HATE IT! part 8 - Combat Rock

I know, I know, I'm kicking them when they're down. 2 "hate it" posts in a row, about 2 Clash albums in a row. But Jesus, Mary and Sammy Hagar, Everything this band did after "London Calling" was just gawd-fucking-awful. This album alone has "Should I stay or should I go" and "Rock the casbah" on it, 2 of the stupidest songs in the history of creation. Like, stupider than anything Sam the sham and the Pharoahs with their "woolly bully" or Frankie Lymon and his teenagers ever released. And The Clash took those songs seriously. Seriously enough to try singing about the Iranian revolution, anyway. And those were the hits. In ancient China, there was a (quite righteous, actually) movement to destroy confucianism shortly after confucius croaked. It almost succeeded, but some wiseguy had a handful of scrolls tucked away inside a wall, and once the coast was clear, confucianism regained its footing and subsequently decimated eastern asia, and has deleterious effects there to this very day. I say let this album be the modern equivalent of those scrolls. Destroy every copy. Delete every file. Kill the surviving members of the band by burning at the stake, burn the sheet music and tablature. This fucking album is every bit as horrid as any offering Richard Marx or Desmond Child ever shat out. And look at what was happening in music then: Diamond Dave was singing for Van Halen. How could anyone willingly put themselves through this circle-jerk when they could listen to stupid music that didn't take itself seriously and was infinitely more fun? Clash fans in 1982 should have been thrown in a gas chamber. Stupid is supposed to hurt. 2 minuses on this F.

HATE IT! part 7 - Sandinista!

Oh, The Clash. Now here's a band I can sink my fangs into. My hollow, venomous cobra fangs.

"Gee, why do you hate The Clash so much?"

Really, I don't, strictly speaking. I have always had a real problem with them being labelled a Punk band. They damn sure started that way, but by the 3rd album the punk had been worked out of their systems and they had gotten down to the business of just making good rock music. Somewhere after that, however, they started believing their own press and bought into the whole "only band that matters" label. What did that get us? A triple-album. OK, people look back to the 70s and groan at the self indulgence of double albums (especially live ones) and wonder what the fuck went wrong. Now how the hell can anyone justify a triple album? Not even from Frank Zappa will I put up with that kind of shit. Especially when it's largely political bla-de-blah. I almost never will stand for politics in my music, whether I agree with said politics or not. Perhaps the greatest crime committed here, though, is the fact that "Police on my back" is the one and only good song to be culled from one hour, fourty-four minutes, and twenty-nine seconds of what is otherwise an exercise in self-indulgence, masturbation, and enjoying the smell of one's own farts. And it's an Eddy Grant cover. At 3:15, that leaves 1:41:14 of pure, unequivocally feculent trash. How into yourself do you have to be to do that to people? And guess what? They never lifted themselves back up from their slide into shitsville. This album is a headstone for what this band used to be as much as it's a triple-sized monument to their own willful failure. Queen had naked midgets with mountainous trays heaped with coke strapped to their heads, The Clash had the pleasure of listening to themselves bray about politics for almost 2 hours. They couldn't even get extravagance right. Fucking assholes.