For rock's last angry band, life at the top has not exactly been a left-wing luau. In Britain, where their only real crime has been falling out of fashion, the Clash is scorned by a cynical press drunk on funk and futurism, and by their own punk progeny, the Oi! bands, for selling out to Yankee commercial interests. At least that is how
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the group's foes perceive the panmusical daring, global political concerns and mature thrash of the 1980 double album
London Calling and last year's six-sided
Sandinista!Here in Reagan country, the Clash has had immortality thrust upon them. American critics hail them as rock's articulate revolutionary conscience, while converted heavy-metal youngbloods see in the band's maverick social stance and awesome stage firepower the Rolling Stones they never had. In short, the Clash is caught between their best intentions and a very hard place.
But the message of Combat Rock–the Clash's fifth album and a snarling, enraged, yet still musically ambitious collection of twelve tight tracks on a single disc–is pop hits and press accolades be damned. This record is a declaration of real-life emergency, a provocative, demanding document of classic punk anger, reflective questioning and nerve-wracking frustration. It is written in songwriter-guitarists Joe Strummer and Mick Jones' now-familiar rock Esperanto, ranging from the locomotive disco steam of "Overpowered by Funk" and the frisky Bo Diddley strut of "Car Jamming" to the mutant-cabaret sway of the LP's chilling coda, "Death Is the Star." And like every Clash record from 1977's "White Riot" on, it carries the magnum force of the group's convictions in the bold rhythmic punch of bassist Paul Simonon and drummer Topper Headon and the guitar-army bash of Strummer and Jones. Yet Combat Rock's overwhelming sense of impending doom suggests the Clash still have no pat answer to the age-old musical question: after sounding the alarm, what more can a rock & roll band do?
That crisis of confidence only spurs the band on. A desperate spirit rings loud and clear in Strummer's asthmatic coyote howl, "This is a public service announcement ... with guita-a-h!," which detonates the album's opening salvo, "Know Your Rights." Over Simonon and Headon's martial crunch, and punctuated by Jones' rubbery Duane Eddy-in-hell guitar break, Strummer tries satiric outrage on for size. "You have the right," he spits, "to free speech/As long as you're not dumb enough to actually try it." The joke gets a little lighter in "Rock the Casbah," a smart-alecky, funk-inflected romp complete with snappy hook and spry party piano, about the banning of pop music by Moslem fundamentalists in Iran. But the meaning is clear. Having rights and exercising them are two different things. And replacing one oppressor with another does not a revolution make.
It's not surprising, then, that the Clash are so taken with outlaw ethics, marked here by "Sean
