Joe Strummer was a true troubadour - he grinded new sounds out of his guitar, had a pleasing devotion to the magic of a campfire, and wrote genius lyrics that will live forever.
Sometimes he was just showing off - it's not enough that (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais soars to undreamed musical heights, it's also the story about hitting the clubs that has two pieces of lyric that are among the greatest ever written - the one about turning rebellion into money, surely the most righteous sneer I've ever heard on a record, and then he's talking about how they'd send a limousine for Hitler and it's still resonant, still smart, still so angry.
We should all mourn the loss of Joe, we can only dream of the songs he could have written about the last two decades of bullshit, but at least he left us with tonnes of small wisdom, sometimes in the same song.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment