Product Description

It's not easy being the World's Greatest Rock & Roll Band (a tag the Clash inherited from the Rolling Stones, who had traded their emotional commitment for tax exile). What you doafter changing the world with your first few releases? The previous SANDINISTA was the Clash's WHITE ALBUM, exploring just about every musical style they could think of over the course of three LP's. COMBAT ROCK, then, could be their LET IT BE, an attempt to focus on visceral, accessible material, kidney-punching instead of bobbing and weaving.
There's an increased focus on funk here, as on the unlikely hit "Rockthe Casbah" and "Overpowered by Funk". Naturally, there's also a pronounced political element to the lyrics (the anti-authoritarian rant of "Know Your Rights", the post-Vietnam morality play of the moving "Straight to Hell".) Despite the renewed sense of focus, though, there's still a high degree of artistic ambition revealed in both the polysyllabic lyricsand the textured, overdub-heavy arrangements.

Track Listing

1. Inoculated City
2. Know Your Rights
3. Car Jamming
4. Should I Stay Or Should I Go
5. Rock The Casbah
6. Red Angel Dragnet
7. Straight To Hell
8. Overpowered By Funk
9. Atom Tan
10. Sean Flynn
11. Ghetto Defendant
12. Death Is A Star

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5218 in Music
• Released on: 1999-10-04
• Number of discs: 1

From Amazon.com
The final album by the Clash's original Strummer/Jones incarnation is also their most inconsistent. There were musical and ideological rifts developing within the band, and it shows: the experimentation is almost as wild as Sandanista!'s (and the biggest experiment is heading away from their punk shiftiness and into a commercial rock sound), but they seem to be enjoying it less. The band's stabs at funk and poetry aren't terribly successful, but it all came together for two massive hits: "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" has the biggest, stupidest, most perfect riff this side of "Louie Louie," and "Rock the Casbah" pulls the band's politics, fine-honed sarcasm, and saw-toothed guitar sound into the service of a dance-floor beat. --Douglas Wolk

Customer Reviews

should i stay or should i go
what a masterpiece this song is and the clash were my favorite of the punk rock bands. i'm not a big punk rock kid, but the clash was my favorite. on this album it has the greatest punk song ever created in punk rock history should i stay or should i go and rock the casbah is a great tropical bar song.

Over -rated Punk Rock!
I bought this based on others reviews and boy was i disappointed.Take way the two singles and you have a rambling album-whats with all the spoken word bits? Perhaps its because theres little music of any real value outside of the singles.

Excellent record.
This seems ot divide opinion more than any other Clash album - some see it as a sell out, others as a return to form following the sprawling, flawed Sandinista. Im certainly in the latter camp; i love this record, and certainly believe the criticism levelled at it is wholy unfair: its a "sell out", why? Because it had two hit singles on it? London Calling was hardly Aphex Twin either, was it? Ironically the Clash's attempt to "reign it in" following the musical binging that was Sandinista is where, in my opinion, this album fails. It has a fairly good cross section of musical styles on here, but fails to really sink into any kind of groove due to the genre-hopping combined with its relative (ie for a Clash album) brevity. Strummers lyrics have also deepened on this record - Allen Ginsberg turns up on Ghetto Defendant and its clear on some of the other tracks (Car Jamming, Straight To Hell) that he was an influence on Strummers songwwriting. It came out at a time when the Clash had just broke big (that is Shea Stadium, albeit supporting the Who, big) in America, and i think this is one of the major influences in people who claim this record is commercial. In my opinion, its no more commercial than London Calling or even the first Clash record, which did appear, lest we forget, in 1977 - a time when no punk record could fail.

Probably my third favourite Clash record, which would place it in my top 15-20 of all time. Love it.