4th entry in the 10 songs that most affected my life series. I have this thing about discovering great acts or important trends about 10 or 15 years after everyone else. While my brother hooked me up to the Police as far back as 1979, it took me another 11 years before other acts - especially punks - of the same era made it on to my musical map. In 1989, I left my southern French provincial town for Paris and the Institute of Political Sciences. I hated everything about the place apart from a few friends, who turned out to be lifelong ones. For the first time in a short lifespan of always being the intellectual of the class, I found myself surrounded with people whose grades, self-confidence, and Parisian-bourgeois lifestyle and attitude made me feel like the embodiment of the clueless redneck cliché, later to be portrayed to perfection in Dinner for Schmucks. It took a while to build some confidence back up, and start forming an identity of my own that would reconcile my roots with the personality traits forged or revealed by this entirely new, fairly adverse context : maybe thats why, years after it had died for everyone else, Punk came alive to me. And no other band gave me quite as much of a kick as the Clash - whose reggae and funk-inflected brand of three-chord rebellion felt like a turbo-charged version of everything Id loved about the Police as a teenager - but with genuine, gut-felt anger and bad-boy elegance in lieu of opportunistic pop chops. The Clash then turned me on to everything else punk (from the Ramones to the Pistols via NY Dolls and the Banshees) and post punk (Public Image, Wire, Joy Division), but at the time I literally wore out my cassette tape of London Calling, the opening one-two punch of which (the title track followed by a properly incendiary cover of Vince Taylors Brand New Cadillac) always put me back up when I felt down. And that was a lot of times. Enjoy. https://youtube/watch?v=EfK-WX2pa8c
Posted on: Sun, 26 Oct 2014 08:56:48 +0000
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