Patti Smith kicks off her ninth album, Trampin', with what sounds like a call to arms: "Come on, girl/ Come on, boy/ Be a jubilee." That word, "jubilee," hangs heavy with meaning. Commonly connoting a commemorative celebration, this Biblical term also refers to a period of emancipation for Hebrew slaves. It was adopted by the abolition movement in the 1800s and by the civil rights movement a century later. And it says a lot more about the album and Smith's intentions than the title Trampin' does: Mixing the personal and the political, she examines her own and the country's past while inciting activism in the present-- a jubilee as both remembrance and protest.
If any musician can expose the lies of the age and urge her listeners to action, it's Smith: She started as a visual and dramatic artist in the late 1960s, when activism was swelling at college campuses across the country; in the early 1970s, when the previous decade's revolutionaries went underground, she put her poetry to Lenny Kaye's guitar and created a highly idiosyncratic form of punk that bore surprising longevity. Her early albums still sound fiery and fidgety, resisting the genre gentrification that has desanguinated her contemporaries, but on Trampin', she is so preoccupied with the past that she fails to adequately capture the present.
As for the past, Trampin' finds particular inspiration in the civil rights movement: The album's title comes from a spiritual made famous by Marian Anderson, which Smith lovingly covers at album's end. The nine-minute "Gandhi" re-creates a childhood illness as the mahatma's defining experience and namechecks Martin Luther King Jr., but ends with a more timely imperative: "Awake from your slumber/ And get 'em with the numbers."
Trampin' is Smith at her most deferential: She looks to figures like Gandhi, King, Anderson, and even Bob Dylan on "Stride of the Mind" for spiritual guidance. While this approach may be valid and even occasionally compelling, for the most part it robs the album of most of its urgency and dulls its outrage. In a sense, Smith hides behind these historical leaders, letting their names and legacies stand in place of her own anger and reasoning.
In comparison to these tracks, the 12-minute epic "Radio Baghdad" sounds much braver and riskier, trading concision for dramatic vitality. Less an anti-war poem than a noisy self-exorcism by an American ashamed of her country's actions, the song expounds on Baghdad's history, culture and ruin, and conjures the kind of righteous fire missing from "Gandhi". Smith yelps "shock and awe shock and awe" with such mighty defiance and disdain that the words sound hardly human-- it's the fiercest moment on the album. However, Smith, intending each line to be a targeted missile, occasionally lapses into bumper-sticker lyrics like, "We invented the zero/ But we mean nothing to you," and, "Robbing the cradle of civilization," whose catchy cleverness threatens to undermine the song's message. It's perhaps a testament to her explosive performance that the song ends with a genuine and meaningful catharsis, which Smith manages to sustain through the short, elegant title track that follows.
Given the complications of the album's political messages, it should be no surprise that the most heartfelt and memorable songs on Trampin' are Smith's personal commemorations, like "Mother Rose" and "Trespasses", which are shorter and more traditionally structured. Smith's late husband, former MC5 guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith, still haunts her music, as it has on every album since 1996's Gone Again, but here, that sadness is leavened by the reassuring presence of her children, both of whom play on the album. In fact, Smith wrote "Cartwheels" for her daughter Jesse Paris Smith, who accompanies her mother on piano for the title track.
These people feel more immediate and more connected to Smith than any of the historical figures she tries to summon, so the gravity of her personal life ultimately outweighs the confusion of American political life. They offer the reassurance of security and certainty, of questions with clear-cut answers, something she finds in the era of civil rights but not so much in our present-day predicaments. What keeps Trampin' from being a failure of imagination is her dogged insistence on searching for something solid and sure to bring to the discussion; what she finds may not offer many solutions, but it does gravely illustrate the burden of giving a shit in the first place.
