Turning revolution into money
…you think it’s funny
Turning rebellion into money
– The Clash. ‘White Man in Hammersmith Palais’ 1978
I saw the Clash in 1977. Now that was something. They were impossibly good – a non-stop torrent of white-hot energy cascading from the stage, passing right through the instantly electrified audience. Not sure I could really speak for hours afterwards.
In 1991, the Clash’s ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go?’ was used to soundtrack a Levis advert. Now, the Levis adverts were cool, and groundbreaking at the time; but they were still adverts. These days, this kind of deal is everywhere. It’s a simple equation. Boomers have money; boomers like this music. Let’s use it to take the boomers money from them. And it works.
I don’t blame the ‘sell outs’; I read somewhere of one sixties band member who’d sold the rights of their biggest hit to a business, who’d used it to sell soap powder, or some such; he pointed out, reasonably enough, that the money on offer was more than they would have earned in gigging for the rest of their born days. I’m sure that, without a very substantial financial cushion, I’d have done the same. I don’t really blame the advertising companies, although I’m sorely tempted, at times.
There is, though, something inherently malign in our capitalist system. There just is. It’s eating up our world, and we’re all complicit, in one way or another. Of course rebellion would be turned into money sooner or later. Round about the time of Joe Strummer’s passing (God, nearly twenty years ago now), I was working at a place called the Bradford Resource Centre, one of the few remaining left-wing redoubts following the serial depredations of the Thatcher years. I was chatting to one old-time socialist, who was bemoaning the creeping commercialisation of everything. I remember saying that one day, when every square inch of Lake District mountain is covered in electrified advertising hoardings, we’ll look back on this time as a period of sublime restraint. We sat there quietly for a while.
By most standards, Joe did OK. He spent his post-punk, mainly post-fame years living in the west country, sitting around camp fires, playing with bands as and when he felt like it, and generally staying free. (Levis ads notwithstanding). But he was right in 1978, and he remains right today; there’s nothing remotely funny about turning rebellion into money.