A few thoughts on the 20th anniversary of Joe Strummer's passing
some pop scholarship, some personal reflection
It was the middle of the afternoon a few days before Christmas 2002, and I was driving down I-71 from my then-boyfriend’s parents’ house in Xenia, Ohio, to my mom’s house in West Chester. A loyal 97X listener for more than a decade, I had that station playing on the radio as I drove. The Clash’s “Julie’s Been Workin for the Drug Squad” came on the air, and I was confused as to why the DJ programmed a deep album cut that I’ve never heard 97X play on air before. (Give ‘Em Enough Rope is one of my favorite Clash albums, but “Julie” is by far the weakest track on that album, so much so that I always skipped it. I’m not even going to link to it here, lol.)
The track concludes, and the DJ cuts in to announce that Joe Strummer, The Clash’s lead singer and rhythm guitarist, had passed away suddenly at his home in England.
I was 24 at the time, and this was the first time the death of someone I didn’t know personally impacted me in a meaningful way (I wouldn’t say Strummer was a celebrity, exactly, especially at that time). For me, The Clash was historically and stylistically the root of all good music. I was just old enough to have been familiar with modern rock before “Smells Like Teen Spirit” blew up the Hot 100 and started the alt rock trend. Though for most Americans 1991 was more or less “the year punk broke,” I knew that it went back to 1977, when bands like The Clash declared “no Elvis, Beatles, or Rolling Stones” and drew their inspiration instead from reggae, hip hop, blues, and disco. As I would later learn when researching my forthcoming book about the radio station I was listening to at that moment in 2002, The Clash’s influence on me was not entirely accidental. 97X playlist documents reveal that The Clash is the only first-wave punk band to chart in the top 25 artists played on the station throughout the station’s broadcast life from 1983 through 2010. Although the band broke up before 97X even adopted its signature modern rock format, in the 21st century The Clash was the station’s 8th most frequently played artist; after the turn of the millennium, 97X played The Clash more often than all but 7 other artists. For more than 10 years, 97X had been sending me the message that The Clash was, if not the only band that matters (as their onetime slogan claimed), at least the one band that mattered most. And as the frontman of that band, Strummer was more or less my icon for what Good Music was.
Although the work he was most famous for was released around the time I was born, he had just put out three albums with his new band The Mescaleros, and his old work with The Clash was very present in the early aughts media ecosystem. By 2002, the millennial post-punk revival was in full swing and the music press was celebrating that year’s 25th anniversary of punk’s “year zero” in 1977; that celebration included a 2000 re-release of a remastered Clash boxed set, The Clash on Broadway and the release of Don Letts’s documentary Westway To The World that same year (please, please someone make this available on streaming). In addition to feeling very present in my daily reality, at fifty Strummer wasn’t old, even from my twentysomething perspective (and even moreso now in my mid-forties). Though Strummer first rose to fame in the 1970s, he felt very present in the postmillennial indie rock landscape; far from an elder statesman trotted out to recall historic events, Strummer and his work were regularly present in my everyday life, and the thought that he was gone was a big shock.
Strummer chose his stage name to reflect the rudimentary nature of his musicianship; he was neither the most virtuosic member of The Clash (easily Topper), nor the best looking (easily Paul), but he was definitely the best performer and conveyed the most energy or punch. That energy was visible in what was called his “electric leg”: when performing, his non-weight bearing leg (usually his left one, as seen here) bounced up and down as he kept time by stomping his heel to the beat. And that same energy is audible in his vocals, which came as punches straight from the diaphragm. You could hear that force right from the start on the Live From Here To Eternity album. Like Strummer’s leg, the album starts off sizzling with energy on “Complete Control,” and Strummer uses staccato punches from his diaphragm to thrust air up his tubes and out his mouth. That vocal punchiness is most clear on the album’s version of “Capital Radio,” which was by far one of my favorite songs to run to, because if I sang along with Strummer and breathed the way he did…my running performance was great because he was essentially breathing with excellent form for someone doing an intense aerobic workout…which was more or less what he was doing on stage. Once I made the connection between his live performance singing and running, I was much less surprised that Strummer ran the 1983 London Marathon with apparently little to no prior training: he trained for the marathon on the job.
As this example of me using Strummer’s live vocals as a running aid illustrates, my connection to him is as an artist and not a person, as an entirely mediated phenomenon and not a personal connection. (And there’s the whole academic field of celebrity studies to explain to us that spectrum between personal and mediated relationship and what 20th and 21st celebrity culture do to shape that…and that’s fine.) My point here is that the loss I felt on hearing of Strummer’s passing was not a personal loss, like when my dad died earlier that fall, but the loss of what had been, at least for me, a cultural institution, an influence, a pedagogue-at-a-distance.
At PopCon 2018, I realized just how much a pedagogue Strummer had been in my life outside music. I always sort of knew that my ideal outfit was a black military shirt (epaullets mandatory) with skinny black pants and combat boots like The Clash wore in their video for “Clampdown,” but then when listening to Maria Elena Buszek’s paper "Joe Strummer's Silk-Stocking Sleeves: Feminism and Fashion in London Punk,” I learned that those outfits were deliberately designed to be gender-neutral. Like, that outfit had been for me all along, huh. This long-forgotten fact about The Clash’s progressive gender politics is another bit of evidence that in the nearly 40 years since the band broke up and the story of punk is re-told and re-re-told, the people involved and their politics are far more complicated than the neat, often hypermasculinized narratives they’re perennially packaged into. (I am reminded here too of Viv Albertine’s first memoir.)
Because Strummer’s presence in my life was entirely mediated, I am fortunate to be able to return to what I think is the most important thing he said. In this clip from the fictional-narrative-used-to-stitch-together-studio-and-tour footage movie Rude Boy, Strummer is at the pub with the roadie the film has elevated into its protagonist, Ray. Ray states his desire to be one of the people “riding around in the black cars”--i.e., one of the powerful elites, whereas Strummer says “it’s either all of us or none.” I don’t know and don’t really care how scripted this was, whether this was his own idea or someone wrote it for him. The thing that matters is that this refrain exists, for me to listen to again and again, when I need it, or when I need some affirmation of its basic underlying fact (which is more or less identical with Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of freedom, which in my actually qualified opinion is the best and most correct one out there).
20 years on, Strummer still feels like he’s been “around” my life in about the same way he had always been. The loss is not the absence of his mediated presence, but its diminished potential size. Because he hasn’t said or made or done anything in the last 20 years, I’ve just been re-hashing material from his first 50. Which both makes that old content more familiar and present, but also obviously means we’ve been deprived of experiencing how he might have changed and grown as we have since 2002…which, as we know from the example of some of his, uh, contemporaries in the 70s London punk scene (who did it first, Lydon or Ye, etc), is not always guaranteed to be a sad thing, but in this case probably is.
In these past 20 years, my life has…stabilized? In 2002 I was a grad student living between Chicago and suburban Cincinnati. About a year and a half after this day, I would meet my now spouse. We got married in 2005 (my iPod DJed our reception), I got a full-time job, they got a full-time job, we both got jobs in the same city, we bought and sold a house or two (which we were really only able to do because we moved to an affordable city pre-2008), had a gaggle of cats and dogs. In other words, in those 20 years I came to approach the age Strummer was when he died. And as I slide well into middle age and some relative stability (who knows what stability looks like in these days of austerity and abandonment), I think about how Gen Z is vocal in their own way about how the future looks more like a lump of coal than it has ever before, and how it is really all of us or none. Maybe history really is, as my friend says, fractal.