Clash

Joe “Strummer” Mellor was born in Turkey, the son of a Foreign Office official. Because of his father’s frequent relocations, he only entered an English school at the age of nine, but left it very early to work in a rubber factory and take to the streets playing rock and roll classics on the ukulele in subway stations, while trying to make it in London pubs as the guitarist for the 101’ers. After a brief stint at an art school, Joe “the strummer” met in 1976 three other working-class kids, members of a sinister-inspired band influenced by the Sex Pistols, and together they formed the Clash. Riding the wave of the punk revolution, they adopted the outrageous look and frenzied sound that were then fashionable in clubs.

The band’s legend exploded with the 1977 triptych, a masterpiece of English punk: White Riot, Complete Control, and Clash City Rockers. These early anthems are infused with Strummer’s venomous, sarcastic humor, his pronounced working-class, coarse, and provocative accent, reinforced by Ramones-style backing vocals, and the fiery guitar work of Mick Jones, one of the few “guitar heroes” of the punk generation. They anticipate the furious rage with which the unemployed would sack Brixton a few years later. From these early proclamations, the Clash positioned themselves at the forefront of politicized punk: they were not nihilistic prophets of apocalypse like the Pistols, but streetwise youths railing against police raids, racism, and the totalitarian instincts of a crisis-ridden regime, adopting as their expressive medium a rough, working-class power-rock and a demagogic Hyde Park oratory.

Clash (CBS, 1977), especially the American version Clash (1979), is a concentrated collection of short, explosive tracks, as was common at the dawn of punk rock, but in reality the songs paint a romantically ambitious portrait of society from the perspective of the “every-punk.” The Clash chant slogans against authority (Complete Control and Remote Control), point fingers at capitalism (White Man In Hammersmith), celebrate street life (Clash City Rockers), incite vandalism (White Riot, London's Burning), and also reflect on international affairs (I'm So Bored With The U.S.A., Hate And War) and the everyday life of stray kids (Career Opportunities). From the epileptic two-chord Sex Pistols-style of White Riot to the crescendoing choral epic of Complete Control, from the syncopated boogie of Clash City Rockers to the solemn apocalyptic prophecy of London's Burning, from the chanted chorus of Remote Control to the martial reggae of White Man In Hammersmith, from the rock and roll of Janie Jones to the “oi” tribalism of Career Opportunities, the album is a continuous surge of emotion, an unstoppable war-like drumbeat. The punks’ frontal attack softens into a melodic beat that turns every song into an anthem, with a loping rhythm assimilating military marches, acrobatic rock and roll, garage rock, skiffle, and reggae. Their punk rock is emotionally charged, the exact opposite of the arid, inhumanly depressing outburst of the Sex Pistols. For years, the choral despair of Complete Control and Clash City Rockers would echo in the records of many other punk bands.

Give Em Enough Rope (CBS, 1978) has a more professional sound, inspired by heavy metal production, and abandons the smash-through punk-rock style. English Civil War, All The Young Punks, and Tommy Gun pale in comparison to the explosive tracks of the first album. Safe European Home flirts with reggae, and Stay Free is a sarcastic ballad.

The Clash were, however, much more, and soon changed direction. Strummer broadened his cultural horizons and followed international events, particularly the Sandinista revolution. Jones expanded their musical palette to include reggae and Latin music.

The Clash stopped being punk with the double album London Calling (CBS, Dec 1979). The record is a milestone of the era because it practically renounces everything that had defined that period, both nihilism and musical illiteracy. The Clash embarked on a new career with an encyclopedic and melodic style. The album spans the cadenced Merseybeat of Hateful, the nocturnal country-bebop of Jimmy Jazz, the latin-funk-ska of Rudie Can't Fail, the martial rhythm and blues of Right Profile, the boogie of Four Horsemen, the disco of Lost In The Supermarket, the funk-rock of Clampdown, and the calypso of Revolution Rock. But the best are still the political anthems: the leftist London Calling, which establishes Strummer as the Dylan of punk, Spanish Bombs, a soul-rock ballad à la Costello, and Guns Of Brixton (the reggae ode to racial unrest). Perhaps the masterpiece is the driving shuffle Train In Vain. Part of the record is redundant and monotonous, but the whole nonetheless has the effect of upending punk rock. As often happens with groundbreaking works, the album counts more as an event than as art. From an artistic standpoint, the Clash, fairly amateurish in reviving past musical genres, are rather adept at maintaining, from start to finish, a dramatic tension that is almost apocalyptic. This is the common thread with the first album: that overwhelming sense of tragedy, which transforms with each chorus into an outburst of violence. The difference is that the meaning has shifted: from the looming and inevitable “end of civilization” to the “aberration of civilization,” which is current and not inevitable, but can be changed through class struggle. In short, the Clash’s philosophy moves from existentialism to Marxism, and their attitude from rhetoric to preaching. This does not necessarily constitute progress; indeed, the confusion and ambition constitute a regression compared to the spectacular form, determination, and conciseness of the first album.

Whether tamed or redeemed, the new Clash preached novelty within continuity: picking up rock where punk recklessness had left off, grafting on a bit of reggae (with various “black” perturbations—soul, Latin, funk, gospel), and giving it a veneer of seriousness, of civic engagement, anti-fascism, and anti-racism. Their charisma thus opened a period of ever more ambitious, kaleidoscopic records—a hodgepodge of styles and controversies—that presented themselves as the ultimate compendium of 35 years of rock, a synthesis and reinterpretation of an entire socio-musical civilization.

The triple album Sandinista (CBS, 1980) amplifies the scattershot quality of its predecessor into a blurred stylistic variety, which ultimately serves merely as a pretext to present the most extensive almanac of social and political issues any rock artist had ever tackled on record. Yet the band continues to craft progressive, engaged, and catchy songs such as Washington Bullets, Somebody Got Murdered, the happiest chorus of Bankrobber (a Dylan-esque ballad), and Corner Soul, a Costello-style soul-rock, along with a series of reggae-themed variations—from the saccharine litany of Living In Fame to the sophisticated jazz-time of Crooked Beat, from the fanfare of Call Up (perhaps their most accomplished composition ever, with a classically tinged xylophone) to the drunken ballad Equaliser, featuring Eastern dissonances and a range of surreal, vaguely sinister references: gospel (Sound Of The Sinners), rockabilly (Midnight Log), voodoo-blues (Junkie Slip). Sandinista is also their "avant-garde" album, in which various arrangements are elevated by cultured orchestrations: Hitsville UK, a choral motif arranged with kitschy "Zappa-esque" techniques; Rebel Waltz, a band-style waltz arranged for baroque ensemble; Ivan Meets G.I. Joe, a brassy funk with an electronic/Third World dub; and Mensforth Hill, a piece for synths, litany, liturgical organ, and ethnic rhythms. Compared to London Calling, Sandinista is undoubtedly even more scattered, but this time the Clash had truly learned to play these styles and imbued them with a cohesive personality through ever more danceable rhythms (as demonstrated in Magnificent Seven, a classic funky-rap disco track; Lightning Strikes, a surface-level funky-soul; and Let's Go Crazy, a Brazilian rhythmic delirium). If London Calling was a pretentious album by a band of amateurs, Sandinista is the measured record of a group of professionals. Where London Calling was more "event" than record, Sandinista is more "record" than "event." London Calling had been an act of penance, with which the Clash betrayed and renounced their roots; Sandinista is an act of defiance. And, quite simply, it boasts much better songs.

The same ideological ambitions compromise Combat Rock (CBS, 1982), on which Third World rhythms are shamelessly put at the service of the dance floor. The Clash reconstruct another persona through the electronic funk of This Is Radio Clash and the polyrhythmic world music of Rock The Casbah, which ideally continue the saga of Magnificent Seven. Towering above all is Should I Stay Or Should I Go, carved in the ugly, raw syncopations of a dragged-out, surface-level garage blues. Soon after, Mick Jones left the band to form Big Audio Dynamite (B.A.D.), while Joe Strummer recorded one more album under the Clash name, Cut The Crap (Epic, 1985), before launching his solo career. By absorbing Black musical styles and injecting an overdose of politics into their lyrics, the Clash forged a style of eclecticism and engagement that represents the first valid and creative transcendence of gutter punk. The Clash are probably the British punk band that has aged best over time, perhaps also because the Clash were never a true punk band. If the Pistols were the Rolling Stones of the movement, the Clash were its Kinks: revolutionary, yes, but with judgment; provocative, yes, but with savoir-faire. Where the Sex Pistols reduced the syntax and semantics of music to the bare minimum, the Clash expanded both in multiple directions, salvaging much of what the Sex Pistols had destroyed.

Cut the Crap (1985), recorded without guitarist Mick Jones and drummer Topper Headon, and largely shaped by the band's manager Bernie Rhodes (with drum-machine and sampling), is an embarrassing swan song. Strummer disowned the album.