I suppose that one of the big reasons that I still appreciate punk rock so much is that as a teenager, when I was just discovering my interest in music, it was a form that allowed my friends and me to participate. It's a bit like folk in that way: if you want to play, you can. (Of course, participation is the point of music in general, and one of the reasons that I write this blog is to help me to formulate my ideas on the experience of listening to music and how we can make that enterprise as active as possible.) Folk and punk also share the fact that they have goals outside of the aesthetic: beauty is not really the aim, it's rather more about argument and the consequent changing of minds.

The Clash, in many ways, were the best embodiment of these ideals, as they wrote about their times from a street-level perpective that still seems entirely relevant. "(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais" would be the song that I would select as their most representative, both lyrically and musically, as the song mixes punk with a reggae/ska beat to tell a story of attending a reggae concert and being left alone with one's thoughts, in the middle of a large crowd. (The Clash, like one of their models, Mott the Hoople, had as one of their primary subjects the rock and roll experience itself.) This song, even more than the cover of Junior Murvin's "Police and Thieves" on their first album, pointed the way that they (and the rest of the punk world) were to go in the years ahead, a journey which would culminate in their all-embracing masterpiece, Sandanista!, only two years later. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTnijX0TH-w)