I heard The Clash’s “Rock The Casbah” on the radio this morning. I know this brands me as an ignoramus, but I don’t get the Clash, I never have. I feel about the Clash the way I feel about architecture-I know it’s important, but I just don’t get it-it doesn’t move me at all. Maybe you had to be there. I wasn’t really there for REM-I didn’t start to listen to them until they were huge, though. I don’t know what it is. I don’t get the Clash, though.
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To The Best of Our Knowledge this week was a perfect exploration of music and its meaning, “Coming of Age Through Music”, featuring one of my alltime Fave Raves, Nick Hornby, talking about his new book, “Juliet, Naked”, which I loved.
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The first speaker on TTBOOK, Lavinia Greenlaw, said something very interesting-teenage girls use music to express and share feelings, and teenage boys use it to categorize emotion-put it into taxonomies and hierarchies. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a description more spot on. Unless it’s “you’re really not well, are you?”
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I’m reading an interesting book, “Say Everything”, by Scott Rosenberg, about the history and future of blogging. Strangely, I’m not mentioned anywhere-but I’m sure he’s just waiting for the paperback.
(Ha!)
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One of the interesting parts of the book is descriptions of some flame wars and battles between protobloggers like Dave Winer and Jason Calacanis. Anyone who spends more than 3 ½ seconds online is familiar to the uncivilized nature of Internet speech in 2009-nature red of tooth and claw, as it were. Sadly, it appears, ‘twas ever thus.
What this made me think about this morning was how really grateful I am to all my readers and commenters. To have something that you have written, or just quoted, or cited, provoke a reaction from someone else is really gratifying. Why write anything at all if you don’t want a response? So, even if you think I suck (cue my friend Eric Parr saying, “but you DO suck!”), thanks for noticing.
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An IPod on Shuffle is a good way for me to discover albums I forgot I enjoyed-so far, Eric Clapton’s “24 Nights” and Billy Joel’s Live in Russia record, KOHUEPT. (Read that last word in Cyrillic to get the proper impact.
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Apropos of nothing, how brilliant was it to use the Doors’ “People Are Strange” in the movie, “The Lost Boys”? It still sounds freaky, more than 40 years after they recorded it. That sounds like a neat job to have, picking out music to put in movies.
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I don't get The Clash either (just like I tend not to get punk rock), but I think this "Rock the Casbah" is a great novelty song.
ReplyDeleteThe video is great, with the dancing sheik, oil wells, and armadillos. Sure, there are no armadillos in the Middle East, but that is what makes it fun.
Rock the Casbah is one of my guilty pleasure. I don't quite get the Clash either, along with you or Mr. dmarks, but I do like to rock out to the song.
ReplyDeleteOften.
Okay, everyday.
Okay... gotta weigh in on this one. I love love love the Clash. I think the problem here is that songs like Rock the Casbah were acceptable for radio. The true nature of the Clash is in their other songs. They had some savvy social commentary intwined with the angst. I tend to think of them in the smart punk catagory.
ReplyDeleteJust my opinion... and I am sure that you can find some songs that you can pick blurbs out of that you don't agree with... but I stand firm. These are people who think and offer thought to ponder. Yes, Casbah is fun.
Okay... so I am late to this post and no one is going to read this now. But here is another thing about The Clash... prior to their arrival, punk had a brash sound that did not have a lot of detail to it. The Clash changed that for punk by adding important elements with a variety of instruments, melody lines, etc. that had been over-run by the basic loud angry noise sound associated with punk up til then.
ReplyDeleteOh, I don't disagree one bit. I understand they are important-you can't write a decent history of rock music, and certainly not one of punk, without covering them.
ReplyDeleteBut I just don't feel it, don't love them, the way I love, say, REM or the Beatles.
With the whole "bomb the Middle East" thing going on in it, some could probably accuse the song of being jingoistic. But that is probably very far from the truth.
ReplyDelete