I wrote this about two years ago — I think — as a standalone essay for a friend’s publication. It didn’t run. I am now working it into a longer essay, but thought I’d share it.
Notes on ‘Guns of Brixton’
Few songs capture the current American zeitgeist better than a 36-year-old, reggae-influenced punk song by an iconic English band with a fetish for American and Jamaican roots music.
The Clash’s “Guns of Brixton” — with its themes of desperation and fear, with its sense that the government or some other ominous threat might arrive at any minute and “kick at your front door,” with its expectation of “no future,” as Johnny Rotten screeched with the Sex Pistols just a few years earlier — is a song of its time and place to be sure.
But it also is a song of our time and our world, reaching beyond the United Kingdom in the late-‘70s to the wider world. From an American perspective, it is a song that captures post-9/11 paranoia and the intrusiveness of the surveillance state in a few lines. It sums up our post-crash economy, one of haves and have-nots, of lost housing, lost income, lost savings and, most importantly, lost faith. In its thumping, ominous bass-line, you can hear the anger of the American street, of Baltimore and Ferguson and Cleveland and so many other American cities as Paul Simonon sings,
Shot down on the pavement Waiting in death row His game is called survivin’ As in heaven as in hell
It is a song that has been covered several times – by Kurt Vile, Nouvelle Vague and others – but never as powerfully as by reggae legend Jimmy Cliff, who issued it on a 2011 EP Sacred Fire and then on his masterful 2012 comeback album, Rebirth.
Cliff’s version opens with an acoustic guitar strumming the baseline, percussion adding counterpoint. Cliff enters, his voice softer than Strummer’s, the anger tempered – a sense of mourning, perhaps, but the voice is clear, the diction precise, ominous in its own way. Consider it a warning. Or reportage. Cliff is recording an homage to The Clash and Joe Strummer, but also offering a statement on what was happening in contemporary Great Britain.
“While I was recording the song,” he told NME in 2012 after the release of Rebirth, “there were some riots going on here in England, too.”
It seems obvious now, Cliff covering “Guns of Brixton.” After all, the Simonon-penned track is a nod to the reggae great, a noir-inspired story of a hustler in working-class England that echoes the story told in the film The Harder They Come, even name-dropping the film and the character Cliff played.
Cliff told NME he recorded the song as a tribute to his friend, Joe Strummer, who died in December 2002. The Clash’s front man had performed on Cliff’s uneven 2004 record Black Magic.
Rebirth is Cliff’s best album since the 1970s, mostly because he goes back to his roots, grounding the record in an earlier reggae sound. Produced by Rancid’s Tim Armstrong, it is devoid of the techno-accoutrements of reggaeton or the toastmaster school, but it is not a nostalgia trip (aside from the brilliant “Reggae Music”).
In many ways, “Guns of Brixton” is the defining track – as I think, in retrospect, it is on London Calling. It is a British working-class anthem turned on its head, written at a time when unemployment and prices were approaching post-World War II highs. Energy shortages were the norm, strikes were rampant in England, and American industry was beginning to ship manufacturing jobs overseas. There were riots in England, the hostage crisis in the United States and the ascension of new conservative governments in both countries.
London Calling addresses this, both musically and lyrically, mixing post-punk anthems with reggae- and ska-inspired tracks that capture the changing racial demographics as well as anything that would hit the air waves. While the title track and songs like “Lost in the Supermarket” and “Train in Vain” received the radio play, it was “Guns of Brixton” that offered the most pointed nod to the economic discontent. The Clash version opens with Simonon’s snaking bass line (noir that you can dance to), followed by the drum, scratching vinyl and a guitar that sounds like the echo of a rifle shot. Simonon, making his first lead vocal appearance with the band, enters, menace in his voice, and raises the existential question:
When they kick at your front door
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
Or on the trigger of your gun
It is a question that repeats, addressed to the prisoner, to the victim of police violence, always punctuated by an insurgent’s message:
You can crush us
You can bruise us
But you’ll have to answer to
Oh, the guns of Brixton
“Answer to” – a phrase indicative of a time of uprising, of rebellion, of the goals of the Occupy movement, of the Arab spring, of a roiling discontent that flared into violence in Ferguson and Baltimore and threatens other cities. Cliff was aware of this, as he said, when he entered the studio. The album, while not as expansive or eclectic as London Calling, mines much of the same thematic turf.
“Basically,” he told the Boston Globe, “I’m motivated to write about sociopolitical issues as well as relationships. I think those themes have stayed with me throughout my life.”
Rebirth opens with a statement about the economy, war and the environment — “World Upside Down” – and continues with songs proclaiming not just a right to speak, but the need to do so, and to fight back, to rebel (including a rewrite of his classic anti-war anthem “Vietnam” as “Afghanistan”).
“Guns of Brixton” sits near the center of the record and follows the very Clash-like “Bang,” a song with a snaking guitar line and screams a la “Know Your Rights” that is a paean to independence, to personal growth, to protest. “Take your stand and make your bang,” Cliff sings above the guitar and noirish bass, before giving way to the Clash cover, to a matter-of-fact warning – “you’ll have to answer to” – set atop an acoustic guitar, a saxophone breaking in like the police, or like Ivan in The Harder They Come.
In Cliff’s hands, the song is freed from the ominous claustrophobic feel of the original and is reborn, to borrow from the album’s title, as an anti-anthem for a new era.
Send me an e-mail.
Hank Kalet 