There’s more to “punk” than simply the sound aesthetic – generally short tracks played with fast beats, raucous noise and aggressively shouted vocals. There’s the general garage band lack of polish as a deliberate snub of the slickly produced commercial rock. There’s the grungy street look – torn jeans and leather jackets. And there’s the iconoclasm of the lyrics.
It feels like the British punk scene is more willing to upset the establishment than the American. While Ramones and New York Dolls (and to an extent The Dictators) basically take Fifties teen rock and make it ironic, The Clash take aim at social inequality, race riots, unemployment and general urban decay. In 1976 there had been racially-motivated riots at the Notting Hill Carnival. The situation in Northern Ireland was worsening. Britain was still suffering from the effects of a global recession which Prime Minister Jim Callaghan was trying to address by asking trade unions to accept lower wages. Into this background step The Clash.
Beneath the thrashing tunes, there are some biting lyrics by the two frontmen, Joe Strummer and Mick Jones. Career Opportunities is a bitterly ironic track about unemployment. White Riot is a call to arms to the disenfranchised white youth to rise up, not against the black youth but against “the people rich enough to buy [all the power]”, calling for the same passion for social justice in white youth as there is in black youth.
Remote Control takes aim at faceless bureaucrats who tried to ban Clash concerts, and Garageland is a swipe at critics who dismissed them as a garage band. There’s a delicious feel of the establishment people running damage control by trying to paint punk as a threat to society, and just wait until we get to the hilarious Bill Grundy interview with The Sex Pistols.
A little goes a long way with punk, for me, but there are some standout tracks on here. White Riot and Garageland are probably the best examples of the punk sound of The Clash, while the longer track Police And Thieves is a cover of a Lee “Scratch” Perry track, one of the first to blend reggae and rock forms and prefiguring the Two-Tone Ska sound that is on the horizon.
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