Overpowered by funk

HE WAS BORN John Graham Mellor into a family that served the Crown. His grandfather was a functionary for the Indian Railway, and his father moved through posts in Turkey, Mexico, Malawi, and Iran. The boarding school boy left to the suburbs of London grew up to be Joe Strummer, and he spent his life purposefully undoing everything his forebears stood for.

–Strummer would describe 1976 as his own personal year zero. Across the globe, the arc of the revolution was falling. The Baader-Meinhof gang and Patty Hearst were on trial. The Weather Underground and the Young Lords Party were in the final stages of violent implosion. The Khmer Rouge were filling their killing fields. Washington bullets were destabilizing Jamaica. In London, as in New York City, capitalism's crisis had left entire blocks and buildings abandoned. Here Strummer came of age as a radical squatter and a spirited pub singer. In a welfare line, he met Mick Jones and Paul Simonon, and they invited him into the intensely charged musical sect they would come to call the Clash.

Strummer fast affected his mates. Jones's tune "I'm So Bored with You" became "I'm So Bored with the U.S.A." While their punk contemporaries flirted with Nazi imagery and ideology, they romanticized the Jamaican roots reggae rebels. When Strummer, Simonon, and manager-advisor Bernie Rhodes – three white males – were drawn into black Britain's summer Notting Hill uprising against the police, the band found its footing. Rhodes had images to contextualize the band's defiance. Strummer found an opening to explore radical whiteness. "White Riot" distilled his awakening into a two-minute, breakneck, ear-splitting call for England's fair-skinned sons and daughters to join in striking back against the British Empire: "Black people gotta lotta problems but they don't mind throwing a brick. White people go to school, where they teach you how to be thick."

"White Riot" also captured the essence of Strummer's philosophy: "Are you taking over or are you taking orders? Are you going backward or are you going forwards?" These are the fundamental questions Strummer bequeathed successors like Bono, Chuck D, Ani DiFranco, and Manu Chao. Strummer epitomized the conviction that progressive politics ought to fire progressive music – not flashy, indulgent prog-rock or austere, didactic folk but progressive music of the most fevered imagination – big, risky rock that inspired less awe than love, more noise than silence, music that moved down the street with the people and knew when to toss a brick.

Triangulating the first and third world across the Atlantic in the sunset of the British Empire, 1979's London Calling was a perfect album, an endlessly mesmerizing reading of American and Jamaican music and myth through English eyes. It's probably the last great record of the rock era. Many would have been happy if the Clash had stayed there forever, and indeed, who knows how many more gems there were to mine. But unlike the generation of indie rockers (and now indie rappers) that followed, the diplomat's son was not content to repeat "Train in Vain," much less "Capital Radio," over and over. Instead, he would turn his eye to the emerging world – the world after the empire, after America, after rock.

Perhaps Strummer's background gave him a unique insight into the waves of change that were about to be unleashed on the world, or maybe he just had a good instinct for getting to the right place at the right time. Just as deftly as "Clampdown" had dissected the rise of the National Front, "Bankrobber" captured multiracial alienation in a Thatcherite time. Then "The Call Up" somberly reflected on the working classes' prospects amid rapidly militarizing geopolitics. (Now heard next to the Hitchens-esque 1982 hit "Rock the Casbah," the tracks offer a dissonance, a clash, if you will, of antiwar and antifundamentalist ideals that seems unusually timely for today's conflicted left.)

Where to go next? New York City. By 1981 hip-hop was pushing through the walls of resegregation erected in the previous decade. The band that once couldn't see past 1977 would become the hinge between the rock and the hip-hop eras. When city officials tried to preemptively squash the band's seven-night stand, they unwittingly sparked a riot in Times Square. With permits in hand and 7 gigs stretched to 16, they introduced Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five to their audiences and egged confused punkoids into their own cup-tossing mini-riot. Later they would frequent the downtown hip-hop club Negril, as fans, soaking up vibes with Afrika Bambaataa, the graffiti elite, and the Rock Steady Crew. The Clash were pulling their audiences by their leather dog-collars out of their self-made ghettos into the real ones where the future was being made.

Over the years the three-disc Sandinista (1980) has taken its lumps. But in these days of more common double-CD releases, it's hard to understand why. Sandinista sounds more like the 21st century than any rock made in the past two decades. Its incessant forward motion is a welcome contrast to the revival-minded microfaddism that passes for most of today's allegedly edgy rock. Alongside the dub and rap and rock, the Clash took on ambient noise, kiddie karaoke, twisted Muzak, whistling carnival calypso (echoes of Notting Hill), roof-raising gospel, and the odd fiddle jig. Over it all, Strummer and colleagues tried to give voice to the people of Kingston, Havana, Hanoi, Tehran, and Managua. "The reign of the superpowers must be over," they sang on "Charlie Don't Surf." "So many armies can't free the earth."

From the ashes of the '60s, Strummer and the Clash moved toward a kind of musical multilateralism, consensus by connecting the dots. Sandinista marks the point where they sketch a map of the new musical and political world, where rock myth topples into hip-hop's corner soul, where the trumpets of polyculturalism collapse Jericho's imperialism. And Strummer characteristically kept moving. In a short July 2001 guest DJ set with WFMU-FM (www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/321), he revealed where his expansive curiosity and compassion were still taking him. He moved from a scintillating collaboration between Ernest Ranglin and Baaba Maal through Algerian rai, Sudanese soul, South African mbaqanga, and Colombian cumbia, ending with Cornershop's Indofuturist pop. The prophetic stance he articulated in his life and music falls somewhere between Paul Wellstone and Jam Master Jay, a romantic, hopeful, inclusive vision of progressivism and a cultural globalization that we've only just begun to see swelling in the streets at the turn of the century.

Jeff Chang