I came back upon this song completely by chance, as I had been playing old 45 singles in the kitchen and my oldest kid (11 years) was way into “Should I Stay or Should I Go”. So I downloaded the entire Combat Rock CD, since she also was in some 4H llama club last year, and her llama she trained to do shows was named Casbah, and I told her then where the name was probably from and she was like, “Yeah, whatever,” but then it came full circle. So Combat Rock The Clash entered our household music playing, with the only other The Clash in the house being London Calling, which I put on my wife’s Ipod years ago because it was listed as one of the greatest records of all-time in some stupid magazine listmania thing at some point (maybe Rolling Stone) and I very specifically remember a Penthouse letter from back in the day from my dad’s stash of porns that referenced how great an album that was for fucking as some dude fucked his sister’s best friend on a beach after a wedding with her first black penis to get out of a cop ticket with an amputee midget, which he never thought he’d be writing about, for the first time. I do not love London Calling but it serves a purpose when I’m in the right frame of mind.
Actually, to be perfectly honest, I was initially gonna roll out with the “The Clash is overrated as fuck and only assholes like them” angle, but toned it down because I know people who have dogs named Strummer or children named Strummer or tattoos of Joe Strummer on their crotch regions, so I’ll be civil here and just say The Clash do not impress nor speak to me like they do others. But let’s be honest, I’m a small town whiteboy who has always felt doomed even though I feel destined for fame, so the adult contemporary punk rock sounds has never made sense to me. In fact, most of what has always been considered punk rock has confused me. Being that shithead shithole small town piece of trash, like the epitome of punk rock is The Sloppy Seconds - a big fat shredding guitarist and a ugly mulleted lead singer yelling about “I’m So Fucked Up!” (which is a great song by the way, I should find that shit so it can be on the list one month eventually).
However, in playing this CD out loud in the kitchen, I came back upon this song, which I previously only remember being the track that I figured inspired a really shitty western movie I once watched starring Deborah Harry. I had forgotten it was a bonafide The Clash song, and a good one at that. What triggered this memory was the new musics, as M.I.A.’s mega-hit “Paper Planes” is a reworking of a couple of loops from “Straight to Hell”. This of course had me playing them back to back while the kids cut out the lights and had a dance party in the kitchen, to over-analyze the tweakings and remixings that the new derivative song did to the original sound. Oddly enough, it sounds stupider. Bass for bass’ sake, which buries the really strange rolling drums effect of the original The Clash version.
This led me to playing this song a lot, but also my daughter with her Ipod has run up the count on this song to get it on the list. She was also playing “Should I Stay or Should I Go” incessantly for like two hours one Saturday afternoon, and I asked her why. She said it was to make me write about it. I told her that it didn’t do it for every song in our shared Itunes, but only ones that were actually on my gaypod shuffle. This bummed her out. So apparently, next month I have agreed to include that song on my gaypod so that I have to write about it. I asked my daughter why she wanted me to write about the song for my blog which she can’t read anyways and will probably never see, and she said, “It makes me happy.” And then my second kid piped up about wanting me to put Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” on my gaypod too so I could write about that, and I just kinda ducked out the conversation at that point.
STEAL "Straight to Hell"
NEXT UP: Crazy African bullshit!
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