Monday Music: The Clash Offers a PSA — With Guitars
”Know Your Rights” Feels Even More Timely Than When It Was Released in 1982
Adding another song to the #AgeofTrump and #Resist playlist.
The test of a great song is whether it lasts. The Clash’s “Know Your Rights,” the opening track and lead single from the band’s Combat Rock album, is a great song.
The song is a satirical assault on privilege and the false promises offered to the downtrodden, to the rights they confer but limit. “This is a public service announcement — with guitars!” declares as it opens, before moving into reggae/rockabilly rave up territory.
“Know your rights/ All three of them.”
Listening today, I can’t help but be reminded of what we have been witnessing on television in recent months: the images of federal immigration officers in masks kidnapping college students and other immigrants.
“Know your rights / These are your rights.”
The song was released in 1982. Ronald Reagan was president. Maggie Thatcher was prime minister in Great Britain. Conservatism was reigning and reining in the rights of citizens and tying their access to government assistance to “Investigation, humiliation / And if you cross your fingers / Rehabilitation.”
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There is not a lot that can be said at this point about the self-proclaimed “only band that matters.”
They were truly revolutionary, starting from pub-rock roots (listen to Joe Strummer’s early band The 101ers) and moving through what we now think of as punk to an attitude-driven, polyglot sound.
They were political and danceable and funny and angry. And they still matter, maybe more than at anytime since their dissolution following Combat Rock. (Album number six, Cut The Crap, was recorded sans Mick Jones and lacked the punch or feeling of necessity of their first five. To my ears, it isn’t The Clash and should be thought of as Strummer’s first and worst solo project.)
Combat Rock was controversial when it was released in 1982, but not for the reasons one might assume. Spawning two megahits — “Rock the Casbah” and “Should I Stay or Should I Go” — fans of the band accused them of selling out.
Combat Rock, though, was part of the band’s natural evolution. Its seeds were in the experiments of Sandinista! and Black Market Clash EP, and can be found on each of their records. Their first album (really a collection of singles) often had a ska undercurrent, a Jamaican swing that separated it from other punk bands. This was more pronounced on Give ‘Em Enough Rope and fully flowered on London Calling — one of the five or 10 best rock records ever made. London Calling spawned hits, and if The Clash had been interested in selling out, they would’ve issued a kind of London Calling 2. Instead they issued Sandinista! a crazy, sprawling experiment in sound and texture spread across three LPs.
Combat Rock refines the funk and dub, tightens the lyrics, and lands punch after punch on the chin of empire. Think of it as Abbey Road and Sandinista! as the white album.
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As with any great record, it is the opener that sets the tone, the theme. And Combat Rock’s theme was the depravity of empire, its treatment of immigrants and ht spoof, its militarism and strategic use of violence. It’s what makes their songs so important now, as fascism has burst through the doors.