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Combat Rock
“The way you get a better world is you don’t put up with substandard anything.” In late December, when word spread that Joe Strummer, lead vocalist and guiding light of the seminal punk outfit the Clash, had died at age 50, I was enraged.
It wasn’t just because an integral symbol of my adolescence was gone, although the Clash was the first band for which I developed a real affinity. Nor was it because the Clash had learned just last November of their forthcoming induction to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as rumors spread of a reunion. This was worse. The kings of punk had not only begun to crumble, but their influence, noticeable among scores of present-day pretenders, pseudo-punks, wannabes and never-wills, seemed during this mourning period to still be living a private life of its own, gaining more steam everyday, bastardized, re-branded and attributed to others. Of course, every band that has ever released more than a few albums wants to matter generations after their run. But in the end, few exemplify and transcend their musical genre they way the Clash did. Few transform their espoused sound into exciting new constructs; few offer prescient social commentary. And, most important of all, few remain true to their original ethos. My anger wasn’t just a reaction to the loss of Joe Strummer, it was a protest against the pop-music industry for paying homage to the Clash everyday and not having enough guts to admit it. * * * * In 1976, when Joe Strummer, guitarist Mick Jones, bassist Paul Simonen and drummer Topper Headon broke out as one of the first bands to arrive in the wake of Malcolm MacLaren’s nihilist quartet, the Sex Pistols, the Clash emerged as the Pistols’s only serious rival. In those days, the Clash sound borrowed much from the Pistols and their American antecedents, the Ramones, with standard screaming three-chord progressions. In fact Strummer himself once famously said that when he saw the Sex Pistols perform he realized he was not alone in not being able to play very well. Yet it wasn’t long before the Clash developed a distinctive voice. Instead of the husky, blaring guitars of punk musicians past, Mick Jones rode high on the register, playing a clinical, almost-earsplitting treble above a steady, pounding bass by Simonen and a subtler, controlled drumline by Headon. The result was a radical departure from the Clash’s predecessors. Blind fury had become controlled and harnessed in the service of creating true harmonic beauty, something that always eluded MacLaren. And before anyone had time to notice, punk had finally become musical. But pop music without lyrics is only half a product, and the Clash’s lyrics didn’t follow the punk norm either. The Ramones were famous for considering themselves a manifestation of the Beach Boys who played their music as if on speed. The Sex Pistols reveled in their self-destruction, largely for its own sake. But Strummer and company had none of that. The Clash were angry, but not just for the sake of their anger or for serving as an “other.” Instead of just destroying the status quo, the Clash presented a vision of a new society rising from the ashes. Yes, the current world is doomed, they implied; but the current world has a lot of good in it, and its problems are solvable. The defining message of the Clash was overwhelmingly idealistic and positive: Anti-establishment angst can build a better world. The Ramones provided escape; the Sex Pistols, disillusionment and despair. But the Clash made their mark for a more important virtue: They signified hope. This hope was presented in precise social commentary. In “London’s Burning,” they denounce their Labourite city’s stagnant, sedentary and inflationary dead-end culture. Issuing a warning that “London’s burning with boredom now,” the song details the mischief of a lad tooling around deserted streets as the rest of the city sits passively in flats staring at television sets. It is not a call to arms as one would expect from a punk band; it is a warning of what a disillusioned, bored and especially unemployed London youth can do in a city that doesn’t care about his welfare. A similar statement is expressed in “Last Gang in Town,” where the Clash satirically details the exploits of roving gangs looking for trouble: “The Crops hit the Stiffs, An’ the Spikes whipped the Quiffs. They’re all looking ’round for the last gang in town.” The song cleverly denounces the gang violence that ravaged the working-class immigrant communities in London’s East End. It is these messages that made the band matter to people, not just music wonks. The Clash’s sound developed even further with the implosion of the Sex Pistols in 1978, leaving Strummer’s band as the only punk group of significance. The band utilized the dropouts and the dub-heavy bass of early Jamaican ska and reggae; it is not the only outside influence with which they experimented, but it is by far the most prominent as evidenced by the songs “Wrong “Em Boyo” and “Police and Thieves.” Of course the Clash also dabbled in other idioms: funk (”White Man in Hammersmith Palais’), rockabilly (”Brand New Cadillac”), classical guitar (”Spanish Bombs’), dub, gospel, soul (”Stay Free”), and classic rock (their two greatest commercial hits, “Rock the Casbah” and “Should I Stay or Should I Go”), to name a few. But for all of their experimentation, they retained their message and controlled fury. The result? One of the richest, most grounded and brave repertoires in rock.
Since the Clash disbanded in 1985 many pretenders and Joe Strummer wannabes have attempted to raise the banner. In the early 1980s, the San Francisco outfit the Dead Kennedys made what was probably the best stab at the crown, becoming up until now the most overtly political of punk bands, even though their approach never transcended the arrested development of three-chord bleariness. Alas, their music never achieved the mainstream success of their predecessors, their politically driven freneticism dove into the depths of Hardcore, and the search continued. Presently we are in the thick of not just what music critics are calling a “punk revival,” but what they should be calling a Clash revival. The music is showing up in some unlikely places: Jaguar, the luxury car maker, recently unveiled an ad campaign using lyrics from "London Calling"; and The Royal Tenenbaums uses the band’s music as a repeating leitmotif for Owen Wilson’s drug-addicted character, Eli Cash. In the wake of Strummer’s death, fans are finding the Clash influence in the songs of U2, No Doubt, the Beastie Boys and Rage Against the Machine. (U2 leader Bono even recently spoke to the legacy of Strummer: "The Clash was the greatest rock band,” he said. “They wrote the rule book for U2.") And, most obvious, a new breed of twenty-something Neo Punksters — the Vines, the Hives, the White Stripes and the Strokes most notably among them — are taking cues not just from the Ramones and the Velvet Underground but from the Clash, stripping away studio gloss, forgetting a few chords, turning up the amp, and cranking out short, scrappy, lightning-fast anthems of angst in garages from California to Sweden.
It’s now in vogue, in other words, to imitate the Clash’s rhythms and textures, never mind the fact that establishing the kind of tonal control they flaunted is out of these youngsters’ reach. Take, for instance, the Vines’s “Ain’t No Room.” The setup is rather conventional: three main chords repeated incessantly below a husky, somewhat muffled main line that creates an almost continuous drone, occasionally broken up by a drum line. It is a rather straightforward punk riff, with the emphasis on speed and volume. This observation is by no means universal, however: Specific tracks by the White Stripes, such as “Jimmy the Exploder,” nuance the cookie-cutter punk line through different instruments (in the above instance, through use of tambourines.), or by blending of genres (rockabilly and country, primarily). Clash-like experimentation, in other words, is obviously a goal. When it comes to lyricism, today’s Neo Punksters are even further away from the mark. These new bands, for the most part, focus on hackneyed teen-dream pseudo-angst: toward the girlfriend, the so-called “loser” friends, and the established society that can’t feel their pain. One example is the Strokes’s song “Last Nite” wherein the discussion wanders between lost love and disillusionment from mainstream society: “And people they don’t understand This difference in quality becomes even more apparent when comparing two songs that deal with the role of police. The Strokes’ “New York City Cops’ is personal and not incredibly insightful; the NYPD are simply ignorant thugs who hassle them on Saturday nights: “Yes I’m leavin’ In their remake of “Police and Thieves,” the Clash, utilizing Junion Murvin and Lee “Scratch” Perry’s inspired words and adding their own distinctive arrangement (featuring a funkier, more uptempo baseline and minimal guitar), go for something deeper. Instead of bobbies cramping the band’s style at the palais, the police are a brutal tool of social oppression, almost indistinguishable from the very criminals they are sworn to apprehend. The police aren’t fighting the criminals. They’re fighting the people they protect, ‘the nation”: “Police and thieves in the streets In fact, despite its efforts towards Clash-like significance, the poetic ground of today’s Neo Punksters seems, for the most part, to just be a retread of the Ramones’s more simplistic, repetitive lyrics: words without room for nuance and interpretation. Suppose, for example, that instead of repeating the phrase “Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment” in their song of the same name, the Ramones offered a half-assed explanation of why they sort of, maybe, could do better with some, just a little, shock treatment. That is what bands like the Strokes are doing. And what’s sad is that they’re intending to do more. They’re creating a lyrical style that only relates in part to life’s problems (The Hives are a distinct culprit in this regard), and, in the process, they’re falling flat on their faces. Lost girlfriends and boring suburbs may be the world these guys live in — most of these bands are drawn from upper- or upper-middle-class backgrounds — but their rebellion against these seemingly innocuous rites of passage seems even more trivial glorified in the way the Clash concentrated their anger.
Patchworks fall apart without seams; that is a universal truth. And while they may already be more famous in terms of worldwide notoriety and market share than the Clash ever was, today’s Neo Punksters are only managing to publicly emulate bits and pieces of the Clash’s influence while revering the band in private. They’ve taken the safe route of tried-and-true three-chord pounding, an early Clash standby. They’ve written slipshod attempts at social commentary without relevant subject matter and adequate composition. And, worse, they’ve been trying to sell it in a way the Clash (or even the Ramones) never would have appreciated (unfortunately, we can’t say the same thing for Lou Reed). In the end, I can’t fault these musicians for trying, but their efforts don’t come close to the real article. One has to be critically cautious in crowning a successor to a king, especially when that king never made a big splash in widespread pop cultural ways because the nature of his message was that of the underground. They may only make the newspaper when a member of the band dies, but for now, as well as for the foreseeable future, the Clash continue to sit proud on their underground throne as the greatest punk band in history, even with Joe Strummer gone. Their legacy and influence will, as they have since the 1980s, continue to keep them in the social unconscious as a band that matters. And any group of reverent musicians interested in writing another chapter to their story would do well not just to study their electric guitar riffs, but to also take serious note of the world that surrounds them. Luciano D’Orazio is a writer whose work also appears in Flak. Related Sites |
