Hippies vs. Punks: The Clash's Combat Rock, Pt. 2, "Should I Stay or Should I Go"

It has been a while since Hippies vs. Punks has been a regular Friday feature of this page. I think what happened is that the coup in Ukraine took over my attention at the beginning of this year.

I had a certain routine that I would follow for a Hippies vs. Punks post. During the work week I would immerse myself in spotlighted recording(s) I felt somehow illuminated the "why" and the "how" of the eclipse of the Hippies by the Punks.

The hypothesis we're dealing with here is that the eclipse -- understanding the toppling of the Hippie by the Punk, coinciding as it does with the dawn of the neoliberal age -- will provide essential insight into our current exhausted and disintegrating cultural paradigm.

A sonic immersion is no easy feat. Listening to an album or possibly two or three albums by the same artist repeatedly over a five to six day stretch requires a triumph of the will. But to truly understand music I don't think there is any other way. Interesting effects begin to multiple. One of the things I realized is that almost always after listening repeatedly to an album, even if it is one previously considered poor, you come to appreciate it. This has been my experience, particularly, for instance, with Penelope Houston's solo debut, Birdboys (1988).

To go along with the sonic immersion, I would print out what I could find online about the particular album and artist, and I would study that on the train ride home at night.

All in all, the Hippies vs. Punks posts, meager as they are, required a significant time commitment, one that has obviously gone by the wayside.

Today we're going to return with a remembrance of the popular culture zenith of First Wave UK Punk band The Clash.

In May I remembered Combat Rock's "Straight To Hell." Today, through the prism of a moment shared with Ron Rivera, we will approach "Should I Stay or Should I Go."

The month was October. The year was 1982. Ron Rivera, who is now the head coach of the Carolina Panthers, who the Seattle Seahawks travel cross country to play on Sunday in a game that will decide the rest of their season, was seated across from me on a bench in Dwinelle Plaza one morning.

Ron Rivera was a junior, a big man on campus, the star linebacker on the Golden Bears football team. He wore a pink Oxford shirt (very au courant), cargo shorts and a pair of white K-Swiss sneakers (which were also au courant).

Rivera greeted well-wishers as they strolled by prior to 10 o'clock class. I looked on from a bench not more than five-feet away. I was invisible, a freshman, nameless, faceless. The sun was shining its orange California rays.

And what seared this episode in my memory all these years is the song that Rivera was singing to himself.

That fall of 1982 you could not go anywhere without hearing "Should I Stay or Should I Go." It played on transistor radios (people still carried those around in 1982; this was prior to the Sony Walkman), could be heard at cafes and bars and coming out of dormitory windows as well as on the lips of gridiron stars.

It is hard today to understand what that feels like. I was reading an article yesterday on the train home about nervousness in the record industry about Taylor Swift's new album, 1989. Swift is the only contemporary artist who has proven able to sell more than a million albums in the first week of release, which must be some important industry benchmark. Overall album sales are down 14% from last year. People are not buying CDs like they used to; apparently people are not even purchasing music by download like they used to. The trend is toward music streaming sites like Spotify. The nervousness about 1989 is that it is a straight pop album. Usually Swift pitches her songs to the reliable and industry-leading Country market.

Music is dying, or at least the delivery system for music. Music can never die even if the Salafis' wildest dreams were to come true and the caliphate stretched to all corners of the globe.

But as the media continues to atomize and newspapers and television and record labels shrink, there is also a corresponding shriveling of popular consciousness.

October 1982 when we were all singing along with Mick Jones and thinking at the same time, "If I go there will be trouble/And if I stay it will double" -- so immaculately true in all its plebeian, quotidianness -- is as close as the Punks, Ron Rivera and all the rest of us came to apotheosis.

Hippies vs. Punks: The Clash's Combat Rock, Pt. 1, "Straight to Hell"

Hippies vs. Punks has been on hiatus. Since February Ukraine has absorbed most of my attention. I realize now that these Hippies vs. Punks posts, though of modest depth and limited insight, require a level of attention, effort and research that I have been unable to deliver of late.

The standard operating procedure for a Hippies vs. Punks post is to take a band, an album, a song, sometimes even a genre and immerse myself in selected recording(s) for a week or two, and then sit down and deliver. And what I want to deliver is some sort of understanding of what happened when the Hippies gave way to the Punks.

Why is this important? Because it is the period of time, when the Hippie dream gave way to the Punk nightmare, that marks the beginning of the age of neoliberalism in the West.

A story that appeared this week in the New York Times reminds us what many (Noam Chomsky, for instance) have been saying for decades -- that inequality, the re-ascension of capital, begins in the 1970s after a brief spurt of egalitarianism in the 1960s. Neil Irwin writes in "Growth Has Been Good for Decades. So Why Hasn’t Poverty Declined?" that great gains in the fight on poverty were made between 1959 to 1973 -- what one could call the heyday of rock'n'roll -- but have completely stalled or fallen backwards in the last 30 years:

From 1959 to 1973, the nation’s economy per person grew 82 percent, and that was enough to drive the proportion of the poor population from 22 percent to 11 percent. 

But over the last generation in the United States, that simply hasn’t happened. Growth has been pretty good, up 147 percent per capita. But rather than decline further, the poverty rate has bounced around in the 12 to 15 percent range — higher than it was even in the early 1970s. The mystery of why — and how to change that — is one of the most fundamental challenges in the nation’s fight against poverty.

The disconnect between growth and poverty reduction is a key finding of a sweeping new study of wages from the Economic Policy Institute. The liberal-leaning group’s policy prescriptions are open to debate, but this piece of data the researchers find is hard to dispute: From 1959 to 1973, a more robust United States economy and fewer people living below the poverty line went hand-in-hand. That relationship broke apart in the mid-1970s. If the old relationship between growth and poverty had held up, the E.P.I. researchers find, the poverty rate in the United States would have fallen to zero by 1986 and stayed there ever since. 

“It used to be that as G.D.P. per capita grew, poverty declined in lock step,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at E.P.I. and an author of the study. “There was a very tight relationship between overall growth and fewer and fewer Americans living in poverty. Starting in the ′70s, that link broke.”

The idea behind Hippies vs. Punks has always been that if we could understand what was going on when the kids gave up on the Hippie dream -- go back to the land, reject technocratic corporate society, live in communion with nature, practice tolerance, etc. -- in favor of the nihilism and know-nothingness of the Punks we could understand where we went wrong the last time around. So that now, as the wheel turns and signs appear pointing towards the coming demise of neoliberalism, we will be prepared to avoid the mistakes the Hippies made.

Not all Punks were "No Future" nihilists like the Sex Pistols or Rock 'n' Roll High School know nothings. The foremost example of a politically engaged, socially conscious first-wave Punk band is The Clash.

It is hard to appreciate today how big The Clash were in the early 1980s. In fact, my freshman year at the university they were the band at the top. And what made them different is that they were, at least as the gestural level, clearly opposed to the cultural establishment that they were reigning over.

When The Clash signed to CBS Records and released their eponymous debut in April 1977, it marked the critical moment when the corporate mainstream recognized the new avant-garde.

As has been noted in numerous past Hippies vs. Punks posts, 1977 is the year that the Hippie finally gives up the ghost and disappears, becoming nothing more than a heavy metal headbanger. The Hippie, shorn not of his locks but of his Aquarian aspirations, had been trending in that direction for many years, certainly since 1971. By 1977 the shift is irrevocable.

Five-years later The Clash release their double platinum Combat Rock (1982); it is the year I graduate from high school and enter the university. My first few months on campus songs from Combat Rock were heard everywhere -- from the student union Bear's Lair, to transistor radios, and out of the mouths of collegiate gridiron heroes. I owned a cassette tape of the album, which I played repeatedly.

The Clash performed "Straight to Hell," a song about the gross injustice of living in a world ruled by war and greed, on Saturday Night Live, October 2, 1982. Watch the YouTube of the performance. It is wonderful. The band is flawless. From the animated guitar playing of Mick Jones and Paul Simonon to the precision of a mohawked Joe Strummer on lead vocals.

I remember that evening. It had been a beautiful, sunny day in the Bay Area. I had been out with a girl, and I got home late and turned on the TV to Saturday Night Live. Everyone watched Saturday Night Live in those days. It was obligatory. I remember thinking that Joe Strummer's conclusion to "Straight to Hell" -- when he holds two fingers (simulating a gun) up to his temple and rasps sharply into the microphone -- was a bit over the top. But watching it today, I have no such qualms.

Nineteen-eighty-two is the zenith for The Clash. Reaganism and Thatcherism rule the West. It is the end -- for the Hippies, for the Punks, for any dream of progressive transformation of society.

But on that one beautiful Indian summer dark night in October I was feeling good: a young man, a boy, living alone for the first time, in a clean apartment, on top of the world as it hurtled through space on its trip around the Sun.

Next week: Combat Rock, Pt. 2, "Should I Stay or Should I Go."