Now War Is Declared

A STICKER on the cover of the Clash's new album describes it as "18 new songs from the only band that matters," and though that rings of promotional hype, the Clash have never been a band to go along with hype. They've played a little trick on their promoters, andtackedanother song to the end of their double album without listing it on the jacket, or telling the guys who wrote the ad copy. That's the keynote for the music on this album: it presents a world gone slightly askew and takes a sort of grim joy in pounding the disturbing discord home.

A couple of years ago it would have been ludicrous to describe the music of the Clash in such terms; a tight, angry punk band, they merely translated blunt, explicit feelings of political frustration into bracing, furious music. The first Clash album (released as the band's second record in the U.S.) spit out all subtlety, and the second deliberately sidestepped it.

With London Calling, the Clash have discovered the metaphor. It gives them new freedom to travel through musical idioms and political subjects, and they take the grand tour. While past Clash albums have contained many songs cut from the same musical fabric, London Calling races through a catalogue of styles and sounds that involuntarily brings the Beatles to mind.

Abandoning blunt messages allows the Clash to adopt musical subtleties. On their first album, they railed against society--

Who needs remote control from the civic hall

Push a button activate you gotta work and you're

late

...Big business it don't like you--it don't like the

things you do

You got no money so you got no power

But London Calling goes after fascism with much more potent and universal images:

Taking off his turban they said is this man a Jew?

Cause they're working for the clampdown

They put up a poster saying we earn more than you

When we're working for the clampdown...

You grow up and you calm down

You're working for the clampdown

You start wearing the blue and brown

You're working for the clampdown

"Working for the Clampdown" is the only song on London Calling with the Clash's old bang-it-out-and-mow-them-down ferocity. The other songs employ speeded-up reggae, pop harmony, heavily produced ballads, or Jamaican swing to get essentially the same political points across to a larger audience. London Calling contains only one love song, and it's the worst on the record.

IF GREAT ART is art that renders labels meaningless then London Calling should finally do in the "new wave." Its lyrical and musical fertility recalls another celebrated double album, Exile on Main Street, far sooner than any Sex Pistols product. Like the Stones' masterpiece, London Calling has its longueurs; but its two discs conjure the end of the '70s as unmistakably as Exile did their beginning. The title track does so best. Over the ominous bleating of Mick Jones's slightly off-key guitar and a despondent, resigned chorus that drops off into silence, Joe Strummer launches into a chronicle of the new barbarism:

London calling to the faraway towns

Now war is declared--and battle gone down

London calling to the underworld

Come out of the cupboard, you boys and girls

London calling, now don't look to us

All that phoney Beatlemania has bit the dust

London calling, see we ain't got no swing

Except for the ring of that truncheon thing

The ice age is coming the sun zooming in

Engines stop running and the wheat is growing thin

A nuclear error but I have no fear

Cause London is drowning--and I live by the river

Strummer's voice through most of the song sounds like he's coughing up his innards, but towards the end he emits a chill screech that you can just imagine echoing predatorially across a deserted, icy moraine.

In contrast, the only warmth on London Calling comes from the Clash's idiosyncratic reggae tunes, songs of Kingston refracted by Brixton into an unruly, festive rainbow. They portray the down-and-out but proud, card cheats, gangsters and two-bit revolutionaries, using brass, piano, and organ to supplement the traditional guitar-bass-drums outfit.

London Calling radiates assurance--musical assurance that this so-called punk band can play any kind of music it chooses, and assurance of a larger sort, that the further the world sinks into confusion the closer it will come to revival. The very energy of most of the songs on the album belies the sense of entropy conveyed by a song like "London Calling." The Clash have taken popular music and used it to give frenzied life to Bakunin's maxim, "The lust to destroy is a creative lust." They have elevated their music to the point where such grand claims for it can't be dismissed out of hand--an achievement few musicians can boast of.