ALBUMS: Sandinista! (1980), Black Market Clash (1980)
MVC Rating: Sandinista 4.0/$$$$$; Black Market 4.0/$$
If you think about it, the Clash had the perfect name for their band.
They clashed with everything.
And Sandinista was a new turn that clashed with the group’s punk rock base. (Think Roy Moore followers if they were leftist streetwise Brits. I’m making the point that they are loyalists not so open to change.)
Sandinista, a three-record clashing of the soul and gnashing of the teeth was their masterpiece and their self-indulgent jam session — (see the clash there?)
It had reggae, dub, punk rock, a waltz, rap, rockabilly, electronica, corner soul and Lord knows what else. Most people didn’t play the whole thing through because it was disorienting. It was like wearing plaid, stripes, gingham and seersucker all at once and on the feet: Keds red high tops.
Not Converse mind you. That’d be uncool.
But it had great stuff on it. Some of the music was eye-openingly good (The piano and bass on the be-boppin Look Here, for example.) It just got lost in the shuffle-play. While the Magnificent Seven, Police on My Back, Rebel Waltz and Somebody Got Murdered got most of the attention, I like the Sound of the Sinners, a gospel send-up that kicks off with this:
As the floods of God, wash away sin city,
they say it was written in the page of the Lord.
But I was looking, for that great jazz note,
that destroyed, the walls of Jericho
This album featured six sides of six songs each and cost just a little more, if I remember it was something like $9,99. And I believe that included, at least at my record store, a copy of the 10-inch, Black Market Clash, taken from the Sandinista sessions. I loved side two of that 10-inch with bankrobber/robber dub and armigideon dub, and no justice/kick it around.
Mick Jones continued this dub reggae rap groove in Big Audio Dynamite, which I reviewed here.
The Clash stood up for the working class and grew into a musically adventurous, and politically aware punk rock group. By their fourth album, continuing in the tradition of arguably their best album, London Calling, they absorbed and reconfigured every cross-cultural type of street music imaginable. They discovered dub alll right. And dub spelled backward as well.
Counting down my 678 vinyl records before I die of brain disease.