Word: clashingly
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...around London, the Clash sings straight to-and, in a sense, even speaks for-a generation of working-class kids not only cut off from the social mainstream but disaffected from the smug, cushy sounds of most contemporary pop. Stateside, the audience is different: students, trendy punks, artists and camp followers who cruise the punk periphery like tourists looking to score a season box for the apocalypse. No wonder that, after only the first American date, Joe Strummer was already sounding a little homesick...
...England, the lashing, defiant sound of the Clash has scored well on the charts. Their songs drive hard and mean business. Just the titles give a taste of the action: Last Gang in Town, Guns on the Roof, Drug-Stabbing Time. In the U.S., air play is scarce. Easy enough to figure that stations programmed for the lulling sounds of California rock or the dull throb of disco might not take to a Clash tune like Tommy Gun. There is even some civic concern about violence at the concerts, to which Strummer replies, "There's as much violence...
...that matter, the Sex Pistols, with whom the Clash is continually compared, although, as Headon says, "we're nothing like the Sex Pistols. We don't set out to shock people through being sick onstage or through self-mutilation." Jones elaborates: "I never was one for sticking a pin in me nose." The Clash, though hardly elegant instrumentalists, makes far better crafted music than the Pistols ever did. The sheets of sound they let loose have the cumulative effect of a mugging, but the songs, full of threat and challenge, never mean to menace. They are, rather, about...
Although the Clash assaults some familiar enemies (cops, narcs, soldiers and teachers), the group has no safe targets - not even themselves. Cheapskate is a bit of ironic bemusement about rock stardom, both its perks ("Just because we're in a group you think we're stinking rich/ 'N' we all got model girls shedding every stitch") and its permanence ("I'll get out my money and make a bet/ That I'll be seeing you down the launderette"). A fever-blister rocker called Safe European Home concerns the lads' attempts to seek...
Mick Jones, who writes most of the Clash repertoire with Strummer, hopes that their music can be "an il lumination." Such an ambition might seem unsuitably lofty but for the fact that the group comes from a tradition that uses music not only as an outlet but as a force, an effective instrument of social change. "The record company's making out we're politicians, and that's a load of stuff," sneers Strummer, but Jones may cut a little closer when he recalls the title of his school song, Servants of the State...