Started writing to see what I could come up with the other day- God willing, this makes sense (Visuals Help Too I Hear)
Hit those keys with purpose!
During an interview on the Tom Snyder Show in June of 1981, Snyder asked the members of the punk band The Clash why they preferred to be called a “news giving” group rather than a rock and roll group. While Strummer and company played to the audience, giving short and sometimes snarky responses (“too many songs have been written love- subjects covered”), their performance of “The Magnificent 7,” with its references to the workday doldrums, day time television, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels explained to listeners what Headon and Jones said in the interview: “We’re just saying life is boring…[Jones] so we’re trying to make it interesting.”
Viewing The Clash as a “news giving” punk rock band that inundated their lyrics, music videos and live performances with communication metaphors, we can see an image a new form of punk rock- less about cynic anger and “anarchistic” ideas, but rather about telling the audience to “know your rights.” In discussing The Clash as a “news giving” band rather than a “news making” band, I plan to look at the band’s use of communication metaphors to broaden the range of the punk rock formula while informing a large mass of people about inconsistencies of the world around them. In relation to the music of The Clash, I will use the ideas of mass communication theorists such as Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman and their ideas on information and new mass media outlets. While written in a pre-internet, pre-punk rock world, the works of both authors pertain to my investigation into the music of The Clash. McLuhan’s ideas on mass communication, in particular, the “global village” and the fast-paced movement of information across boarders around the world can be seen in multiple Clash songs and album artwork as The Clash music styling’s related back to the anger of suburban English punks as much as suburban white youths in America and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
Alongside the works of McLuhan and Postman, I plan on applying “Encoding and Decoding” by Stuart Hall and Subcutlures by Dick Hebdige to my analysis of The Clash and the use of mass communication in new and subversive ways using examples ranging from the music video for “Radio Clash” to the addition of Morse code to the end of “London Calling.” The uses of communication imagery in the work of The Clash presents a new outlook from the world of underground music that changes what it means to be a popular band- creating a new layer to popular music, and punk rock, in the process.
So fun stuff right? Comment below if you love it and if you hate it, eff ya haters.
