Rob's Ramblings: Straight to Hell and the Weird World of Cultural Appropriation
Amidst the oft-forgotten but great Clash album Combat Rock, there’s one song which has always haunted me. “Straight to Hell” was actually one of the album singles, released as the B-side of “Should I Stay or Should I Go Now”, but it’s not one I heard much growing up on a steady diet of classic rock radio. The A-side, the kind of clasically simple song which The Clash almost used as bait for more diffuse musical wanderings, fits comfortably on the morning zoo, but “Straight to Hell” definitively does not.
The song’s first three verses each deal with different situations of oppression. The first refers to working-class people in Britain’s decaying industrial heartlands, amidst the deindustrialization and union-breaking of Thatcherism. The lyrics juxtapose Britain’s high-culture pretensions with the brutal realities of its working class (“How’s about a British jig and reel?”/”Speaking King’s English in quotation.”) Later, the song references Puerto Rican immigrants in America facing both outward hostilities (“volatile Molotov”) and drug addiction (“Procaine proves the purest rock man groove/and rat poison.”)
The part that’s always fascinated me the most is the middle verse, from the perspective of a Vietnamese child of American veterans, the “Amerasian blues.” For a long time, I read this verse as that of a father disappointed with the Americanization of his son (“Let me tell ya ‘bout your blood bamboo, kid/ It ain’t Coca-Cola, it’s rice”), but it’s actually about a boy imagining his disappeared father, a series of the empire as one which rampages through the third world and then leaves them to deal with the aftermath.
The final verse seeks to bring these experiences together, explaining them as all an example of a global underclass: “It could be anywhere / most likely could be any frontier / Any hemisphere.” An academic might call it the subaltern, or the “global South.” There’s something old-school Marxist about this concept, that Northern English factory workers and Latin American immigrants and Vietnamese peasants are all in some sense the same, and that none of them has some sort of irreducible privilege over the other for which they must atone.
This is not the type of song that is written much anymore, or then for that matter. The idea of a white singer doing a song from the perspective of a Vietnamese child or a Puerto Rican immigrant might seem politically risky. The lyrics, and Joe Strummer’s vocals, are not afraid of playing into caricature or racial essentialism: one can’t hear Strummer rasp “Mama-mama-san” or “junky-junk ragtime USA” without fearing that one might be listening to auditory brownface. At best, a song like this today might be put into the same well-meaning cringe category as “We are the World” or “Same Love.”
“Straight to Hell” evokes the spectre of cultural appropriation, of violating the sacred directive of “nothing about us without us.” But adhering to the injunction to “write what you know” has resulted in a somewhat tedious lyrical landscape: there are a lot of songs about falling in and out of love, a lot of songs about how hard it is to be a famous musician, and an increasing number about various identity-based grievances. The dominant popular genres of our time, hip-hop and Swiftian confessional pop, strongly encourage identification of the narrator of a song with the physical person of the singer. Even when an artist clearly isn’t singing about themselves, it’s assumed they’re singing about someone like them.
Sticking to what you know can save you a lot of embarrassment and inaccuracy, but I also think there’s something lost in the process. It is obviously presumptuous to think that a British punk can truly understand the mindset of a Vietnamese peasant, but the beauty of art is in trying to do so regardless, in doing your best to experience a world that is fundamentally unlike yours. After the angry political slogans of much of The Clash’s early work (and much of Combat Rock), and the famous self-indulgence of Sandinista, “Straight to Hell” seemed to promise a new direction for The Clash, and perhaps punk rock in the 1980s, still angry and political but also introspective and musically diverse. Of course, the band imploded shortly afterwards, and it remained a curio.
As I’ve noted, “Straight to Hell” never became a radio-rock staple, but it did develop something of a cult legacy. Vulture ranked it as the second-best Clash song in a 2017 article. One of my favourite current bands, The Menzingers, covered it on an early album. It’s an aggressive rush of music, and while the Clash’s version of the song allows plenty of time to linger on the lyrics, on the Menzingers they’re simply part of the rising and falling sound, like the notes themselves. It’s a sign of the song’s influence that even a band more known for romantic nostalgia than political commentary covered it 25 years after release.
The biggest musical legacy is, however, a song you’ve almost certainly heard. The most distinctive musical part of “Straight to Hell” is the distorted wah-wah-wah sound that fills the space between verses, an almost electro-pop sound totally different than the crunchy rock which defined The Clash’s biggest hits. It’s a song that the band couldn’t even really replicate in concert – listen to this live version from a San Bernardino concert, which also has some improvised lyrics:
This sound was sampled in MIA’s 2008 hit “Paper Planes”, where it is basically the entire musical backdrop. The sample was extensive enough that the members of The Clash were credited as co-writers, although no doubt the majority of people who heard it had no idea it was a 80s punk B-side. The lyrics, while sang in a peppy cadence, describe the same sort of global subaltern that “Straight to Hell” discussed, describing the experience of South Asian immigrants in the United Kingdom, with references to counterfeit visas and burner phones.
MIA has a much better claim than Joe Strummer to speak for the global south. She spent her childhood in Sri Lanka, until she was displaced by the bloody civil war. She also had a Clash-esque approach to radical politics, garnering controversy for her vocal support of the Tamil Tigers revolutionary front/terrorist group (take your pick.) MIA was, in a sense, appropriating The Clash’s music from a punk cultural scene she had never been a part of and turning it into a much more mainstream-friendly pop track, but in another sense she was the perfect musician to revive “Straight to Hell.”
Perhaps this expresses why I’m so uninterested in the concept of cultural appropriation, or “own voices.” Culture moves, between high and low, between metropole and periphery, between privileged and subaltern. The south copies the north’s culture and adds its own spin, and then the north copies that copy. Some of it will be cringeworthy, much of it will fail, but, as in “Straight to Hell”, some of it will be beautiful.