Shostakovich, The Clash & 'The Big Sell-Out'

I've been a whore, I am and always will be a whore

-Dmitri Shostakovich, after accepting membership in the Communist Party, 1960

In February of 1948 accused "formalist" Dmitri Shostakovich stood before the Soviet General Assembly and read his response to Stalin's Historic Decree banning several of his own recent symphonies as well as those of his contemporaries Prokoviev and Popov. As a formalist he stood accused of modernist tendencies, a decadent refutation of joyous simplicity and thus incompatible with the goal of all art: the exultation of the spirit of the Soviet People and their great leader Comrade Stalin.


This was not Shostakovich's first infraction; in 1929 the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians administered a slap on the wrist after the premiere of his satirical opera The Nose. Suitably chastened the composer subsequently devoted himself to film work and ballets illustrating revolutionary Soviet themes. In 1936 Stalin himself attended a performance of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, an opera ostensibly in service of the Soviet struggle, only to walk out in disgust at its moral ambiguity, satirical tone and daring harmonic constructions. Shostakovich was soon denounced in the pages of Pravda under the headline "Muddle Instead of Music", his work derided as "morally obscene", the composer warned that his career "may end very badly". Stalin's terror was underway and those who displeased the dictator were executed or sent to the gulags. While his friends and colleagues suffered, Shostakovich lived in perpetual shamed, agonized suspense as Stalin's pet, alternately coddled and tormented as the needs of The People and the whims of their leader dictated.


By the late 1940s Shostakovich had perfected his role, something akin to that of a brilliant but naughty schoolboy, a fawning smile and a spitball in his pocket; his symphonies spoke in a formally conservative voice in which some heard a strain of mocking satire and subversion; occasional film scores and workers songs were produced to glorify the Motherland and its leader; criticisms were met with obsequities. His 7th Symphony commemorating the siege of Leningrad earned Stalin's praise and the gifts of a new five room apartment in Moscow and a country dacha; though he still kept two suitcases packed for the arrival of a Black Maria he delicately used this unofficial status as the premier Soviet composer to aid the cause of his less fortunate peers. All the while he sought the shadows of piano and chamber music - their lack of pomp and grandeur rendering them useless as propaganda and thus nearly invisible to the state's eyes - for an unshackled expression of his tragic, mordant voice.


By 1948, his behavior was conditioned; answering the charge of formalism, he spoke to the Soviet General Assembly in Stalinese so fluent it could be read as abject contrition or the driest of satire:

The absence, in my works, of the interpretation of folk art, that great spirit by which our people lives, has been with utmost clarity and definiteness pointed out by the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik). I am deeply grateful for it and for all the criticism contained in the Resolution. All the directives of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik), and in particular those that concern me personally, I accept as a stern but paternal solicitude for us, Soviet artists. Work - creative, joyous work on new compositions which will find their path to the heart of the Soviet people, which will be understandable to the people, loved by them, and which will be organically connected with the people's art, developed and enriched by the great traditions of Russian classicism - this will be a fitting response to the resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik).

His plea succeeded, but there was no joy for Shostakovich; his life was a struggle between his muse and his master, and his master always kept the upper hand. He resisted where he could, but in the collective paradise of the Soviet state there was room for no individual but one, and Shostakovich, his wife and his children lived only at His discretion; the composer was merely an instrument of Stalin's rule.

By 1960 Shostakovich's subjugation and humiliation was complete; he accepted a position at the head of the Soviet Composers Union and a membership in the Communist Party. Fifteen years had passed since Stalin's death, the Terror with it, and artists were once again allowed some measure of freedom, but by now Shostakovich knew only one way to make himself heard; in a fever of self-loathing he composed his autobiographical Eighth String Quartet: a sorrowful requiem for the "victims of fascism and war" and his own conscience, its dark largos the mourning of a man with no illusions about the world or himself.

You think it's funny

Turning rebellion into money

-The Clash, White Man In Hammersmith Palais, 1978

Born with guns blazing less than two years after Dmitri Shostakovich's death, The Clash defined themselves in strict opposition to the political and cultural orthodoxy of doleful Olde England of drear. Their very name served as a manifesto in brief and their first single elaborated upon it; White Riot was a blunt call to arms while its flip, 1977, with its chorus of "no Elvis, Beatles and the Rolling Stones in 1977!", consigned rock's past to nostalgia and its present to The Clash.

After the brush clearing of their first album The Clash would continue to build on the foundations of punk rock, rejecting its musical conservatism and becoming first rate songwriters who incorporated pop, rockabilly, R&B, and especially reggae into their sound. This was part of a greater philosophy which posited the band as the unifying voice of the punk diaspora, a one band pirate radio station uniting all the world's underdogs in common cause. Conflating the personal and the political, they sang eloquently of the power of the individual against the forces of conformity, commerce and nihilism; they released two and three record sets (London Calling & Sandinista! respectively), forcing their record company to sell them at the reduced price of a single disc; fans were treated as fellow members of a movement. The press dubbed them "The Only Band That Matters" and the laurel still clings to their reputation today.

So how does one reconcile this principled idealism and revolutionary fervor with the use of The Clash song London Calling in a 2002 television commercial for Jaguar luxury sedans? The spine-tingling tune, one of their best and the title track of their defining album (Rolling Stone called it the best of the 80s), envisions London's apocalyptic end:

London Calling
To the far away towns
Now war is declared
and battle come down (...)

London Calling
Now we ain't got no swing
Except for the ring
of that truncheon thing

In 1991 Levi's had used Should I Stay Or Should I Go?, one of the band's few poppy love songs, in a commercial to little backlash, but this time Clash fans were aghast; some questioned Jaguar's wisdom in co-opting such a furious, righteous anthem for the benefit of a haute-bourgeois lifestyle accessory, and most everybody wanted to know how The Clash had come to authorize its use. Many simply assumed that the band had lost control of the rights. Joe Strummer, the band's de-facto leader set them straight:

Yeah, I agreed to that. We get hundreds of requests for that and turn 'em all down. But I just thought Jaguar…yeah. If you're in a group and you make it together, then everyone deserves something. Especially twenty-odd years after the fact. It just seems churlish for a writer to refuse to have their music used on an advert and so I figured out, only advertise the things you think are cool. That's why we dissed Coors and Miller. We've turned down loads of money. Millions over the years. But sometimes you have to earn a bit, so everybody gets some.

The Clash set out to erase the distinctions between music and message and they succeeded; the two are inextricably linked, more so than almost any other band I could name, and by selling their music, particularly a song as resonant as London Calling, to a corporation they are effectively gutting a movement and hanging its corpse out as Jaguar's shingle. Strummer's lazy, disingenuous response belies the affection and respect he continued to hold for his band long after their breakup in 1986; he never repudiated his ideals and continued to pursue his commitment to a socially aware global music in his post-Clash band the Mescaleros. As the writer of Lost In The Supermarket and Koka-Kola, trenchant critiques of the "advertising world", he more than anyone must have known what this decision meant.

Jaguar too knew what they were doing; there is an unmistakable whiff of revolutionary chic to The Clash and they're smart enough to stand downwind of it. In the rush to canonize Joe Strummer (R.I.P) & Co. this is something the rock community has consistently neglected. For all their idealism and occasional brilliance this is also a band of middle-class lads self-mythologized as outlaws; who sometimes pandered in their efforts to adopt subcultures, musical and otherwise; who "loved a bit of posing" as Strummer once said.

Despite, or perhaps because of this, they are your local liberal grad-student's favorite band. Chances are he knows of a dingy bar where the jukebox glows like a marquee in the London gloom, its belly full of Clash records nestled conspiratorially alongside those of another self-proclaimed Man of the People, Johnny Cash; where The Clash signify something both illicit and unprofaned. It's a prime demographic and everyone wants to pick its pocket. Stalin may have ruled Shostakovich's Mother Russia but out here cash is King.