Tuesday, June 21, 2011

The Clash's London Calling

Today I will discuss my favorite album of all time: The Clash's London Calling.

This album was made in 1979, it was a blend of various types of music styles from reggae to pop. It sound's terrible right? A punk album with reggae in it? You may have ideas of punk as everyone walking around with black leather doc martens, spiked hair, and Nazis. That's merely an image, everyone has one or tries to attain one, whether they want to admit it or not.

Punk was much more than its image, it was a collaboration of people saying "fuck everything about 1970's music". Hell, if I was living in the 70's and Fleetwood Mac was on the radio, I don't think I could have handled it either. Simon and Garfunkel?? Billy Joel??  THE EAGLES!?!? FUCK THAT.

As cliche as it sounds, I see punk as the most pure way of expressing yourself. Music should be something you feel, not that you listen or dance to.

"Punk" these days is not what you should believe punk actually is. Punk is more or less is dead. It had a short run in the 70's and sort of died off in the 80's. That's where the post-punk genre came in(I'll talk more about this later on).

Let's dive into the Clash's first and most well known song, London Calling.

Everyone and their fucking mother has heard this song. Every friend's ipod/zune I've went through had this song on it. A lot of people believe this is Clash's best tune. Personally, I think its the worst on the album, but I could have just listened to it too many times.

London Calling the song was influenced by the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. It also speaks of domestic problems in England such as drug use and unemployment.

If anywhere, you should start with this song. It will give you a bit of an idea to what the Clash is really like. But it is after all, a starting point if you have never listened to punk. This is just a taste of punk to get your ears in gear.

In the next post I'll talk about my favorite songs on the London's Calling album.

Here is a link to the song(with lyrics): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lotkzHsIuoA

2 comments:

  1. I love The clash, and this album is by far the best

    ReplyDelete
  2. Classic album. I picked it up on vinyl last month.

    ReplyDelete