Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and over the next few weeks, there will be an outpouring of homage to Joe Strummer. We'll see his grim visage again, his rigid and uncompromising pose, his hostile stare, all dolled up with stark, aggressive headlines, coyly daring us to read the obits or pick up the magazines or watch the tv specials and remember what it was like to be young and angry when those two things still mattered. We'll read over and over about the Clash and what they meant. We'll read over and over about what the Clash should mean to us--when we are no longer young or angry. And all the words will all be wrong. They'll be wrong about the Clash and they'll be wrong about Joe Strummer.
We'll use this moment, this death of this idol, to bemoan our loss of youth, of intensity, of believing that what we do really makes a difference. We'll finally learn how many forty-year olds were inspired to so much lower heights. We'll be reminded that Brits were once rockers and that even punks borrowed from American idiom. We'll be reminded of unemployment and race riots and that music was once politics. We'll learn that the Clash, finally, are history.
And this outpouring about the Clash in the obits and the articles will be strange and untimely and, ultimately, out of focus. The Clash didn't die with Strummer as the Beatles died with Lennon. The Clash was already dead, killed by Strummer and his partners in crime: Mick Jones and Paul Simonon. The band ran its course and the players ended it and they never went back on the road, never cashed in, never caved in.
It's the pictures next to the stories that won't be wrong.
In every picture what we'll actually see is not just Joe Strummer, but the Clash. We'll see photo after photo of the band. We'll see that Strummer never appears alone (do you even know which one is Strummer?). We'll see, in the pictures accompanying every story, what the Clash stood for and what no other band has ever been able to capture. The Clash was not personalities or performers, was not Mick, Paul, Topper, or even Joe Strummer. The Clash was, simply and perfectly, the Clash--and nothing more.
Joe Strummer, husband and father and musician, was just a part of the greatest rock-and-roll band that ever played. And he walked away in order to live the rest of his life. We too should learn to live ours.
Posted by Martial