Hippies vs. Punks: The Clash's Combat Rock, Pt. 3, "Overpowered by Funk"

Something has been lost. My first year of adulthood, my first year living alone was my freshman year at the university. The year was 1982, the year The Clash released Combat Rock.

Combat Rock is widely accepted today to be the beginning of the end of a great band. Conventional wisdom holds that the album is a radio-friendly sop to commercialism.

What cannot be denied is that Combat Rock is the last record featuring the band's main lineup -- Strummer, Jones, Simonon, Headon. The final studio album of The Clash, the universally panned Cut the Crap (1985), is minus Mick Jones and Topper Headon. The former, sacked by Strummer and Simonon over creative differences; the latter, because of his drug addiction.

I think dismissals of Combat Rock are off the mark. I think appraisals that class the record below the band's eponymous debut or the double album London Calling (1979) are largely due to Combat Rock's massive popularity and crossover appeal. For the most part, smart-set taste-makers eschew anything that has mass-market appeal.

But back to this idea that something has been lost. Last October I wrote about sitting in Dwinelle Plaza next to gridiron star Ron Rivera (now head coach of the Carolina Panthers) at the beginning of the 1982 school year and listening while he sang "Should I Stay or Should I Go" to himself. If one compares the Congressional midterm elections that year, 1982, with the midterms that transpired shortly after the Ron Rivera post, 2014, one sees a country that is no longer a Democratic Party majority.

The Democratic Party swept the 1982 midterms in the popular vote 55% to the Republicans 43% owing to the unpopularity of the Reagan Recession. In 2014 the Republicans won a bare majority of the popular vote, 50.9% to the Democrats 45.3%. But the Republicans actually have a greater majority of House seats now -- 247 -- compared to what the Democrats had in 1982 -- 243.

So in the 32 years of my life as a voting, tax-paying adult citizen of the United States, the nation has done a flip. We are no longer an egalitarian-minded, working-class nation, or at least that is what a reading of the poll results tell us.

Another way to look at this loss is by the results of the radical leftist 1960s-spawned Peace and Freedom Party. The Peace and Freedom Party, which was ubiquitous in my lower division years as an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley, a presence I lazily took for granted, won 34,422 votes in 1982 and competed in numerous California Congressional Districts; in 2014, the Peace and Freedom Party polled 9,192 in the midterms.

The Peace and Freedom Party from its inception has been concerned with racial justice. The party planned to support Martin Luther King, Jr. for president in 1968 but chose Eldridge Cleaver instead because of MLK's support for mustering the National Guard to handle the Detroit riots.

The Clash as a band always acknowledged the influence of Black artists, for instance the collaboration with Mikey Dread.

One of the tracks that adds depth to Combat Rock is "Overpowered by Funk," The Clash's homage to early hip hop artists Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five and Sugarhill Gang. Joe Strummer raps "Funk Power" with graffiti artist Futura 2000.

Combat Rock is basically released the same time as Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five's The Message (1982). I owned both. Popular music was never the same after "The Message":

To me, listening to "Overpowered by Funk" again, it reminds me less of "The Message" and more of Tom Tom Club's "Wordy Rappinghood," which preceded Combat Rock by one year. Both showcase Punks (in the case of Tom Tom Club, the husband and wife rhythm section of Talking Heads) taking a stab at hip hop:

There was a lot of sunshine and hope back in the first few years of the 1980s, even with the tentacles of neoliberalism taking hold amid the Reagan Recession.

Undoubtedly we were naive. Look we were are now with money power all but completely victorious.

But for that moment there appeared to be enough time and space where racial harmony was possible.

Hippies vs. Punks: Generic Flipper

After work I have to pick up a packet for a race I'm running Sunday morning. It involves a trip up to the Green Lake neighborhood. I don't know what time I will get home. So I am posting the weekly installment of Hippies vs. Punks this morning instead of tonight.

I mentioned in a Monday post on the SST Tour that my Hardcore bonafides boiled down to a love of the Minutemen. To add to that I would be remiss if I did not mention Album – Generic Flipper.

In the 1980s entertaining in the university city of Berkeley usually involved having friends over for beers, sometimes a meal, and then out into the night to go to a bar or a party. Sometimes we would stay all night in the apartment I shared with my girlfriend (who became my wife, and then my ex-wife) and just drink, talk and listen to music. At a certain point in the evening, after all the records had been played, usually sometime around midnight, one album would be placed on the turntable, an album irrefutable and dense, inky black, dark and deep, an album that said, "It is over." That album was Generic Flipper.

Listening to a song like "Life is Cheap" before trundling off to bed to sleep off the alcohol reminded one that the world is ruled by brute force wielded by alien forces -- an important lesson to imbibe along with one's liberal education.

Flipper was formed out of the wreckage of Negative Trend. It combined Negative Trend bassist Will Shatter and drummer Steve DePace with vocalist/bassist Bruce Loose and guitarist Ted Falconi. (A college buddy of mine lived next door to Ted.) The band was controversial in that their slow, bass-driven droning sound went against the speedy grain that dominated California Hardcore.

Generic Flipper -- recorded in 1980 and 1981, released in 1982 -- overlaps with and provides perfect sonic documentation of the "Reagan Recession." 

Nineteen-eighty-two was the first time I was living on my own as an adult. Nationwide unemployment hit 10.8% in November and December, higher than any time -- including the Great Recession of 2008 -- since the Great Depression. Attempting to cut inflation Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker took a meat ax to the economy, the prime interest rate hitting 21.5% in June of '82.

Though I was safely ensconced in the protective arms of the university, I remember the vibe of that time of high unemployment. I remember it was a cold fall and winter. Living in an urban environment for the first time I became aware of the shit and piss and broken beer bottle alleyways and the hatred, vomit, rage, junk, dread, squalor, hopelessness of life that Generic Flipper so accurately records.

Reaganism was definitely the end of the line for any Hippies who were still holding out in the early 1980s. Flower Power had been rendered juiceless. The Punks, who first appeared in the avant-garde at the same time as the stagflation of the 1970s, painted a picture of a future we are presently living.