Winamp Wednesday: Both Arms in Plaster
A toast to St. Joe Strummer
Winamp Wednesday is our continuing feature spotlighting all the MP3s I downloaded in the wild-west days of the early internet. B-Sides, live shows, off-air recordings, classics, and today's track...
Joe Strummer, “It’s a Rockin’ World”
Let’s talk about being fourteen at Christmastime.
The reason I know this track says a lot about what it was like to be fourteen and American in the Late 90s. I’ve written about how The Clash Were The Only Band That Mattered before, but my obsession with a decade-old band hadn’t yet bled into the solo careers of its members. The beginnings of dial-up internet and an interest mostly sparked by the Grosse Pointe Blank soundtrack wasn’t going to lead a teen to the Clash album we don’t talk about or the solo career of Paul Simonon. Within a few years Napster and wider access to the internet and all kinds of pre-and-post-Millennial evolutions would make it much easier to piece together the entire picture on any band you pleased. But in 1998 you got what you could in the local record store or drip-fed from cable TV and 14.4 modems. What was Joe Strummer up to? I’d have to consult the errant copy of Rolling Stone to find out.
So I found “It’s a Rockin’ World” on the Chef Aid soundtrack. South Park is even more of a shambling corpse than The Simpsons now, but at Christmas ‘98 it was the hottest thing going. They were on a roll that added “Plane’arium” and “Chewbacca Defense” and “Underpants Gnomes” to the lexicon of teenagers who could repeat the same bits in a spiral, laughing over and over at these absurd bits. Hell, I’m sure that there’s someone in their Early 40s in America using “look at the monkey!” as a non sequitur and giggling right now. That the semi-musical episode got a full soundtrack release within days of airing felt like a miracle to those of us who were ardent fans, and like the show it was oddball enough to appeal to all kinds of tastes. Did you like mainstream rap? Here’s the new Master P single. Are you a complete weirdo who dug too much into your older brother’s records? Oh look, Ween!
If you were somewhere in between, here was a solo Joe Strummer track that couldn’t have been more perfect for a posturing wanting-to-be-awesome teenager if it had been created in a lab. A crazy drum fill into a UFO noise? I’m not sure if there’s a better way to kick off a little slice of pop. This track isn’t angry and it isn’t in-yer-face the way the best of The Clash was, no hard edges of “I’m So Bored with the USA” or the sadness of “Train in Vain”. It’s the settled joy of someone who’s already been around the block, of an artist who didn’t want to be on his own in the first place. (Check out how quickly Strummer and Mick Jones reunited under the Big Audio Dynamite brand for a primer on how little he wanted to be a solo artist.) Joe knows what he loves and he’s going to put all of it into this one song. There’s a honky-tonk piano solo in the middle here which would be incongruous in the best of circumstances, but circumstances here means “Ozzy and DMX really wanted to be on the Blade soundtrack”. You don’t tell the man who wrote “Lost in the Supermarket” what to do, you just let Isaac Hayes sing over the last chorus. Joe Strummer can do whatever he wants.
Which is good, because the lyrics eventually descend into gibberish. I think we’re trying to get playfully philosophical here, but we could have used one more or one fewer drafts on it. Those first few lines, though, were accelerant to my adolescent heart. If Joe Strummer could write a protagonist who messes up so badly he breaks both his arms and still has enough gumption to ask out a girl, then I had less than zero excuses in a similar situation. This song was soundtrack to December, to the Christmas season when it felt like anything was possible, that childlike wonder still not fully baked off my teenage frame. When you add validation from one of the all-time great rockers, what kind of perceived invincibility do you get?
Dear reader, nothing good comes from that line of thinking. The superpowers that teenage crushes and big plans and rock lyrics create inevitably lead to the existential car accident that every high schooler has to endure eventually. It makes you the main character, and ain’t nobody should be the main character. “It’s a Rockin’ World” became a theme song, the opening credits to some real-life WB show that was my life as I saw it in my head. It wasn’t healthy, but show me a well-adjusted fourteen-year-old. I’m realizing now that I was probably fixating on a track that many of my fellow teenage South Park fans skipped right over. This one wasn’t funny and it didn’t have a bunch of swears. What it was was crazy hopeful.
Billboard Magazine had a great quote about “It’s a Rockin’ World” when it was included on the Strummer anthology Strummer 001. “This was Joe’s brand: He loved the absurdity and variety of the world enough to believe humanity just might save itself.” That bumblebee, the lousy rotten bum? He loved him too. The sidewalk surfer? He had to love him, because we were all him at one point or another. In a lot of ways “It’s a Rockin’ World” is a perfect Christmastime song. If we’re even going to pretend that this time of the year is about good will towards men, the best of our intentions, maybe even a savior come to absolve our sins, then we’re going to have to realize that it’s a party of the most raucous order. Welcome to this Earth, bro. We’re trying to find an answer. If that ain’t the whole Christmas story in a nutshell.
Fourteen at Christmas feels as close now as any given holiday season in my twenties. I can still feel a weird sense of unease. I was bad enough at school that my teachers were calling home to read off my test scores, bad enough at friends that I only had a few of them, bad enough in my body that it felt like a constantly-shaking prison. I guess that’s the same for any high schooler except for those who peak in high school. A year from then most everything would be different. That’s the hyperspeed at which your life moves from fourteen into fifteen into sixteen. We’ll get there in just a little bit.
But December 20th exactly twenty-five years ago I was riding the subway home listening to this track like it was the only damn thing to care about in this rockin’ world. I’d hold on to the pole and let my body go slack and ride the tracks and the curves down Manhattan like the best kind of surf. It was posturing and it was mostly in my head but it made me feel free and joyous as the year drew to a close. Ain’t nothin’ fake about that.
Next time: I’ve been thinking about tomorrow…