The Clash, or what was left of The Clash by the time they got around to recording their sixth and final release, can’t be serious. Because if you cut the crap from 1985’s Cut the Crap you don’t have an album! You don’t even have an EP! Why, you don’t even have enough songs to fill both sides of a single, as The Clash themselves proved!
Cut the Crap is a legendary shitfest of epic proportions and one of the most ignominious fare-thee-wells from a great band ever, setting aside such stinkers as the Velvet Underground’s Squeeze and The Doors’ Full Circle, which as everybody knows don’t count because those albums were no-hopers released by bands whose creative geniuses had either split (Lou Reed) or done a Parisian bathtub croaking act (Jim Morrison).
Seeing as how no sane person would buy Cut the Crap (Joe Strummer himself disowned it), it has lots of spare time to appear on the many “Worst Albums Ever” lists out there. It often car pools with Van Halen III to such affairs. It shared a limo with Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait to the 2023 Rolling Stone magazine 50 Genuinely Horrible Albums by Brilliant Artists list, where it asked Self Portrait, “Are my methods unsound?” To which Self Portrait replied, “I don’s see any method at all, sir.”
The story is well known. By 1985 Mick Jones and Topper Headon were history, replaced by a trio of ringers in the form of guitarists Vince White and Nick Sheppard and drummer Pete Howard. Which shouldn’t have been fatal. The Clash had three guitarists! They were a punk Lynyrd Skynyrd! Unfortunately Strummer made the inexplicable and 100 percent lethal decisions to let manager Bernie Rhodes help write the songs (strike one) and (worse!) put him in the producer’s seat, while also giving him carte blanche to realize his grandiose musical ambitions (strike three and you’re out). There is no strike two in the music business.
Strummer and the rest of the band quickly learned that Rhodes was not a team player. Rhodes saw the chance to create a Brave New Clash in his own image, a totally updated ’80s Clash complete with all the mod cons. Synths! Samples! Drum machines! And anything else you could cram onto a 24-track studio console! Who cared (Rhodes certainly didn’t) if his vision of a Brave New Clash just happened to “clash” with Joe Strummer’s idealistic vision of a back-to-basics punk Clash?
Rhodes simply seized the reins of power, first by seeing to it that bassist Paul Simonon and drummer Pete Howard’s contributions were “disappeared” Stalin-style, then by taking the master tapes from the studio and larding the songs with enough synthesizer parts to fill eight Flock of Seagulls albums.
There are complications and mysteries. For one, Strummer was not averse to the drum machines, despite his averred desire to return to The Clash’s punk rock roots. So Rhodes doesn’t bear all the blame. And while Strummer dismissed the debut LP of Jones’ Big Audio Dynamite as one of the “worst pieces of shit I have ever heard,” in large part because of its use of synthesizers and samplers, he inexplicably stood by while Rhodes made merry use of the same on Cut the Crap. A case of Stockholm Syndrome? Some sneaking suspicion that Jones was indeed on the right path?
The truth is (or so it seems) some obscure contractual codicil rendered Strummer powerless to stop Rhodes from doing whatever he wanted with the album, but it should be added that despite Strummer’s seeming disgust with B.A.D.’s synths and samps and Jones’ unseemly attraction to being a rock star, at some point Strummer begged Jones to come back, and by 1986 he’d be producing and contributing heavily to B.A.D.’s sophomore LP, No. 10, Upping St. You get the sense that revolutionary Joe was grasping at straws because he was confused and knew he had a fiasco on his hands.
Cut the Crap is uncut crap for two reasons. First, Rhodes had more ideas than experience as a record producer. And he didn’t produce the album so much as go on an epic binge. (Someone should have hung a “Produce responsibly!” poster on the studio wall.) He cluttered the songs with electronic drums, synthetic keyboards and studio effects, and further muddied the waters with questionable guitar overdubs. Then there were the big football chants that were the choruses, which were more Joe’s idea but quickly wear on the listener. By the time the two were done, the songs on Cut the Crap were literally full of shit.
Then there’s the fact that many of the album’s songs simply aren’t very good. Jones had been The Clash’s songwriter, period, and while Strummer would ultimately more than hold his own, Rhodes was a different story—the man was a punk rock legend for a variety of reasons, an inspiration and a mentor to many, but a songwriter he was not. The band was determined to return to their punk roots, but the best Strummer and Rhodes could do was produce rote, by-the-numbers simulacrums of the punk rock The Clash had abandoned eons ago, and which sounded hopelessly dated in the wake of hardcore bands like Black Flag. The 1985 Clash may as well have been an escapee from Jurassic Park.
And while they might have stood and delivered and gone out in a blaze of fuck’em’all punk rock glory, instead they had to stand back while Rhodes smothered Strummer’s “Rebel Rock” in studio gravy. But not enough studio gravy to disguise the fact that what was on offer was largely beyond-its-expiration-date mystery meat.
A few of these songs are so beyond the pale they make Edgar Winter look like Barry White. Opener (opener!) “Dictator” makes the Hindenburg sound like a kiting accident—the only thing missing is Herbert Morrison crying, “Oh the humanity!” It’s more than just the revenge of the drum machine; voices and horns and god knows what else come in and out, and Strummer’s vocals are buried alive in the mix. If there’s an actual song in there, it’s hiding behind an array of synthesizers, hoping not to be noticed.
“Are You Red..Y” is the sound of technology triumphant—the drum machines and synthesizers have taken over, Strummer sounds like he’s singing from far, far away, and what you have is a cluttered cacophony with mob-sized vocals on the choruses. It’s a hot mess and 100 percent unlistenable, a synthpop cacophony. “Fingerpoppin’” is all faux-handclaps and listener suffering; there’s enough happening in there for five songs, and it’s a good thing you can hardly make out Strummer’s vocals because I’ll be fucked if I can tell what he’s singing ABOUT. Lines like “Don’t talk shop/Around the house: fingerpop/Don’t talk shop/Being boy or girl, man or mouse?” make me doubt revolution is on the agenda, the line “Urban tribes of fighting troops?” notwithstanding.
“Dirty Punk” certainly comes out guitars a’blazing, but I get the sense Rhodes overdubbed ‘em until the mixing console began to smoke and went on the fritz. This one’s a punk number, all right, but the lyrics are muddled; does Strummer want to be a dirty punk or drive a “big, big, big, big, big car?” Could it be a dig at Jones? I don’t think so. And despite the momentum things go wrong pretty quickly—the massed vocals on the choruses work, sort of, but things go wrong during the instrumental break, and the song weighs a ton, a fate that also befalls “We Are the Clash” with its pounding drum machine, football stadium-big choruses, and confusing instrumental break. There’s too much clutter, and the song needs to go on a serious diet—punk anthems simply shouldn’t be so bulked-up. Rhodes’ production leaves you with the impression that he injected these songs with steroids—and maybe a shot of human growth hormone while he was at it.
“Cool Under Heat” is a mid-tempo number that goes big on the guitars and sink-under-their-own-weight vocals on the choruses. Always the choruses! One thousand people strong! Did Rhodes gang-press an entire village and pack them into the studio? In any event they overpower the song, which if stripped to the essentials may, and I stress that may, have had something going for it.
“Movers and Shakers,” same deal. Hard to make a word Strummer is singing under that drum machine thump, thump, thump, and the choruses are headache inducing—as for the synthesized horns they contribute nothing. This is rabble-rousing, but what are the rabble rousing about? Who knows? I’ll say it again—had The Clash cut an unadorned version of this one, a one-take go-for-broker, it might be worth listening to. As it is your stereo sags beneath its twenty-four overladen tracks.
“Play to Win” opens with noise, some spoken word folderol, and never gets around to lowering itself to melody—it varies from pinball machine busy to a choir of football hooligans singing about the prairie and the wild frontier. Highly annoying, it is. “North and South” is sung by Sheppard and is a remarkably straightforward pop number—no rebel rocker this one. And the band lightens up on the huge choruses. Rhodes (by his standards, anyway) keeps things relatively uncluttered. The only problem is it’s not that good a song—it’s simply not catchy enough.
“Life Is Wild” is tripe—the verses are glorified dance pop (noisied up some) while the choruses are Oi! as imagined by Albert Speer—nothing should sound that gigantic. I’ve tried shouting “Keep it down!” but it doesn’t work! I’ve asked the choir to vacate my apartment but they won’t! Then comes this mad collage of voices that is very irritating, followed by more tribal bellowing on the chorus. And shouldn’t that banal title be illegal or something?
A few (or two to be precise) of these songs have their defenders. “Three Card Trick” is blessedly uncluttered by studio gimmicks and Strummer’s vocals are as upfront as they get on Cut the Crap, and the group vocals don’t overwhelm. The song hardly quickens the blood, and unforgettable punk it ain’t. But it’s solid, and on Cut the Crip solid is a real accomplishment. “You could put it on a previous Clash album and people wouldn’t puke!” seems to be the consensus. Well okay. But it’s hardly a timeless Clash track either, so big whoop says I.
“This Is England” is the one that defenders single out when they do the foolish and attempt to defend Cut the Crap. Me, I’m ambivalent. The opening handclaps annoy, the synth line is wimpy, and the big choruses still irk. But I get it. You can hear Strummer and he sounds like he’s ready to hoist the black flag, and the mid-tempo melody is anthemic. That said, the percussion that runs through the song distracts, and the guitars that take the song out sound as flat as Delaware.
The lyrics work as agit-prop (which is what they are, so wonderful) but some lines give me pause—that “This is England/The land of illegal dances” makes me wonder if England isn’t just a larger Bomont, Utah, and if Kevin Bacon isn’t going to liberate it to the sounds of the great Kenny Loggins. And what’s a “human factory farm”? Since when did soylent green become the national food of England? Still, compared to the rest of Cut the Crap, “This Is England” has real power—Strummer called it “the last great Clash song,”and while I’m not sure about that “great,” it doesn’t pale in comparison to their previous work.
Cut the Crap marked a sad, no make that ignominious, end to the Clash saga, one their fans would just as soon forget happened. It’s a story of a manager run amok, studio technology run amok, and a musician’s ego run amok (“Mick Jones? Who needs him?”). This album should never have seen the light of day. Cut the Crap’s biggest flaw is it fails to take its own advice.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D-
