#8 London Calling - The Clash

My favorite line from the album: "I wasn't born so much as I fell out, nobody seemed to notice me..."

Totally brilliant album.  Rather than listening to this album just twice with a few of my favorite songs over and over afterwards, I spent a whole weekend immersed in The Clash.  Laundry, working out, driving to work on Friday - you name it, I spent the whole time with Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, and Nicky Headon.  Ballers, all, but Paul is the hottest.

It was like they took the best of rock, punk, reggae, ska, and other random categories of music, threw it together with a theme about the end of the world and birthed this badass album.

Random Picture of the band:

Here is a youtube video of them performing London Calling:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiVvA9YQpiI

I think that it's such a great album on its own and the spooky, end-of-the-world themes probably resonated then as much as they do now considering I personally feel an impending doom about the world; but maybe that's because - as we already discussed in the Ok Computer post - that my brain functions at frequency "anxiety" or maybe it's because I believe Monsanto is trying to kill us all.  but I digress.  What is also so amazing about this album is it doesn't bring you down despite the lyrical content of the songs.  Most of the album is upbeat and very catchy so it's not like getting hit with a totally unforgiving apocalypse.  But it'll be playing at my house when the zombie invasion comes, no doubt.

What the Rolling Stone had to say about it:

Recorded in 1979 in London, which was then wrenched by surging unemployment and drug addiction, and released in America in January 1980, the dawn of an uncertain decade, London Calling is nineteen songs of apocalypse fueled by an unbending faith in rock & roll to beat back the darkness. Produced with no-surrender energy by legendary Sixties studio madman Guy Stevens, the Clash's third album sounds like a free-form radio broadcast from the end of the world, skidding from bleak punk ("London Calling") to rampaging ska ("Wrong 'Em Boyo") and disco resignation ("Lost in the Supermarket"). The album was made in dire straits, too. The band was heavily in debt; singer-guitarists Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, the Clash's Lennon and McCartney, wrote together in Jones' grandmother's flat, where he was living for lack of dough. But the Clash also cranked up the hope. The album ends with "Train in Vain," a rousing song of fidelity (originally unlisted on the back cover) that became the sound of triumph: the Clash's first Top Thirty single in the U.S.