Is The Music Calling For A River Of Blood?
The Clash: “Sandinista!” (CBS/Epic)
Before this afternoon, it was about eight years running, maybe nine, since I had last endured a thorough, complete listen of “Sandinista!” I purchased the 3xLP set junior year of high school at Trash American Style in Danbury, CT, a great store that no longer exists. I wanted to see if all the crazy things I read on the internet about one of my new favorite bands was true. To put it easily, you really have to be: a) a record/pop culture nerd, b) an irrational punk enthusiast in daffier high school days, or c) both to really get behind an album like this. Now, even though I’m/was both, “Sandinista!” packs a Vicodin-infused sucker punch that, over the course of a tacitly whopping two and a half hours, doesn’t stop its trajectory of comfortable lunacy. It is like the “The Story of the Vivian Girls” of the music world. Just try and listen in one sitting, I dare you. Where it (mostly) fails as a punk rock record (how seriously can you take the politics of a group of white European guys when they are clearly high as hell and diddling with dub and genres they knew little about?), it succeeds in spades as a work of art that had no precedent before it and whose relevance and audacity, despite itself, has not yet been matched.
On a national, televised, fully consumable frame of reference. Seriously. “White Album”? Trivial dalliances through a group of bored multi-millionaires’ gold-leaf trollop gardens. “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness”? Too bald and sad! “Speakerboxxx / The Love Below”? Nice try, ghetto Beatles! “Back To Basics”? Where do I put my penis? Yawn.. Record-nerd legend has it “Sandinista!” was the Clash’s rebuttal to “The River” by Bruce Springsteen, itself a double-LP offering that only existed because the Clash’s unilaterally successful double “London Calling” actually moved units. It would make sense, then, that one of the lyrics in the opening track of this woozy behemoth would be: “Wave buh-buh-bye to the Boss (sic) / It’s our profit, it’s his loss.” Of course, anyone who knows their history must know this is not a self-fulfilling prophecy. While “Sandinista!” was a success critically, the Clash folded some five or so years later, while Bruce Springsteen could fart in a cup these days and use it to build a new science wing for your school.
Anyway, yes, wave buh-buh-bye to the Boss, sure. The Clash managed to hand Springsteen’s poppy populism back to him in the form of a bloated, confounding mix tape of ethnic sounds that the Dylans and the Ochses of the world would drool over, certainly, but never consider they could make it themselves. Of course, it’s not like Mick Jones and Joe Strummer just made all this shit themselves, relying on all sorts of reggae producers and girlfriends to come in and beef up the WTF-ness of it all. But for the most part, the first track and consequently first single (the clarion call of “Sandinista!”), “The Magnificent Seven”, was made by the band itself, and is a romping, stomping funk explosion with depressed, hilarious lyrics about waking up to a new and pitiable gray-day. Most importantly, it’s rapped. Yes, British socialist punkers came across the sea in a jet liner to try to tell America about hip-hop music in 1981, when most black people didn’t know a thing about it. Take that, Aerosmith. And what is Rev Run doing now? Oh yeah, starring in one of the worst reality shows of all time. What a true revolutionary.
So… best album ever? Believe me, whether or not you want to read two more sentences about this shit, I have a novella’s worth of opinion and wherewithal in this tired goblin noggin of mine that would support such a bold claim. I guess, if you really like music and you really like marijuana, you’ll find something about this beast that will motivate you to some sort of silly social nimbus where you can cry and coo about all the injustices that are beneath you as an upstanding member of the planet, maybe start to daydream about a thick-hipped Nicaraguan native that’s listening to “Junkie Slip” at the exact second you are! For those of us who aren’t druggy losers, the album is pretty much perfect for a long drive anywhere, as it is hecka long (obvs.) and tremendously varied. There’s rock, roots, reggae, hip-hop, samba, calypso, psychedelia, waltzes, and even a genre I can only describe as “Irish cowgraze”. It’s also perfect for something to have on in the background as you draw or write.
If a triple LP falls in front of you at the record store and you don’t give a shit, does it make a sound for other people? This is the question posed by “the only band that matters”™ and aimed at the world at large. You can’t blame a group of stoned superheroes for trying to save music.
