London Calling

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<b>100 Best Albums</b> Looking back, it’s funny that The Clash started out as a punk band. Not because they weren’t rebelliou, but because they always seemed too absorbed by tradition and continuity to deliver the sonic and sociocultural rupture punk promised. If the Ramones’ take on “California Sun” and “Do You Wanna Dance” goofed on the naivete of early-'60s pop-rock, The Clash’s version of “I Fought the Law” was deadly earnest, a declaration of shared values with the rock myths that punk supposedly helped end. If the Sex Pistols had been suicide bomber, The Clash were ascendant general, adapted to present terrain but romantically steeped in the past. As great as the band’s first two albums had been, they’d mostly worked off a blueprint of punk that by 1979 had started to look a little limited, even retrograde. Installed in a makeshift practice space adjoining an auto body shop, they started rehearsing covers in styles seemingly outside their comfort zone: reggae, soul, rockabilly, pub rock. Soon, whatever allegiance they still had to punk as a social movement was eclipsed by their newfound power as a band unto themselve. In other word, <i>London Calling</i> not only replaced stylistic concision with experimentation (a move pushed even further with 1980’s <i>Sandinista!</i>) but marked the moment when The Clash became bigger than punk. What was—and is—remarkable about <i>London Calling</i> wasn’t just how much ground it cover, but how comfortably the band stakes their claim to it. They’re heavy (“Death or Glory,” “Hateful”), they’re light (“Revolution Rock,” “Lover’s Rock”), they sing about public struggles (“Clampdown”) and private relationships (Mick Jones’ “Train in Vain”) and advance the old chestnut that our inner lives are always products of our outer realitie. Take “Lost in the Supermarket,” the story of how an alienated kid from the suburbs seeks freedom through shopping because shopping is the only model of freedom capitalism gave him. In other word, politics on <i>London Calling</i> aren’t just something that happens at the poll, but at work, at home, when we’re pretty sure nobody’s watching. Musically, the punk fascination with American soul and Jamaican reggae (“Train in Vain,” Paul Simonon’s “The Guns of Brixton”) that had developed in part out of a connection between blue-collar English workers and immigrant laborers from the West Indies broadened into something more eclectic: the Tex-Mex/reggae hybrid of “Rudie Can’t Fail,” the bilingual sloganeering of “Spanish Bomb.” What had once been framed as a local struggle—poor white English kids searching for a future in the face of diminishing prospects—became international, the plight of working-class people generally, the ballads of the common man. “El Clash combo,” Joe Strummer sings on “Revolution Rock.” “Paid 15 dollars a day/Wedding, partie, anything/And bongo jazz a specialty.” Anyone forced to run themselves down for money—now or then; black, white, or otherwise—can understand. As for “bongo jazz,” the joke is that the band has probably never played it in their life, but could definitely figure it out if that’s what you were paying for. .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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