•
Rating: There are a variety of opinions about the Clash and the impact and importance this band has had on the musical and cultural history of Great Britain and rock’n’roll, on the quality of all their productions, on the real or alleged compositional abilities of two of the most notorious musicians of that era - Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, of course - on whether punk was perhaps nothing more than a great bluff and a more or less successful commercial operation, and on how truly “punk” the Clash itself ultimately were. Probably many of these opinions - all of them, if expressed with a minimum of common sense and, a thing increasingly rare in this era of syntactical vaporization and grammatical decay, literacy - are respectable and perhaps little productive, but certainly interesting and endless topics of discussion on one of those dark and stormy nights. When lightning flashes, thunder roars, and the rain comes down in drops heavy as lead, arrows come from the sky in the form of rain, thunder shakes the pillars of the sky and - let’s be honest, you know how it ends! - you look the unleashed cyclone straight in the eyes and say, “Bring your worst, friend. You don’t scare me.”
However, I haven't seen any green-eyed Chinese girls around, but I've lost my mind for one with fiery red hair who lights up when you talk to her about “reclamation and land conservation”, I've seen - green - explosions and people entering and exiting while flying, while a goat butts a hedge and gets its horns stuck. I've seen Chinatown and, although I don't consider it among the greatest masterpieces of the “hard boiled” genre, and notwithstanding Jack Nicholson, who climbs the Dunaway as well as Humphrey Bogart did with the endless Bacall many years before and Bob Hoskins with Jessica Rabbit a few years later, he's ultimately less convincing than Robert Mitchum and that great son of a bitch Elliott Gould in “The Long Goodbye”, I have always found it a great film. Anyway and however, beyond the false moralizing and the deviations and distortions of this damn western world, the events of this self-exiled director remind me of one who at the dawn of this decade “died in solitude” in a place in Carthage made famous by the Scipios and which is still today a place of worship and pilgrimage of some political dinosaurs and unworthy representative of equally unworthy Italian socialism. The fact is that, on this day, outside, it must have been forty degrees and this city, hell of boiling oil on earth, will kill us all before any possible nuclear holocaust and atomic disaster, before any of us stands up and asserts their more or less reasonable reasons. Assuming this could serve or change things. Assuming there are any.
I cared about Joe Strummer. That’s out of question. I cared for him like the older brother I never had and, since my life took a bad turn, admitting I learned something from Joe and claiming such a thing would even be disrespectful to him, we can say with absolute certainty that, when I was young, I spent more time listening to and re-listening to “London Calling” - bought over the years three or four times in various formats and editions and reissues - than reading Kant, Hegel, and all the Critiques of Pure Reason with my cats in boots. Then as now, I was convinced I had to fulfill in life a mission as great as it was vague, which, even if I would never win, would have at least seen me end with my head held high under the Mexico City sun, before the firing squad of some Central American puppet Sergeant Garcia created by the oil dollars of the US government. The Clash’s sound and Joe Strummer’s words seemed to be the right soundtrack for this whole story, and my continuous bashing my head in a revolution against everything and everyone seemed decidedly and damn punk. I didn't want to be condemned to an ordinary life, like everyone else's. I would end before, and my end would be spectacular. It would have made sense.
The issue remains unresolved. I am an unstoppable romantic or perhaps just an incurable jerk. I should have distracted myself from my “revolutions” by inviting some girl, at least one, at least that girl with fiery red hair and eyes as deep as the bluest blue of the Sargasso Sea, to dance, but so far I've preferred to throw my life away fighting against the ghosts and monsters crowding my mind, skirting genuine madness and deluding myself into finding peace sooner or later through the use of psychiatric drugs and straitjackets.
Everything has only gotten worse. The real revolutions are all long gone and even the Earth's revolutionary motions around the Sun seem to have slowed down, almost in contrast to the frenetic rhythms of our increasingly chaotic, crowded, and stinking cities. Joe Strummer is dead and left me alone, perpetually awaiting my execution, like Massimo Lopez, the “cangurotto” who had his life saved by endless phone calls in a famous advertisement broadcast on Italian television in the nineties.
The fact is that I knew Mick Jones was doing well. For some years now, he has put together the Carbon/Silicon, a band that already has some records behind it and of which I had read some more or less flattering reviews, but of which I nevertheless considered the listening “useless”: how could these Carbon/Silicon have anything to add to a perfect story, or at least I considered it such, as that of the Clash?
Moreover, Mick Jones was mentioned because he supported - if ever there was truly a need - the cause of Kate Moss’s boyfriend, who, when not too busy getting photographed and caught while publicly and brazenly using drugs, does the job of the lead singer of the Libertines, the Babyshambles, etc., etc.
The life of Mick Jones, who today appears as the ungainly and distorted stand-in of Nicholas Cage and dresses on stage like the David Bowie of “Under Pressure”, is an ordinary life for a rock star. Too ordinary. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want harm to Mick Jones - heaven forbid! - nor would I wish him condemned to a premature death or a life of every kind of excess, too stupid, pathetic, like that of the aforementioned leader of the Babyshambles. However, when last Thursday I saw him take the stage with his Carbon/Silicon, I asked myself: is it right that this man has survived his own legend, the story of the Clash, everything this band has meant and maybe will continue to mean throughout the years?
I didn't know how to answer myself. Maybe I prefer to let it go, worried this time about not giving myself further headaches, but, if we want to draw a parallel between my events and those of Mick Jones, it really seems the latter is doing better than myself. Mick Jones, dressed in a blue suit, appeared amused, in perfect shape, and at ease among cans of modern energy drinks, some too megalomaniac DJs, and indie-rocker kids. The performance of Carbon/Silicon, part of the first of the two days of the 2010 edition of the increasingly less rock (the headliners this year were Fatboy Slim and Jamiroquai...) Neapolis Festival, lasted about an hour and was decent. Too decent, even “by trade”, confirming in fact everything superfluous I had thought of this formation, which still includes, among others, the second guitar presence of the former Generation X Tony James. The audience, overly irritated by the previous performance of the Velvet, a band historically devoted to uselessness, appreciated and even went wild at the end, when Jones reprised two of his historical warhorses, “Train In Vain” and the overexposed “Should I Stay or Should I Go.” Naturally, I would have preferred to hear some other old Clash song rather than these two, but Mick Jones was never Joe Strummer and still, even when he played “Police On My Back,” the audience was unsensitive and quite disinterested.
It was precisely this, instead, the moment of greater reflection and interest of the Carbon/Silicon concert. As the last lights of the day gave way to the evening, I turned my gaze towards the San Paolo Stadium - the venue hosting the festival, the Mostra d’Oltremare, is indeed on the same square where the sports facility that some would like named after the legendary Attila Sallustro is located - and the thought of some useless Sunday afternoon spent in the stands watching twenty-two jerks in shorts run after a ball adhering to some more or less rigorously tactical logic and functional to beautiful play. Especially, I thought of the usual damn neo-fascists who shout slogans like “Officer first enemy!” and praise the clash with the police for practically all ninety minutes plus injury time, no matter if wearing the shirt of their favorite team on the field is Ruud Krol, Baroni, Fusi, Renica, Renato Buso, Corneliusson, or Edinson Cavani and what the match trend might be. These people go to the stadium, as to anywhere else, just to spew crap.
It’s useless to ask this time how much these slogans have any relevance to soccer because the answer is obvious - none - and it would then require a broader discussion and reflection on circumstances that have little to do with the issue at hand. However, there remains the terrible realization of the further and constant degradation of our society, of the void that has been created in the heads of the last generations and the fact that, if overall cops can historically be considered jerks, this time we are not any better even on the other side of the barricade. So, we condemn modern society, this western world devoid of real ideals, empty of content, and made of distortions and miserable and dangerous deviations created by the monsters of television and mass media, bombing worse than a nuclear submarine in the waters of the Baltic Sea during the Cold War. But not even this time, however, can we justify, absolve, and unload from their own responsibilities the entire previous generation. These young neo-fascists of every possible social extraction are their children and the result of their failure to educate. They are the children of the failures and frustrations of a previous world and of people who, at a certain point, pulled the plug and stopped fighting against all the ghosts and monsters that crowd their heads, our heads, and our everyday life. Because it is easier to live this way because, in the end, some never really believed it.
And then Mick Jones and I tie one to one, because all things considered, in my clear madness and in pursuing perhaps impossible revolutions, I never gave up, I gritted my teeth, and I perhaps took a few kicks on the shins, but in the end, I did score a goal and left the field with my head held high.
Too bad the match was held in Naples and away goals in European competitions count double.
Loading comments slowly
