The Clash
White Riot

THE REVIEW

1-2-3-4

Fast, violent, and direct.

No rhetoric, no intellectualism or verbosity, no showmanship. Two strummed guitars and a nervous bass, no framing, an indelible chorus that penetrates the head and heart. 

The snob can dismiss it as simplistic and musically insignificant, the narrow-minded do-gooder from social campaigns might see it as incitement to racial war, the state-employed left-wing intellectual professor might say the lyrics are elementary and clichéd. Fuck them.

To hell with them and their world made of non-violent demonstrations and violent repression, their world where a Sardinian shepherd, while protesting to get protection from institutional market parasitism that is crippling him, can lose an eye to a smoke bomb launched at head height, and it's all fine because "the forces of order did not violate procedures" and because "the demonstration must respect the rules."

A boulder hurled against the cowards in suits of the "let's sit down at a table and negotiate" and those who don't even want to negotiate. Against the indifferent and the wishy-washy, the rabbits, passive and passivist in peaceful opposition: those who in '77 as in 2010 should learn from the black people to fight for a cause, or for the simple dignity of being human.

Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon were really there, side by side with the Jamaican community, in the streets of Notting Hill in '76, tasting batons, giving a complete sense to their art and their lives. They were really there, and that's why they have been able to penetrate our consciousness for over thirty years, trying to wake us up.

Are you taking over
Or are you taking orders?
Are you going backwards
Or are you going forwards?