We were listening to the Clash’s London Calling at work the other day, and I finally had to come out and say it: Wouldn’t it be a much better album with four or five fewer songs?
Critics make so much of how it’s this wide-ranging genre-hopping masterpiece, and they’re right about the range and the multiple genres, but it’s the masterpiece part where I think they’re off track. Granted, I don’t have much interest in roots-rock and world music to begin with, but the Clash’s stabs in those directions strike me as slapdash and vastly inferior to their punk, pop, and hard-rock efforts. Picture a London Calling that goes straight from “London Calling” to “Hateful,” and from “Clampdown” (or, to be fair, “The Guns of Brixton,” which is pretty striking) to “Death or Glory,” and maybe you’ll catch my drift.
It’s not that I don’t admire their ambition or heterodoxy–given the humorless necrophiliac lockstep that much of punk has found itself in during the intervening decades, such qualities are to be commended. Hell, my favorite Beatles record is the White Album, which virtually defines all-over-the-map-ness. But the Clash, for all their virtues, are simply not the Beatles, and London Calling is a case of the Clash’s ambition outstripping their innate talent.
It may come down to a simple matter of aging well, or aging poorly. When London Calling came out, listeners were no doubt impressed that a band with the Clash’s punk bonafides (re-established on any number of the album’s tracks) had a sonic palette so daring and expansive–the punk side stayed punk and the far-out side stayed far-out, if you will. (Obviously, there were limits to how far out the critics would allow the band to go; cf. Sandinista!) Today, the way the album pushed past the punk boundaries is interesting from a historical perspective, and in some cases fusing that attitude with a solid pub-rock core yielded undeniably killer results (“Rudie Can’t Fail,” “Revolution Rock,” and especially the gorgeous Phil Spectorisms of “The Card Cheat”) but it’s the fury and the songcraft of the real rock that makes the record memorable, not its comparatively weak nostalgic novelties.