Will anything on the high street remain?

They got Burton suits
You think it's funny
Turning rebellion into money

https://www.theguardian.com/busines...nto-administration?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

 

Since they're the only thing open...

I'm all lost in the supermarket
I can no longer shop happily
I came in here for that special offer
A guaranteed personality

 

And has this ever been more apt

The voices in your head are calling
Stop wasting your time, there's nothing coming
Only a fool would think someone could save you
The men at the factory are old and cunning
You don't owe nothing, boy, get runnin'
It's the best years of your life they want to steal

 

Since jobs seem to be going right, left and centre...

Career opportunities, the ones that never knock
Every job they offer you is to keep you out the dock
Career opportunities, the ones that never knock

 

This is a public service announcement
With guitar

You have the right not to be killed
Murder is a crime
Unless it was done
By a policeman
Or an aristocrat

You have the right to food money
Providing of course
You don't mind a little
Investigation, humiliation
And if you cross your fingers
Rehabilitation

You have the right to free speech
As long as
You're not dumb enough to actually try it

 

What you see is what you get
You've made your bed, you better lie in it
You choose your leaders and place your trust
As their lies wash you down and their promises rust
You'll see kidney machines replaced by rockets and guns
And the public wants what the public gets
But I don't get what this society wants

 

We talk and talk until my head explodes
I turn on the news and my body froze
The braying sheep on my TV screen
Make this boy shout, make this boy scream!

 

So many people can't express what's on their minds
Nobody knows them and nobody ever will
Until their backs are broken and their dreams are stolen
And they can't get what they want then they're gonna get angry
Well it ain't written in the papers, but it's written on the walls
The way this country is divided to fall
So the cranes are moving on the skyline
Trying to knock down this town
But the stains on the heartland, can never be removed
From this country that's sick, sad, and confused
Here comes another winter of long shadows and high hopes
Here comes another winter waitin' for utopia
Waitin' for hell to freeze over

 

I said, you blame it on the immigrants
you blame it on the poor,
blame anyone who's not the same as you
You forgot about the bankers
yeah, the greedy fk*cing w@nkers
cos it's them who made this mess we're living through

So be careful what you wish for
and remember what they did,
remember how they tore this land in two
They might tell you different stories
but they're still the same old Tories
and they'll always put the bankers before you

So give me fourth division football,
indiepop and proper pubs
Radio 4 on in the kitchen when it's cold outside
You can keep what's superficial,
you can give me David Mitchell
give me anything that's heartfelt, real and kind

 

White man in Hammersmith Palais greatest ever Clash song and those lines are a pop at The Jam.

 

So here it is, Merry Christmas
Everybody's having fun
Look to the future now
It's only just begun

Never have Slade's poptastic song seemed so laden with doom and dread....

 

I agree and I know, but Going Underground is a fantastic song.

 

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”

 

PS My dad's seen The Clash. About 4 times. It's almost enough for me not to like him. If it was 5 we'd be done. There are definitely extremities that I could live without if cutting one off would allow me to see them. But as much as I think the first album is the best, not during the spitting era.

 

I really like the Jam. I also really like the Clash. They were never mutually exclusive.

Oh and Give Em Enough Rope was their best collection of work in my opinion.

 

The early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies -- the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

In their propaganda today's dictators rely for the most part on repetition, suppression and rationalization -- the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the suppression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in the interests of the Party or the State. As the art and science of manipulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine these techniques with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational propaganda essential to the maintenance of individual liberty and the survival of democratic institutions.

Aldus Huxley - Brave New World Revisited. 1958.

 

Give 'em enough rope is an amazing, almost forgotten, album. The problem it has is it has to stand up against the raw sound of the first, which I don't think has ever been captured so well, certainly not with so many good songs; the genuine genius of London Calling; the batsh1t mental genius of Sandinista, and the hits from Combat Rock, which I don't rate too highly, although Straight To Hell is up there as one of their best. Yeah and there's another one, but we don't talk about that. (And some of the compilations and 'Live' albums are pretty damn good)

Give 'em Enough Rope is undoubtedly the most consistent in terms of sound and quality. It's actually very innovative in the wall of guitar sound throughout. It's a blueprint for Stadium Rock that so many record producers have and still look to for inspiration. I still listen to it regularly, it's just that, for me personally, it hasn't got those highs that Clash/Calling/Sandinista have. It's a brilliant album (and this harks back to your post about Greatest Hits the other week) on a consistent theme, but I prefer the adrenaline that the better songs on the other three allow, and can cope with a few OK tracks in between, particularly now that I listen to more music on my computer than I do on vinyl and it's so easy to click the skip button.

I've become everything I hate!

 

Wow! That's good. Bloody hell that's good. To my shame I haven't read it. I will now.

 

The hangman by maurice ogden.

 

I went to see The Clash....I wasn't over impressed by the first album initially, but changed my mind after seeing them live.