In 2010 Patti Smith published Just Kids, an unpretentious and moving memoir on her pre-fame days in New York with Robert Mapplethorpe. Its direct quality came as a pleasant surprise, because it is frequently lacking in her music. Amerigo, which opens Banga, is a great song about the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci’s maiden voyage to South America, but Smith speaks lines like “and we danced, naked as they, baptised in the rain of the New World” with all the portentousness of a teenager telling her parents that she can’t eat her dinner because there are people starving in Africa. Smith is a disciplined songwriter — Fuji-San and April Fool are perfectly economic constructions and the title track has the spiky, emotional forcefulness Smith has shown since making her mark with Horses in 1975 — but you sense a need to impress her artful credentials upon us. With Neil Young, on the other hand, you get the impression that he really couldn’t care less about what we think of him. That frees him up to make deceptively groundbreaking albums like Americana. Columbia
Patti Smith: Banga
Smith writes great songs, but - where her recent autobiography was admirably direct - her lyrics strain towards artiness