Strummer was the main songwriter and frontman for The Clash, promoted by its label, CBS, as “the only band that matters.” To me, that marketing hype was eerily predictive.
It’s hard to resist comparing Strummer to another pop star who made a reputation as an advocate for social justice, John Lennon. I was there during the Vietnam War, and Lennon was late to the party, wearing his peacenik vestments only after they became fashionable, with very few rallying cries in his songs other than “Imagine.” But he was a Beatle, and as such, larger than life. Lennon decided to use the bully pulpit given to him by fame to stage publicity stunts like his “bed-in” to call for peace. Good enough ...
Strummer carved his status from a bedrock of activism and wrote some of the most compelling and enduring anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist anthems yet.
Consider the opening of “Know Your Rights,” recorded 36 years ago as if commissioned by Black Lives Matter:
This is a public service announcement
With guitar
Know your rights
All three of them
Number one
You have the right not to be killed
Murder is a crime
Unless it was done
By a policeman
Or an aristocrat
Oh, know your rights
Some things never change …
Written in 1979, just as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were starting to make right-wing nationalism the next big thing, “Clampdown” sounds as if it had been written after the Charlottesville debacle last year. A fierce critic of predatory capitalism (isn’t that redundant?), Strummer wrote one his finest lines here:
The men at the factory are old and cunning
You don't owe nothing, so boy get runnin'
It's the best years of your life they want to steal
Now it’s the predatory lending industry that wants to steal the best years of their lives from college graduates, so boy get runnin’ …
"Clampdown" is a soundtrack for both Britain and American in 2018:
What are we gonna do now?
Taking off his turban, they said, is this man a Jew?
'Cause they're working for the clampdown
They put up a poster saying we earn more than you!
When we're working for the clampdown
We will teach our twisted speech
To the young believers
We will train our blue-eyed men
To be young believers
The judge said five to ten-but I say double that again
I'm not working for the clampdown
No man born with a living soul
Can be working for the clampdown
Kick over the wall 'cause government's to fall
How can you refuse it?
Let fury have the hour, anger can be power
D'you know that you can use it?
The voices in your head are calling
Stop wasting your time, there's nothing coming
Only a fool would think someone could save you
The men at the factory are old and cunning
You don't owe nothing, so boy get runnin'
It's the best years of your life they want to steal
You grow up and you calm down
You're working for the clampdown
You start wearing the blue and brown
You're working for the clampdown
So you got someone to boss around
It makes you feel big now
You drift until you brutalize
Make your first kill now
In these days of evil Presidentes
Working for the clampdown
But lately one or two has fully paid their due
For working for the clampdown
This song, so prescient, so chilling, speaks more loudly today than the protest of the selfie celebrities.
Strummer’s lyrics get more timely by the day. Just this week, the government of the United States began proceedings to deport more than 8,000 refugees from Vietnam who were accepted into the U.S. before 1995. Back in 1982, when the carnage and nihilism of the American role in Vietnam were still fresh, Strummer wrote this cruelly poignant verse in “Straight to Hell”:
When it's Christmas out in Ho Chi Minh City
Kiddie say papa papa papa papa pappa-san, take me home
See me got
Photo photo photograph of you and mamma mamma mamma-san
Of you and mamma mamma mamma-san
Let me tell you 'bout your blood, bamboo kid
It ain't Coca-Cola, it's rice
It’s easy to see why The Clash, thanks to Joe Strummer, are still the only band that matters.
(Photo by John Coffey, 1980)
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