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Lord Lucan

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Re: Cope vs. The Clash

Dec 14, 2009, 22:47

"And so, throughout 1978, exotic Post-Punk groups grew up totally in defiance of that Newly composed revisionist Punk Rock Rule Book (“Thou shalt not wear this… thou shalt not listen to that…” “I fucking will, mate, and with flares on if I wish.”). I ain’t gonna name, blame & shame anybody specific for what happened … oh, all right then, yes I will … it was Uncle Joe Stalin, sorry, Uncle Joe Strummer who caused the schism. Yup, once that posh too-old cunt had made his crass (memories of ‘Power in a Union’?) appeal to ‘Punk Rockers!’ on whichever Clash single it was, up sprang a whole new generation of newly-uniformed Strummer Jugen, all desperate to wear only the gear what Joe wore, to sing only of the subjects what Joe sang.3 Posh to the point of having been a public school educated diplomat’s son, and at least old enough to remember Woody Guthrie, Strummer reached out to the working classes in the manner all British Poshies still think best, i.e.: act macho, slurp your tea & and deny your past. And so, after 1977’s Jubilee chaos, the vivid Punk Vision of the Pistols/Clash/Buzzcocks was thereafter absorbed into so-called Punk Rock, a tweaked Men-Only, Shi-ite version of its original Vision, almost always thereafter to be comprised of obligatory 2-minute-hate songs, pub terrace anthems, 4 leather jackets, 4 pairs of scuffed 501s. And whatever Punk had done randomly during 1977, Punk Rock wished ritualistically to re-enact forever thereafter AND demand parity with the form’s originators."

(...)

"it (The Pop Group)showed up the newly-released second Clash LP GIVE ‘EM ENOUGH ROPE for precisely what it was: old-fashioned. So fucking old fashioned, it coulda been a biplane … or a Blue Öyster Cult Record, Sheesh; SECRET TREATIES certainly comes to mind. Sure, that sounds classic enough now but we’d all cut our hair and followed Foul-mouthed Johnny to get as far away from that shit as was possible. Old fashioned. Old fashioned fucking rock’n’roll they served us, and were shameless enough to try and pass it off as new… and – far worse still – succeeded in hoodwinking most suckers!!! The look of rebellion, that’s all the majority wanted. The look. I still remember standing in Probe Records the day that sad slab came out and thinking “You fucking sell-outs, with your fucking staccato BÖC drums and late Mott choruses. After the thrill of fucking off every adult in Jubilee land the previous year, who the fuck wanted this bloated & too-long-in-the-recording American FM brain-rot? That the LP’s reception in the USA gained the band Album of the Year awards from such arch-bastions of Kapitalism as ROLLING STONE and TIME magazines is all the evidence you need to see just how far Uncle Joe’s band would stoop to conquer. And after releasing that crock of old shite, ex-rockers everywhere seized their opportunity to come in from the cold, Strummer’s decision to Pearlmanize the Clash inevitably endorsing the return of all those hoary old ‘70s big rock riffs again, this time punked up not in any musical manner but by the simple donning of a motorbike leather. People didn’t even bother cutting their hair anymore. Was it punk, was it Thin Lizzy?"

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"So rather than re-educating the UK masses as he’d blathered on about for so long, Strummer’s pro-US obsessions facilitated all those Fifth Columnists who churlishly wished only to prolong the Jubilee year’s Punk festivities, and – worser still – prolong it in a tart, bowdlerized form, all gesture and self-parody. So when Suicide – darlings of the UK Post-Punk scene from Day 1 – supported the Clash on their 1978 British tour, parochial meatheads to a man rained bottles down on them for providing no evidence whatsoever of being Punk Rockers (no geetars, no drums, no motorbike leathers, WTF?). What a tragic episode. A musical Holocaust. At the time, I was depressed as all hell and felt outrageously betrayed. Outrageously. And after all those fucking promises, all we got from the Clash were rock’n’roll bromides and Yank imagery. Remembering those Clash/Suicide shows, even today, surely nothing better illustrates the division between what Punk’s experiment coulda been, and what it was now forced to become: merely fast, angry rock played by J. Stalin’s proles."

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"From the evidence contained within THE FUTURE’S UNWRITTEN, Julien Temple’s excellent Joe Strummer documentary profile, it seems to me that Joe’s abandonment of his role as Generalissimo of Punk in favour of popstardom in the USA was a decision that still baffled even him, poor sod. However, in the cold light of 2009CE, it must be remembered that J. Strummer was still only mid-late 20s when all these decisions had to be made. However decrepit he seemed to me at the time, that’s still young to shoulder such a heavy weight of Cultural Responsibility. That he’d had the sleight of hand and sheer personal Pol Pot-ness to blank all his Commune mates from the 101 house in order better to fit in with the much younger Punk scene suggests to me that Strummer would ultimately have demanded of himself a prime starring role in whatever next-big-thing transpired musically, and most serpently didn’t wanna have to take a worthy secretarial role – even as General Secretary, ha – in the greatest musical revolution since 1967, and who could blame him? Why play the important but temporary Trotsky to J. Rotten’s Lenin, when you could be off on your own with your heroic other being Stalin, re-writing the route as you go along, even assassinating your erstwhile ‘kamarad’ Mickhail Jonesky. Poor Joe S. Perhaps Tymon Dogg came back at the end as a kind of Beria figure. The jury’s still out on this one."

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Re: Cope vs. The Clash (anthonyqkiernan)

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Re: Cope vs. The Clash (anthonyqkiernan)

Topic Outline:

Cope vs. The Clash – Lord Lucan, Dec 14, 2009, 02:29


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