Ghetto Defendant—The Clash
#365Songs: April 21
It’s Day 6 of #ClashWeek, which means I only have one official album left to pull from. That would be Combat Rock.
Like Sandinista! before it, Combat Rock is polarizing.
To some, it’s a sellout. To others, it’s a masterpiece.
I’m with the “masterpiece” crowd. Calling Combat Rock a sellout is ridiculous. Find me even one hit song besides “Rock the Casbah” that evidences a similarly heightened socio-political awareness, and perhaps I’ll change my tune. But until then, we simply have to acknowledge that The Clash were landing hits even as they were landing blows, and they were doing so in a way that few artists had ever done. It wouldn’t really be until the arrival of Public Enemy that we’d see anything even remotely similar. No surprise that Chuck D is a fan — he even narrated Stay Free: The Story of The Clash.
And if your sellout argument rests on the existence of “Should I Stay Or Should I Go,” I don’t know what to tell you. Sure, it’s a pop gem. But so was “Train in Vain.” But seriously, I think this is one of those songs where you can’t just go by the recording itself, or the lyric. You have to experience it.
Through a sort of odd series of influencing factors when I was a kid, I actually saw the video for “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” before I heard it on record. It was a live version filmed at Shea Stadium, and it was just absolutely fucking incredible. The band plays the song about twice as fast as the album version, and the passion they display is just fucking otherwordly. I could watch that shot of the band walking down the halls on the way to the stage a thousand times and never not be moved — they move like gods. It’s rock and roll in all its fiery glory, tearing down the walls, burning the flags, raising the roof, and setting the people free. Watch it for yourself, and then you tell me if this is a goddamn sellout:
Choosing one favorite song from this album is impossible, and I’m not going to do it. Instead, I’ve picked one that, for me, is just more evidence of the band’s artistry and courage.
“Ghetto Defendant” features a spoken-word companion lyric delivered by Allen Ginsberg, and you’re welcome to point out to me where in the pop song rulebook it says that including spoken word poetry from a gay, Buddhist, beat poet is a recipe for success.
The song itself is absolutely haunting, and contains some of Strummer’s most beautiful lines:
Hungry darkness of living
Who will thirst in the pit?
She spent a lifetime deciding
How to run from it
Once fate had a witness
And the years seemed like friends
Now her child has a dream
But it begins like it ends
Ghetto defendant
It is heroin pity
Not tear gas nor baton charge
That stops you taking the city
While Ginsburg’s mantra-like recitations start out in a place of divergence from Strummer’s narrative lyric, the two come together in a brilliantly hazy evocation of poetic tragedy, with Strummer singing the following …
The ghetto prince of gutter poets
Was bounced out of the room
By the bodyguards of greed
For disturbing the tomb
His words like flamethrowers
Burnt the ghettos in their chests
His face was painted whiter
And he was laid to rest
… as Ginsburg makes clear over the course of his poetry that the subject is Arthur Rimbaud.
As melancholically gorgeous as are both Strummer’s words and his vocal, it is Ginsburg who delivers the penultimate gut punch:
Guatemala
Honduras
Poland
100 years war
TV re-run invasion
Death squad Salvador
Afghanistan
Meditation
Old Chinese flu
Kick junk
What else
Can a poor worker do?
Musically, everyone in the band is at their best. In addition to his remarkable vocals, Strummer also delivers a stark harmonica line that sounds almost like one of Augustus Pablo’s stirring melodica lines. Paul Simonon, who is oddly not the bassist on some of The Clash’s strongest material (Rock the Casbah, for example), delivers a perfectly reggae-influenced pattern here, while Topper Headon is, as always, the master of the rhythm section, providing both a lid-tight groove and an array of percolating percussion layers. As for Mick Jones, he’s ultimately the real architect of the song’s soundscape. His opening single-note guitar lines immediately establish the mournful incisiveness that defines the whole track with an almost sitar-like atonality.
It’s really just a brilliant song, and it stands as irrefutable proof that Combat Rock is not only not a sellout, it’s the opposite of one. It is art for art’s sake.
What often goes far too unspoken about Combat Rock is the fact that it is, fundamentally, an anti-war album.
In 2024, with a global populace that has grown ever more morally anemic as it continues to suckle at the teat of a monolithic media cow whose blood runs with gun money and oxycontin, it is easy to forget there was a time when humans were appalled by war, and when artists captured that horror and returned it to us in the form of art that kept us aware. 1982, the year when Combat Rock was released, was only seven years out from the official end of the Vietnam War. Fast forward to 2018, which was seven years out from the official end of the Iraq War. Can you remember the bands at the top of the so-called “rock” genre that year? Imagine Dragons, Panic at the Disco, Foster the People, Twenty One Pilots, Mumford & Sons, Greta Van Fleet … shall I go on?
No, I shall not.
The point is, The Clash were profoundly haunted by the Vietnam War — its aftermath and effect on the rest of the world — and they channeled that feeling into an album of extraordinary power, and that is exactly what artists should be doing, and it’s something that is in danger of being lost as our “major” artists are increasingly just shills for the capitalist machine.
So take a moment and go back and listen to an album that is the antithesis of selling out, and remind yourself how it feels to be energized to action by music that reminds you that you need to believe in the world if you’re going to save it from itself.
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