Perhaps what I look forward to the most every day is the brief period from 4- 4:30 p.m. where I blissfully ignore all existing research and scroll on social media. During this scroll I encounter “trad-wife” vlogs and swipe through “prom dress inspiration” posts that seem to have an inexplicable fear of bright colors. I press “like” on a friend’s mom’s photo at the NYC “Hands off!” protest, noticing a lot more moms than friends before I close my phone for the time being and distract myself instead by blasting The Clash’s 1979 London Calling and finishing my US History notes on Reagan’s presidency.
The Clash was an influential British punk rock band that dominated the scene in the 70s and 80s. As cliché as it sounds, their punchy tracks have a particular quality that makes me want to put down my phone and lace up some combat boots. The Clash epitomizes the punk rock movement in a way even the renowned Sex Pistols cannot; where others were reactionary and brash, The Clash was committed and insightful. The movement they created was by every means a product of the climate of the time.
By the mid-70s, England’s post-war prosperity had fizzled out and its people were confronted with inflation, unemployment and dwindling social service programs. The poor economy only worsened the existing societal issues of racism, xenophobia and police brutality that plagued London. Obnoxiously bourgeois “glam-rock” dominated the charts, blasting over the very real, glamorless lives of the working class. The stage was set for a punk revolution.
Living in the then fragmented neighborhood of Notting Hill, London, a young Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon, the band’s soon-to-be founders, had a unique viewpoint on the world. Growing tension between the Black residents of Notting Hill and the police force culminated in an episode of riots and police violence at the Notting Hill Carnival in 1976. This conflict inspired their first single, “White Riot”, that called upon the white working class to join the Black-led fight against working class oppression, criticizing people’s comfort in comfort. Strummer’s lyrics commented on the dynamics that led up to the riots, saying “All the power’s in the hands of the people rich enough to buy it” .
The Clash’s music continued to be inherently political. Their second studio album, London Calling, brought punk rock to the masses in 1979. The title track ominously suggests that the threat of war is very much still looming, and the rest of the album comments on other social issues from famine to nuclear annihilation. By now, the Clash was leading the punk movement on both sides of the Atlantic, eventually becoming more popular in the United States than the UK.
Unlike many of the artists of the time, the Clash developed their music to “fit the rhythm of the lyrics”, said guitarist Mick Jones, not the other way around. Their music was written to have “the urgency of a news report”, commenting quite explicitly on current events. A favorite song of mine, and one of their most popular, “Rock the Casbah”, is a playful track about the persecution of Iranian people for listening to popular music off their 1982 Album Combat Rock. The song represents the band’s rebellious character- resisting persecution through music. “Rocking the Casbah” is rising up against oppression, and jamming out.
If nothing else, The Clash asks you to get your head out of the sand. Indifference is out, action is in. They functioned under no law but their own and knew nothing of censorship. We have a lot to learn from The Clash’s unapologetic resistance.
