Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros - Rock Art and the X-Ray Style

(click to listen to "The Road to Rock n Roll")

I was never a punk.  I think I might have tried to pull it off in fourth or fifth grade, probably because I associated it with skateboarding, but more often, I was turning my nose at it, swearing that it all sounds the same, still convinced that it was necessary to justify liking music by virtuosity rather than impact. 

I saw Big Audio Dynamite on MTV and bought The Globe when in my world The Clash was just another punk band that sang "Rock the Casbah," and for a long time, Mick Jones was the face of the band for me because he sang "Should I Stay or Should I Go."  The Ramones were the one punk band I could name drop when I would finally concede that even if a lot of punk music did all sound the same, I couldn't deny that yes, some of it was pretty awesome.

Then I heard London Calling--all of it at once--and suddenly, I liked punk music.  Suddenly, Joe Strummer was the face of The Clash.  Suddenly, I was pulling out all the most ragged rock records I owned and searching out music I never would have just days before.

Years later, a friend (whose age and sub-urban formative years place him as my most-punk friend) gave the woman who would eventually become my girlfriend a CD-R copy of Rock Art & the X-Ray Style (mislabeled as Streetcore), and a few years after that, I was introduced to the rebirth of Joe Strummer.

After ten years making sense of his past, a sleeping visionary had rediscovered his sight and his voice, instantaneously recasting every song he ever wrote for The Clash in the light of the present.  The rebellious punk rocker had embraced his inner hippie and found a message every bit as revolutionary as "White Riot," just a little wiser and more diplomatic.  Listening to Rock Art & the X-Ray Style makes me miss Joe Strummer the man, more than Joe Strummer the punk, and when a man's life portrait makes a greater impression than a snapshot, the world can ask no more of him.  Gone too soon, but here forever...

Techno D-Day
Forbidden City
Willesden to Criclewood
Yalla Yalla

*inspiration courtesy of The Future Is Unwritten