SANDINISTA NOW!
A working class hero is something to be" John Lennon sang that. He wasn’t, course, he was an observer—a thinker. His songs a record of his thoughts. Yet by the same token perhaps he was very much that, both by background and by action— challenging the old order actively—“The War Is Over.”
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LETTER FROM BRITAIN
Penny Valentine
SANDINISTA NOW!
A working class hero is something to be" John Lennon sang that. He wasn’t, course, he was an observer—a thinker. His songs a record of his thoughts. Yet by the same token perhaps he was very much that, both by background and by action— challenging the old order actively—“The War Is Over.” Way before JacksOn Browne sniffled into his kleenex about male sacrifices Lennon was unself-pitying exploring sexual politics. Yoko brought to him feminism and he was confused by it.. Through songs he raised his own contradictions. By doing that he faced us—male and female alike—with ours. We all listened, accepting and rejecting as we liked. Music is powerful. We take in its messages and sift them about in our brain, however subconsciously. Whether anything but personal experience makes us change the way we think is another matter.
Lennon interviewed. “Look at it this way,” he said. The Clash continue to do so. “A working class hero is something to be” Joe Strummer still has a touch of that about him: “And you’re minding your own business/Carring spare change/You wouldn’t cosh a barber /You’re hungry all the same/
I been very tempted to grab it from the till.” (“Somebody Got Murdered”)
The critics, by and large, thrash Sandinista' here. They consider it self-indulgent, v
’Course, it cost so little to buy, they chortle, so much of it is rubbish, slack, throwaway to fill up vinyl.
The Clash promised way back to keep prices down. They have. Now they’re told they’re not “right on” enough—but they’re naive to keep molding their music with their politics; told to be more experimental—but they should stop filling tracks with tape loops. They’ve been told in print to be everything contradictory yet, please, not to be contradictory themselves.
I like Joe Strummer’s reasons why they called it Sandinista! in the first place (even if they still play so that half the lyrics become swallowed up in a cavalry charge). Better, he thought, to have people actually saying that—maybe even thinking about it, than, say, “Squashed Hedgehogs.” Can’t help liking someone who sees themselves as a newspaper for a bunch of pepple who don’t' take one.
“The Kokane guns of Jamdown town/ The killing clowns/The blood money men/ Are shooting those Washington bullets again. ”
Who else, right now, is writing songs about British and American imperialism? Who else directly acknowledges that reggae is the most powerful music around, comments on the exploitation of one class by another through was on “The Call Up” or puts it into a historical perspective on “Something About England?”
Punk brought a sense of class to rock. Sometimes it exploited it. Art school middle classes singing about dole queues when they weren’t on one. Songs about highrises and poverty are now considered passe (Not another song about rotten living conditions, yawn, that was 1979’s thing, man). The highrises haven’t gone away. Unemployment figures keep going up, social conditions for an even larger portion of society get worse by the day. In these post-punk days there should be more of a clamor about it, yet only Clash are coming up with the goods:
“The wives hate their husbands/And the husbands don’t care/Their children daub slogans to prove they lived there...this room is a cage, it’s like captivity/How can anyone exist in such misery?”
Sure there are problems here. Clash now present their songs from what, }n a sense, has become a traditional structure: commentary that relies on that most traditional of musical forms—melody. To really hear what Clash are saying you almost have to dislocate their music from their lyrics. So despite Clash’s personal politics, which have not only stayed direct but actually grown stronger over the post-punk years, there is the problem about the romance and mythology of rock music here. Their observations, comments and feelings become part of that romantic form with all its ac knowlegdements to rock’s history. They are precariously balanced.
Can rock music change the world? No. Different forms provide different senses of release, information, un-reality (escape) and sometimes a comment on reality.
Personally I’m glad Clash are around. Tom Robinson, who made songs from the barricades, has now, with Sector 27, come off the streets turned rock musician first and foremost, treading a Lou Reed path on occasions, and 'twice—with “Mary Lynr»~. and “Looking At You”—successfully creating urgent pop songs. But he’s gone back to a tradition in which the individual, not the collective experience, is uppermost. Bowie hasn’t come up with one of his major contributions to everybody’s sense of awareness lately. The British experimentalists have come into 1981 floundering a bit. Ian Dury finished last year off playing with Don Cherry, which confused his audience to no end but was a bold political move musically; still his lyrics continued to mold British music hall and traditional rock and roll ethos.
“Imagine” is top of the charts here, other Lennon tracks jostle to fill Up the spaces. It’s a case of nostalgia and record company enterprise at the pressing plants, but maybe people listen a little harder now. Look at the ridiculousness of the cold war, say Clash on “Ivan Meets GI Joe,” look at TV and the way it makes you a consumer in the work trap. I’d rather have Clash making some kind of intervention through rock ’n’ roll about the state of the nation than nothing. And they do it better than most.
