenced her.

‘Tarkovsky’, a track that was inspired by Smith’s visit to Russia, takes its name from the Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and is one of the ‘artier’ tracks on Banga, not least in its title. The lyrical style is poetic and, where other songs on the album veer between speech, chant and singing, this emphasises speech alone because of the language and meter employed. In her liner notes, Smith describes the track as ‘a response to the film Ivan’s Childhood, improvised over a variation on a theme by Sun Ra’. The song’s subtitle, ‘The Second Stop Is Jupiter’, is the title of the Sun Ra piece Smith and her band use as their basis. With knowledge of the poem’s inspiration, it’s possible to see the lyrics as descriptions of scenes from Tarkovsky’s film, albeit that Smith’s ‘transcriptions’ are still highly allusive, a dreamlike interpretation of the film seen through the lens of improvised poetry. At the end of two of the verses comes the refrain ‘The boy, the beast and the butterfly’, seemingly a reference to the opening scenes of the film, in which we witness Ivan’s childhood experiences detached from the horrific context of the war. Notable throughout the recitation is the deliberation with which Smith pronounces syllables in words like ‘speed’ and ‘flight’ and the ‘b’s of the refrain.

‘Nine’ is an old school Smith track featuring chanting and cryptic, archaic imagery; Smith is one of the few popular artists who could get away with using a phrase like ‘wherein perfection brews’. Following a brief takeover by Verlaine’s reverb-heavy guitar, Smith once again appears to channel Bob Dylan as she makes oblique reference to ‘nine blue eyed sailors’ and a cast of vagabonds, gypsies and harlequins. The album’s loud-quiet dynamic is maintained with the lilting ‘Seneca’, a lullaby written for the son of Dream of Life director Steven Sebring. In her liner notes to the album, Smith describes the song as ‘a prelude to adventure’, the adventure again being life itself.

‘Constantine’s Dream’ is the most ambitious and adventurous track on Banga, not only in its length (10:20), but also in its improvised edginess and its range of references. The track opens with acoustic guitar joined by a bass drum delivering brooding textures, the archetypal calm before the storm. A ‘classically’ chanted opening follows, in which a dream is recounted in the first person; this section is sung and the coding of the delivery allows us to hear the protagonist as Smith herself. After a minute, Smith switches to spoken word, also in the first person (the ‘I’ of the song still appears to be Smith, no longer dreaming). The narrative builds up, with drums, a persistent electric guitar riff and other strings all thickening the texture. The word flow quickens into a litany of religious imagery as Smith describes the basilica of St. Francis in Arezzo. From here she moves away to the theme from which the track takes its name: ‘Constantine’s Dream’, one of several frescoes in the basilica that make up the series The Legend of the True Cross by the Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca. As Smith introduces the painter and his masterwork and describes the dream depicted in the fresco, we are still subject to her narration, but the dream is now someone else’s. At one point, Constantine awakes in his own dream and is visited by an angel. By this stage, the narrative is one of visions within visions: Constantine’s, Piero’s, Smith’s. By the fifth minute, the song/poem is primarily about the making of art (in the person of Piero) mixed with the making of war (in the person of Constantine). At 6:22 Smith, voicing Piero, delivers three of Banga’s most memorable lines:

All is art – all is future!
Oh Lord let me die on the back of adventure
With a brush and an eye full of light

In the next section of the track, we move to later in Piero’s life as he suffers blindness. Then, in an unexpected narrative twist that suddenly summons the earlier song ‘Amerigo’, Smith connects the date of Piero’s death—1492—with Columbus’s trip to the New World (‘adventure itself’). She compares the ‘beauty unspoiled’ of the newly discovered lands with the vision of St. Francis. The last section finds Columbus himself dreaming, then folds all the stories together in an apocalyptic finale that sees ‘the twenty-first century / Advancing like the angel that had come / To Constantine’. A last reference to ‘the apocalyptic night’ finds the music building into a Velvets-like squall.

Banga concludes with Smith’s version of Neil Young’s ‘After the Goldrush’. Coming after ‘Constantine’, the song invites comparison with its predecessor; the lines ‘mother nature on the run / in the 1970s’ continue the theme of spoiled nature. Smith subsequently updates Young’s lyric to ‘in the twenty-first century’ and uses children’s voices to repeat the refrain, a suggestion of future hope.

This concludes my initial reading of Banga. In the next part of the essay, I’ll consider the canonisation of Smith and her work in light of some late chronicles, a series of documents and events that saw Smith’s work fixed into the rock canon and provided further context to situate her work and her many cultural reference points. These chronicles include not only the biographies and analyses written by others, but also Smith’s own contributions to the canonisation process, in particular her books The Coral Sea and Just Kids. There will also be a third part, where I return to Banga, filtering my observations through the knowledge we have of Smith from the late chronicles that preceded it.

1. Richard Elliott, ‘Words from the New World: Adventure and Memory in Patti Smith’s Late Voice’, in Patti Smith: Outside, edited by Claude Chastagner (Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2015), 113-35.