Let Fury Have the Hour

by Antonino D'Ambrosio

  To identify the way in which punk, and specifically the Clash, helped precipitate a permanent revolution I want to use a remarkable book by the French philosopher Stathis Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx. Kouvelakis, through French theorists like Michel Foucault, is concerned with restoring the immediacy of revolution, seeing this process as a rupture that tears down the old without positing a map of the new. What is revolutionary, Kouvelakis claims, paraphrasing Lenin, is the capacity to “recognize the fundamental problem of our time at the time and place of its first appearance . . . [the fact that] every question of the day—precisely as a question of the day—at the same time [becomes] a fundamental problem of the revolution.”1 This capacity to explore the present, to be immediately of it, marks the first Clash album in the way that, Kouvelakis argues, in the previous century, characterized the work of the German poet Heinrich Heine and the early work of Karl Marx. Heine turned his back on an age which, as a reaction to the upheaval of the French Revolution, craved “harmony, social peace, and political moderation”2 and portrayed, in poems like “The Silesian Weavers” and “The Migratory Rats,” the insatiable hunger of the workers who in the first poem tell Germany its doom approaches, its “shroud is on our loom” as ominously “we weave.”3 In the second, the workers take the form of rats who destroy everything in front of them and who will not be appeased by politics or philosophy: “Soup-logic only and reason-dumplings/Will silence their hungry stomach rumblings.”4

  The last word on the state of permanent readiness as permanent revolution came from a Marx just beginning his career in activism and philosophy who wrote that the lack of an exact idea of what the future ought to be “is precisely the advantage of the new trend: We do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want to find the new world through criticism of the old one.”5 Marx later crystallized this state of being in the now when he stated in The German Ideology that “communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”6 Marx, at least the early Marx, remember, was not a Marxist. Whoever suspected, though, that he was at heart a protopunk?

  ENGLISH CIVIL WAR

  The Clash emerged at a moment in 1976–1977, well after the end of the 1960s, when that generation’s rebellion was over, and when another generation’s, that in reaction to Thatcherite England, was just beginning. The U.S. bicentennial in 1976 and the Queen’s Jubilee in Britain in 1977 would be springboards for the repression to come in the Thatcher-Reagan era, and the Clash thrashed violently against the encroaching passivity these events promoted. The Queen’s Jubilee, celebrating, as Clash commentator David Quantick put it, “twenty-five years of grinding the proletariat’s face into the dirt with an iron heel,” would be greeted by the Clash’s first album, a veritable compendium of the grief of working-class English youth.7 Thatcher herself, crowned queen the next year, is to usher in, as Reagan will in the United States, the post-Fordist era which featured the dissolving of the labor-business pact that had held for thirty years with an attack on the very legitimacy of unions (Reagan’s first official act was to smash the air traffic controllers’ union) as well as the accompanying large-scale exporting of the industrial base of both countries to other areas of the globe in a worldwide corporate “race to the bottom” in order to find the lowest possible wage.8

  Both the form and style of the first album, simply titled The Clash, announced a break with rock ’n’ roll as usual and an absolute identification with the fate of the group’s audience. This album is one of the great working-class statements of the last century. The Beatles had opened rock ’n’ roll content up beyond the love song, but punk and the Clash restored the purity of the form in their return to the short blunt bursts of the early rock ’n’ roll era. The content, though, was radically different than the silly love songs of early rock ’n’ roll. “Janie Jones” (“I’m in love with a rock ’n’ roll world . . . I’m in love with Janie Jones world”), the name of a madam the punks frequented, outlines both the attraction and alienation of sex as an outlet for the frustrations of the workplace. “Career Opportunities” (“Do you want to be, do you really want to be a cop? the ones that never knock”) details the dead end that English working-class youth faced, leading an earlier generation back to the grind of the factory as depicted by the working-class character (Albert Finney) giving up his rebellion, getting engaged, and going to work at the end of the 1960s film Saturday Night, Sunday Morning. In Strummer’s and Jones’s generation, when the factory itself is disappearing, this frustration leads to the junkie’s clutches, the dole, the army, or prison, expressed in the song “Hate and War,” “the only thing we have today.” This critique of dead-end work has its complement, expressed in “48 Hours,” in the way the group sees the weekend, the two-day reprieve. Their depiction of “leisure” recalls Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique in “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” where it is the frantic other of work, recreating in its rote quality the pattern of the factory.9 This totalizing critique is best summed up in “Remote Control” (“Don’t make no noise . . . Don’t make no money to get out of here”) whose group-chanted bridge is simply the word RE-PRES-SION.

  If the album’s content is dystopian, its form belies this content and suggests the beginnings of a way out. Its language is cockney, a working-class argot, so thick as to be often indecipherable for an outsider and with no accompanying words on the album jacket. It celebrates language as the collective wisdom of the working class and makes no pronunciation concessions to the American market, as British groups often do. The choruses are often anthemic, sung or chanted by the group, not just by the frontman, Strummer. They represent the collective element in the music that both challenges the standard rock ’n’ roll division of lead singer and band and presents the chorus sentiments as group (or class) rather than individual statements. Musically, Jones’s guitar slashes through the Clash’s early tunes in staccato bursts of anger, a buzz saw that destroys the intricate harmonies of rock in its now fossilized stage. Yet in key moments, especially in “Police and Thieves,” the guitar plaintively, here in an unadorned solo, plays the melodic line and in a deeper way not only echoes Strummer’s anger and hurt in the vocal, but also suggests that there are reservoirs of feeling beyond anger and hurt which may yet be tapped.

  There was still another layer to the Clash. Though it manifested itself imminently, that is, grew out of the specific conditions of their moment, it would enable their revolutionary message to resound across the world. This was their connection to Caribbean youth in Britain through reggae. Strummer had always shown an interest in black musical forms and black politics, with an early song in his band the 101ers (named after the address of a squatter house where the band lived) being a rhythm and blues riff about a “big blue policeman” and his “little black book.”10

  The defining moment of this connection occurred at the Notting Hill riots in 1976. Strummer and the group’s bass player, Paul Simonon, watched as black youth threw bricks at cops expressing their frustration that would be so much a part of the album the Clash would write in the wake of this event. “White Riot” (“I want a riot, white riot, a riot a’ me own”), their signature song, was written in solidarity with the event. The John Bulls running on the cover of the first album to quash the actual black riot are, in the imagination of the band, alternately running to quell the rebellion the Clash urge on their audience. The secret history of punk is that the movement was born not out of the stick-it-in-your-face attack on the Queen’s Jubilee waged by the Sex Pistols (“God Save the Queen and Her Fascist Regime”) but rather out of a transposing into white circles of the anger evidenced by black youth at Notting Hill the year before.11

  Reggae, as Dick Hebdige puts it, not only “carried the necessary conviction, the political bite so obviously missing in most contemporary white music” through its “aestheti
cs born of suffering,”12 but also, through its use of patois, a language spoken “beneath the master’s comprehension,” made no concession to an outside audience and seemed to be, much as the working-class punks conceived themselves, a “foreign body which threatened British culture from within.”13

  Both black and white youth were in the crosshairs of the British imperial system, but among the punk bands it was the Clash who perceived this most directly. In “Police and Thieves” (“in the street, fighting the nation with their guns and ammunition”) the Clash take Junior Murvin’s melancholy reggae song and infuse it with punk anger through Strummer’s accusing vocals and Jones’s slashing guitar. It’s the only song on the first album in which the Clash go into a “jam,” the only song over three minutes, or as they later say in “Hitsville in the U.K.,” over “two minutes fifty-nine.” In the song proper and the chanting over the rhythm that extends the musical interlude at the end of the song, the Clash carve out a space not only for a reconciliation of black and white youth, which in its liberal moment begat punk’s Rock Against Racism, but which also attempted, in its more radical moment, to forge a bridge across the interracial chasm that would lead both groups to see their common class enemy and take action against it. The later “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais” expresses this sentiment literally, but also suggests in its irony that the time for its coming to fruition may have passed: “White youth, black youth, better find another solution (other than random violence), Why not call up Robin Hood and ask him for some wealth distribution?”

  The Clash’s interplay with reggae persisted throughout their career, with Jones and Strummer writing about their trip to Jamaica in “Safe European Home” (on Give ’Em Enough Rope) and using both the ska beat and the language of Jamaican toasters in their later ode to working-class solidarity on London Calling’s “Wrong ’Em Boyo” (“It’s wrong to cheat a tryin’ man”). The interplay was acknowledged on the reggae side when studio impresario Lee “Scratch” Perry, who engineered the Clash’s “Complete Control,” had their likenesses inscribed in a mural in his Black Ark recording studio in Jamaica and later when Bob Marley responded to the Clash’s creation of what was termed “punk dub” by recording his own “Punky Reggae Party.”14

  CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

  The second way, besides their representation of the milieu of working-class youth, that the Clash pursued their immanent critique was as artists, in their reaction to their own marketing and commodification by the record industry. Like the Sex Pistols, the Clash participated in a generalized questioning by the punk movement of all phases of the record company mediation between the groups and their audience. The Clash continually made their dealings with this marketing machine an issue in their music.

  In “Garageland,” in responding to an infamous review by the orthodox musical press claiming they should be locked in the garage they came from with an engine running, the band viewed this homicidal suggestion as a badge of honor. “We’re a garage band, we come from Garageland,” Strummer snarls on the chorus, then he fills in the class aspect of what it means to be a garage band: “We don’t want to know where the rich are goin’. We don’t what to know what the rich are doin’.”

  Two later singles extend their critique of the musical industry. When CBS released “Remote Control” as the first single from their debut album without consulting the band, they wrote “Complete Control,” perhaps their greatest song. The song starts with a series of orders by the record company each of which beginning with “They say,” equating the corporate “they” with the other powerful forces over the lives of working-class youth detailed in the song’s predecessor “Remote Control.” Here the Clash pose their most formally collective alternative to this control in the music itself which, with its fast-clipped singsong pace and raunchy call and response meter, is designed to duplicate the feeling of the band on the road; out there, together, taking on all comers. The song also introduces the note of irony in characterizing the culture industry which will be picked up in their next musical encounter with it. They catalog the ways corporate conglomerate CBS is attempting to manage them and conclude by snarling at CBS’s “complete control even over this song,” recognizing that even their attack against the record company will be used by it for profit.

  Finally, in “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais,” the last great song from their early revolutionary period, they deal with the larger question of commodification. Noting the process of punk becoming commercialized in a way that is echoed later in rap’s old school/new school debate (“The new groups are not concerned with what there is to be learned. They’re always fightin’, looking for a good place under the lightin’”), they then address the larger issue of the power of a corporate media that is just beginning to accelerate the process of centralization. In so doing they also raise the issue of the dawning penchant for product placement. “They [the punks] got Burton suits/Hah, ain’t it funny/Turning rebellion into money.” The question of cultural cooptation is the central problematic that both the punks and those who follow them in rap and in global hip-hop will deal with and it is the Clash that raise that question most directly and eloquently.

  The next phase of their career, post-1978, is their interaction with the American market, an interaction that, in the end, destroys them. The changes start in the second album, Give ’Em Enough Rope, where Blue Oyster Cult producer Sandy Pearlman teaches them how to adapt their critique to the American market, where violent overthrow is suggested, not stated, and where class consciousness must be concealed, as Dick Hebdige says, in style. The album is still interesting and Jones manages in “Stay Free” to use the trope of the love song to describe the parallel between him and a buddy who ends up in jail. The “Stay Free” of the title means literally his hope for his ex-con mate and metaphorically his consciousness that to live a working-class life and not adapt to other values is to stay free.

  The next album, London Calling, is pitched to the American market. It’s a perfectly awful mishmash of musical styles, only finally redeemed in the throwaway uncredited last song, “Train in Vain,” which proved that the group was capable of writing a perfect pop song. The distance traveled between the first and third album can be measured by “London Calling,” the title track, which suggests a phony, Hollywood blockbuster, post-Armageddon city, a fantasy dystopia which contrasts sharply to the first album’s “London’s Burning,” a celebration of the possibility of immanent revolution and of a potential utopia realizable because of the recognition of the dystopic elements of the present. The accommodation to the American market, and to their own global marketing, reaches its nadir in Strummer-Jones’s last album together, Combat Rock. “Rock the Casbah,” which peaks at number seven on the American charts, ostensibly about democracy in the Middle East, goes on to become one of the anthems of the American troops in the first Gulf War, where the song is easily translated as a rationale for an imperial attack on the oil resources of that region.

  The Clash eventually succumbed to a commodity process which in its present moment is all encompassing. As John Harris says, “Put bluntly Anglo-American popular music is among globalisation’s most useful props. . . . mainstream music, whether it’s metal, rap, teen-pop, or indie-rock, cannot help but stand for a depressingly conservative set of values: conspicuous consumption, the primacy of the English language, the implicit acknowledgement that America is probably best.”15

  STAY FREE

  But the spirit of the first Clash album and the early singles lives on and migrates. If for punk, reggae is a “present absence,”16 a form around which much of punk composes itself, then for rap, beginning in the Bronx in 1979, a year after the end of the first Clash period, punk was a present or structuring absence as well. Punk taught rappers that they could challenge the record industry and create hits outside the system, that music with a rawer edge could succeed, and that revolutionary immediacy was possible in a commercial art form. Chuck D, the leader of the most politically and culturally
conscious rap group of the era, Public Enemy, credited punk with “showing me that music can be a powerful social force and . . . must be used to challenge the system.”17

  At the same time that rap in the United States was domesticated, transformed in the marketplace into the raunchy but apolitical gangster rap, the movement spread across the globe and returned to the local immediacy of British punk in the 1970s and American rap in the 1980s. As Tony Mitchell relates in Global Noise, models and idioms from hip-hop in the United States have combined in other countries with “local musical idioms and vernaculars to produce syncretic combinations of African-American influences and local indigenous elements.” This form is promoting a worldwide culture of rebellion that, paradoxically, grows out of an absolute commitment by its artists to expressing the local conditions of their repression. Global rappers, the children of Chuck D, but also of Strummer and Jones, in this punk/hip-hop nation include antiglobal communists in Italy, Basque separatists in Spain, Maori street rappers in New Zealand, and the militant Islamists of the Palestinian rap group Shehadin (Martyrs) who advocate armed opposition to Israeli oppression.18