983. street parade

Second of two in a row from side five of Sandinista! (the Clash’s longest album, if not its best). “To say it was a hard sell to many of their early fans is the definition of understatement. It Was Hated (and still is by some) for being all the things that was truly great about it, which is to say, driven by the ultimately punk attitude of saying f*** it, London Calling’s made us bigger than we ever dreamed of being, let’s see how far we can push things by just diving into the music, all music, anything that interests us, the whole mad street parade. In my particular case, the arrival on the local Terminal City scene of some genuinely strong and clean LSD probably assisted in my seeing things in this regard.” (Philip Random)

984. Kingston advice

First of two in a row from side five of Sandinista, the Clash’s largest album if not its best. London Calling gets all the glory, of course, but there is a serious argument to be made that Sandinista is every bit its equal if only for all the tangents it explores – dubs, re-dubs, versions, visions. As if these four guys (and their various studio compadres) somehow managed to digest the whole weird, wild, primed-to-explode world of 1980 and jam it into six long playing sides of vinyl – not world music so much as what the world actually sounded like. Must be a clash – there’s no alternative.

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1026. Radio Clash

1981 was a pretty brilliant year if you were an open-minded Clash fan. Between London Calling and Sandinista, they’d just released ten sides of genre bending, ever expanding, often superlative vinyl in barely more than a year. So when Radio Clash (the single) appeared in four different versions, all dubbed up and dance floor ready, there was no reason to doubt what was being promised. Hell yeah! Their next move would be to launch a pirate satellite so the world would finally have all cool radio All The Time. If you dropped enough of the ole lysergic, it felt very possible. Maybe even likely.” (Philip Random)

1040. ghetto defendant

In which Allen Ginsberg drops in on the Clash during the Combat Rock sessions, the mike gets opened and he slam dances Metropolis, enlightens the populous. And so on, off into a mid-tempo ramble on the hungry darkness of living. Whatever evils were going down in 1981 – nobody in this crowd was looking the other way.

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1069. U.S. Forces

Midnight Oil’s politics have gotten most of the attention over the years, which makes sense. It’s not as if they weren’t wearing them on their sleeves, with U.S. Forces as good an example as any. But the music should also be noted, because here was an outfit that could rock every bit as hard as the Clash, while also working the sort of pop precision you’d expect from an XTC. And with lyrics like, “Everyone too stoned to start a mission, People too scared to go to Prison,” you had a pretty rich and relevant package with 1982’s 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 as good a place to start as any.

1073. The Band Played Waltzing Matilda

“The Pogues were exactly what the mid 1980s needed. The original London punks had finally blown all their fuses, with the Clash’s inglorious meltdown being the most recent notable calamity. Enter a bunch of guys (and sometimes a girl) with way too much Irish blood in their veins, grabbing their parents old instruments off the wall (and a few of their tunes), and thrashing away like it truly f***ing meant something, which in the case of The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, it did. Because as the wise woman said, the universal soldier, he really is to blame.” (Philip Random)

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