Clash City Rockers
There was an article in Slate a few weeks ago commemorating the twenty fifth anniversary of the Clash's London Calling album: Debunking Punk - What the Clash meant to rock 'n' roll.
By Stephen Metcalf. No one else covered this in the general news press,
maybe in the music press, but I don't read the music press any more. I
always read more along the lines of Op and Forced Exposure anyhow.
London Calling was supposed to be the last rock n' roll album,
deliberatley mimicking the first - Elvis's. I have both records and had
noted the similarity, but had chalked it up to a more general irony.
After that set up Metcalf takes it away in a different direction,
the sociology of rock and roll song writing partnerships. He notes that
these Brit song writing teams seem to pair: "...white working-class
boys [who] meet when young; bond over their mutual love of American
rhythm and blues." He doesn't include or consider an American example.
I couldn't think of any obvious examples either. Still I wondered was
this just an oversight or an instrinsic part of the dynamic he is
describing. In the post war period in which rock and roll is set, the
working class largely completed a move into a defacto middle class
similar to the U.S. The British experience of this was different, the
working class never ceased self-identifiying as working class, and
always had to exist in counterpoint to a formal aristocracy.
This is one aspect of what is called American Exceptionalism
- Wikipedia (brace of scare quotes, "", provided for the
proceeding term, use as needed). Here a rejection of a working
class identity or outlook by a majority
of franchised through all periods of American history. The reasons for
this are a fairly knotty thing to untangle. Seymour Lipsett devoted an
entire book to it: It Didn't Happen Here: why socialism failed in the
U S. The book can only sketch out possibilities. That level of class
sensitivity was never part of the United States ideology, nor do any of
our political institutions and processes impel us towards it. While
true social mobility might be as constrained in the U S as in old
world, Americans did not buy into explicit class identity and welcomed
the notion that virtualy everyone; tradesmen, clerk and white collar
salaryman alike were part of a society-owning middle class. Beneath all
this the distinctions of social membership were maintained through
coded patterns of consumption and style. And through this a struggle
ensued over a body of stable high-income jobs and the information and
educational opportunities that would gain them
The British had these song teams that in large ways helped
define the popular culture of the era. because of the incorporated
nature of that relationship the truce across the sectioned
working-middle class that the booming post war economies of the west
allowed. These songwriting partnerships sublimated these tensions and
conflicts within the songs a partially conscious expression of civil
wars. This was not necessarily a carthretic expression, but one that
had great power and hold regardless. In the attitudes in
the voice and poses of the songs are statements and opinions on
post-war culture, its values and future. In Metcalf's words. "The Clash
closed out the rock era, when the uneasy alliances between the Jaggers
and the Richardses, the Lennons and McCartneys, the Strummers and the
Joneses, could perfectly echo the deep optimism and the equally deep
unease of the culture at large. " In the British Invasion we have
things that Americans themselves understood and felt on several certain
levels but did not have the best popular culture voice to express
directly themselves.
11:31:17 PM  ;;
|
|
