Resuming the series of reviews in which a critic is wrong-footed in real-time, with Garry Bushell giving a measly two-stars to the record that Rolling Stone would later anoint as Best Rock Album of the Eighties (even though technically it came out in the 1970s, at least in the band's native land, and at the very end of the decade, the last weeks of '79).
But, thinking about it, I don't even like London Calling. And all the reasons why Rolling Stone would rate it so high are exactly the reasons why Gazza finds it so boring - the relapse into Presley-Stones-etc rock's rich tapestry-ism.
And within five years Strummer himself would be in resounding agreement with Gazza and would attempt to restage The Clash debut with Cut the Crap.
Yes, despite various attempts over the years, I've never clicked with London Calling, apart from the title track single, and "Lost In the Supermarket," which I find affecting.
The rest bypasses me.... it's like the Clash submitting belated candidacy to be part of the Last Waltz line-up.... a truce between New Wave and Old Wave. (Getting Guy Stevens to produce - the man who more or less created Mott the Hoople - is totally the Old Wave into New Wave truce move).
I prefer Sandinista... on points.... but also because they sound confused and dispirited...
The spiritedness of the Clash is one of the things I find least appealing about them - probably why I never clicked with the debut either.
(That's why I'm endeared towards "Lost in the Supermarket" - a Strummer song, and Strummer sentiment-admission of frailty - even though it's Jones who sings it, with trademark wetness).
"...attempt to restage the Clash debut with Cut the Crap."
ReplyDeleteJesus, have you heard it? It's fucking unlistenable! The argument that This is England is the last great Clash song is fanboy bullshit. Is it played on a Bontempi?
But you have a real, undeniable point with London Calling. The American-led interpretation of the Clash as superior rock band only demonstrates that Americans never got punk's potential. An object lesson in Marcuse's point that capitalism subsumes everything.
I'm not saying it's as good as the Clash debut (which I don't even like). But it is definitely an attempt to go back to go back to basics, to where they started. Only to sound like Angelic Upstarts on a bad night. It reeks of Strummer's desperation and nostalgia.
Delete(The exception on the album is "This Is England", which is something different - more like Strummer's parallel to Costello's "Pills and Soaps")
Say more? ‘Pills and Soap’ is a tightly focused evisceration of the tabloid press. ‘This is England’ seems like a collage of grisly fragments.
DeleteI like all the Clash albums that you're not supposed to like, and dislike the pair that you're supposed to regard as classics.
ReplyDelete"This Is England" is the British "Born In The USA".
Does that include Combat Rock? I can't remember what the critical viewpoint on that was - I think it was 'they're back after Sandinista'.
DeleteI love 'Complete Control', "White Man in Hammersmith Palais', like 'Bankrobber', love and like those two songs on London Calling, like maybe a third of Sandinista (so, result), like maybe half of Combat Rock but love 'Straight to Hell'.
Think Give 'Em Enough Rope, Sandinista and Combat Rock are all great.
DeleteThe first album is just too amateurish and tinny for me. The production on London Calling feels airless - lacking resonance and depth - although Armagideon Time is a great B-side from that era.
I'm not a big Clash fan because I don't really buy into their worldview, which is barely more sophisticated than Jimmy Pursey's. But there's something for everyone in their back catalogue.
I think the way you feel about the first album depends a lot on whether you heard the UK or US version first.
DeleteThe US version adds the band’s two best songs (White Man… and Complete Control), a fun cover (I Fought the Law) and a couple of other reasonably god tracks. And it cuts four tracks of punk-by-numbers filler. The result is arguably the only Clash album anyone really needs.
I see that on streaming now the original 1977 UK track listing is the standard, which I guess helps completeness but makes for a greatly inferior listening experience.
Basically proof that following the soulless and spiritually bankrupt demands of the market really works.
Delete(Oh, and that should be “reasonably GOOD tracks,” of course)
I think they are the kind of band whose output allows different people to prefer different albums. Mine is Sandinista! Absolutely love it. Second best: Combat Rock.
ReplyDeleteVery perceptive comment.
DeleteI really like listening to the oddments that make up (Super) Black Market Clash, but that's about it.
DeleteThe Clash are definitely the most 'American' of the UK punk bands, which explains why the UK press largely fell out of love with them so fast (an amusing instance of their barometers crashing into themselves - a 'thinking man's yob' might turn out to be a British Springsteen) and the US press warmed up to them just as quick
ReplyDeleteStrummer is an interesting case, because he's SUCH an Yankophilic folkie right from the start ('Woody') but felt the need to go out of his way to deny it for a long time, because of how badly it, well, clashed with the image/persona he was going for (there's that story from his old hippie ex-girlfriend in The Future Is Unwritten about rushing up to embrace him while he was in his new punk threads and him reacting very coldly)
Your Burchill reference in 'rock's rich tapestry-ism' makes me wonder - what was it that the theoretical architects of UK punk wanted, and was it even possible to get them?
DeleteBurchill, McLaren, Lydon, etc. were revolutionaries who pre-emptively mocked the very idea of revolution; they used the sounds of the past in order to discredit them ('destroying rock 'n' roll', as Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon still tirelessly put it - the musician as nihilist art-market participant); they got up the nose of the establishment, then had very conducive decades-long careers inside of them without ever indicating that this was a shift of priorities from either party. Above all, they treated punk as the high water mark in Western civilization and also just something they did for three or four years.
You could say the same about many of the 60s US hippies, but in their case it's starker - they either readily admitted to selling out and the dream losing, or insisted (unconvincingly) that this was just working within the system for the same goals. There's nothing like that from the UK punks, really (Parsons might be the exception) - they went from vehemently willing the destruction of mainstream culture to operating very happily in it. It indicates that in terms of thought punk was a mile wide and an inch deep - it was an orgy of destruction that got their ya-yas out and allowed them to rejoin society afterwards - the cynic's view of rock in total
I think there was a nihilist/utopian split in punk from the beginning, with Sex Pistols as the signature nihilist band and The Clash as the signature utopian group. Then you had The Pop Group as the band that most struggled to reconcile them both.
DeleteProbably if you looked at nihilism and utopianism as a dialectic, then the synthesis is "at some point you gotta make a living."
Amphetamines probably more a factor than any kind of worked-out ideological stance.
ReplyDelete"Unsustainable intensity".... followed by, well, what we do now, those of us who didn't die, or go mad? You work out some kind of path that seems to connect to what you believed during that intense phase, that doesn't seem wholly capitulatory, that could be construed to yourself and others an as extension or a non-betrayal. "I'm the real punk, still" is a common sentiment - "I just took it to a different arena". McLaren tried it in Hollywood and collided with a much more unbudgeable industry than the UK rock biz.
Isn't it more helpful to frame punk as a disruption, rather than attempt to define it as a social program, the success of which we then try and evaluate? I'm thinking of Badiou's concept of the Event, which ruptures our perceptions of reality and reveals new possibilities. From this perspective it doesn't matter that people like Lydon went off the rails. There was no cause to betray, no path to stray from.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the Clash, as an American I find it interesting that their success in the States seems to have turned off so many in their home country, and that whenever I hear their embrace of American rock 'n' roll bemoaned, their openness to rap is often overlooked. The influence of early NYC rappers like Grandmaster Flash et al tends to counter the narrative that The Clash turned retrograde, no?
I'll cast my vote for "Sandinista!" as their best album, too-- one of those rare collections I can always put on knowing I'll discover something in the music I hadn't noticed before.
Just the other day I had occasion to read John Piccarella's Rolling Stone review from 1981, and I think he got a lot right (and it's kind of charming to read a review about The Clash when they were taken seriously as a cultural force). I liked this bit:
"The Clash’s attempted marriage of grass-roots American and Third World musics becomes almost visionary politics in this light. And that’s why the Clash are vital. They exemplify an awareness that offers hope to their fans. Like the Beatles (largely by accident), the Clash (largely by intent) have the potential to organize a rock & roll audience into an optimistic political body, or at least to provide the right information."
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/clash-sandinista-188352/
That Piccarella quote! It's that kind of hope and expectation around a rock band that seems a million years ago, irrecoverable..... like, what WERE they thinking? "Optimistic political body", what does that even mean?
DeleteMind you, as recently as M.I.A., the same kind of discourse-wheels were set in motion... Robert Hillburnism, is how I think of it, except that it was a close to majority viewpoint about the point and purpose of popular music amongst the criterati at one point.
This was Steven Wells' schtick - things may be bad under Thatcher, but I've found a band from Bingley who are determined to fight back....
Delete"Optimistic political body" is funny, yeah, although maybe it made more sense in early 1981, after a decade of disillusionment, cynicism, and despair. "Optimism" was in short supply. But actually the bland vagueness of the phrase is kind of interesting in the way it sets a lower bar for what we should expect rock to accomplish in the world. Rock and roll's utopian ideals won't actually change the world, but bands like The Clash might create the possibility for change simply by turning their audience around to face a direction they might not have perceived otherwise. The Clash and MIA have fallen away-- we know better, we've seen through them, we're wised up about how post-punk used "aesthetic pluralism as a way to recenter white men and masculinity" as Robin James argued on her blog just the other day-- but maybe some of the political awareness they created, some of the attitude they sparked, has lingered, and that's not nothing.
DeleteDeath Or Glory becomes another story.
DeleteThat Robin James post is very interesting
Deletehttps://itsherfactory.substack.com/p/on-the-alt-in-alt-right-and-the-post
These feel like Simon would have a lot to say about them
https://www.its-her-factory.com/2024/08/antoniffied-pop-vs-brat-the-stakes-of-elite-musical-taste-in-pops-girlboss-era/
https://www.its-her-factory.com/2024/12/is-the-alt-in-alt-rock-the-alt-in-alt-right/
Maybe I am missing something, but those pieces seem to gloss over the gender divide here. The fans of Taylor Swift, Boygenius, etc are not the same ones that are being drawn to the alt-right.
DeleteI wonder if you could make the case that the lack of left-aligned male performers has been a factor in the rightward shift of young men. No Clash, Public Enemy or Rage Against the Machine in 2024.
But in general, the political power of music is greatly reduced. It made sense for Rolling Stone to ask in 1981 whether the Clash were the next big radicalizing force in rock. Popular music had very recently been integral to huge political and social changes: the campaign against the Vietnam war, Gay Liberation, second-wave feminism, anti-racism. If you wanted to mobilize young people for change today, music would be a long way down your list of priorities.
Always a bit strange to read ivory tower academic leftists opine on the dissident right and what its apparent agenda is, as they are always markedly clueless.
ReplyDeleteIf you actually read (perish the thought!) what the leading thinkers on the dissident right are saying, they don't really care that much about masculinity, heterosexuality, or "whiteness". Nor do they care about leftists, who they perceive as powerless and irrelevant.
What the right, and especially the far right, are focused on is destroying the post-war administrative state that supports the US empire and the globalist liberalism that it enables. As such, they do not perceive ethnic minorities, feminists, and LGBTQ+ as enemies, but simply as clients of the power structure that they wish to destroy.
Don't think the left really appreciate the scale of the right's project, and what it might entail.
I'll see your Sensibly Grim Outlook and raise you a Nosedive Into The Slough of Despond.
DeleteYour otherwise very accurate assessment undersells the problem on two counts:
One, the "far right" you describe may indeed constitute a "they", but it's highly doubtful there is a "project" beyond demolishing the post-war administrative state. There is no coherent ideology behind it. I would be less terrified if there were an Edmund Burke lurking in the shadows, but there isn't. There's just a loose mix of Randian nitwits who have no plan for the day after they're done torching liberal democracy. Let there be disruption!
Second, you're correct when you say the target is really the administrative state, and not marginalized groups, but unfortunately "they" are allowing the demonization of ethnic minorities, feminists and LGBTQ+ in order to drum up enough popular support to get their puppets elected. So it amounts to the same thing.
It's gratifying to see that The Clash have mostly slipped away as a reference point for and influence on bands. The Clash was always a massive contradiction right from the get-go. It's totally disingenuous for a band to write and a perform a song professing their boredom with the U.S.A., but use hoary '50s rockers like Bo Diddley and cornpone country rockers like Joe Ely as supporting acts once they tour the U.S.A., as opposed to using more musically challenging acts from the U.K. like The Raincoats and The Pop Group that would have benefitted greater from the exposure. Joe Strummer was shameless in his Yankophilia, as Tyler put it, from styling his appearance after '50s American "rebel" actors like Marlon Brando and James Dean to emulating Woody Guthrie (ugh) in his earlier days. It's almost as if Joe was embarrassed to be British and knew exactly how The Clash could appeal to American sensibilities. Then there's The Clash's use of military imagery and macho posturing, all the while decrying war, but not really sending up militarism in any kind of clever way. Songs like Know Your Rights truly are the pits and seem rather laughable in their didactic lyrics.
ReplyDeleteOn a musical level, The Clash mostly fail for me because of the dilettantism and feeble, half-baked sound of their records. Their attempts at reggae and dub just feel anemic compared to The Pop Group, a far more musically and lyrically challenging band. Don't get me started on The Clash's attempts at rap, which rate right down there with Debbie Harry's clueless attempt on Rapture as the most lifeless, rhythmically challenged attempts by whites to rap.
Speaking of which, someone really should examine the phenomenon of English-speaking, non-American musical figures who cite predominantly American influences (e.g., Elvis Costello, Nick Cave, Billy Bragg, Robyn Hitchcock, Julian Cope) in an article. I'm of the belief that there really isn't anything new or exciting left for the rest of the world to learn from American music, especially more roots-oriented genres. As a lifelong Anglophile, it disheartens to see British acts (as well as other U.K. and British Commonwealth nations) adopt American accents and musical motifs to try to break into the American market. All the more reason to celebrate mavericks like Kate Bush, David Sylvian, Vini Reilly, Brendan Perry, Lisa Gerrard, and Robert Wyatt for forging their own identities and resisting easy temptations to conform to American tastes.