Posted By BillHeise on April 21, 2009

A few weeks ago, I was talking about the destruction of the 1960s idealism by the worst sort of commercial fluff embodied in the movie Love Story. The music that I listened to in those years offered some hope. The Who made a statement of indifference to politics. Pete Townsend would “pick up his guitar and play / Just like yesterday.” Led Zeppelin featured lyrics drawn from the language of high modernism of Yeats, which sought escape from the everyday world into a world of myth.

But by the end of the 1970s, new forces were emerging that rejected the mainstreaming of rock and roll.  They were embodied in the punk movement.

Punk quickly, though briefly, became a major cultural phenomenon in the United Kingdom. For the most part, punk took root in local scenes that tended to reject association with the mainstream. An associated punk subculture emerged, expressing youthful rebellion and characterized by distinctive clothing styles and a variety of anti-authoritarian ideologies. (Wikipedia)

Such an ideology must have appealed to Pete Townsend, who had started off in the 60s in a similar situation with the “Mod” movement, but who had now become mainstreamed through the success of his many albums. In 1975, the year that Ken Russell had produced Tommy—an excessive film if there ever was one—Townsend had lashed out at the rock community to journalist Roy Carr

making acid comments on fellow Who member Roger Daltrey and other leading members of the British rock community. (Wikipedia)

The Clash

Middle Class Alienation

The Clash emerged as one of the main forces in the new, stripped down musical scene. Their music eschewed, not only the musical and celebrity excesses of the 1970s, but the longing to escape the world, as Yeats had, by enclosing ourselves into a world of music. The Clash explored the underground world that was ignored by “the beautiful people.” They declared their alienation from middle-class culture, a common theme that even the punks shared with Yeats.

I’m all lost in the supermarket
I can no longer shop happily
I came in here for that special offer
A guaranteed personality

I wasn’t born so much as I fell out
Nobody seemed to notice me
We had a hedge back home in the suburbs
Over which I never could see

I heard the people who lived on the ceiling
Scream and fight most scarily
Hearing that noise was my first ever feeling
That’s how it’s been all around me

Revolutionaries Themselves

They were angry at attempts to mainstream them, but rather than shifting away from middle-class into Yeats’ “otherworld” of golden birds singing to emperors, as Pete Townsend had, they took up arms themselves and urged an anarachic revolution against all forms of government.

When they kick out your front door
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
Or on the trigger of your gun?

London Calling spread the urban message to small towns throughout England.

London calling to the faraway towns
Now that war is declared-and battle come down
London calling to the underworld
Come out of the cupboard, all you boys and girls
London calling, now don’t look at us
All that phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust
London calling, see we ain’t got no swing
‘Cept for the ring of that truncheon thing

Other songs expressed similar sentiments:

• Rebel Waltz
• Spanish Bombs
• Police and Thieves

Revision

The punk movement did more than call for anarchy, however. They went back to the beginnings of rock ‘n roll and attempted to redefine its history away from the movement that had given us “phony Beatlemania” and its attendant culture of celebrity of “beautiful people.” The “beautiful people were proof that the culture had taken a detour from the ideals of the 1960s. Instead they went back and rerecorded Bobby Fuller’s “I Fought the Law,”

They did more than simply going back to simpler times, however. They reworked the classics to bring them in line with their tougher stand.

Train in Vain was a reworking of Ben E. King’s tune, Stand By Me. But unlike Stand By Me, which offered reassurance “just as long as you stand by me,” The Clash offered a far bleaker view of the world in which redemptive love had been forever lost.

Say you stand by your man
Tell me something I don’t understand
You said you love me and that’s a fact
Then you left me, said you felt trapped

Well some things you can explain away
But my heartaches in me till this day

Did you stand by me
No, not at all
Did you stand by me
No way

My Favorite Music at the Time

This was some of my favorite music when I was in high school. I was a kid who had not been an especially good candidate to be one of the “beautiful people.” So I lashed out, taking some comfort in the fact that there were people in the world who were speaking more directly to me. It was in this mood that Larry and I went to Comiskey Park for Disco Demolition.

Categories: What I'm Listening to This Week
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