The Clash - Combat Rock

Today is Memorial Day. It is a day of remembrance and honor for those who died in the service of the Armed Forces of our Country. 

As you may or may not know, i tend to avoid reviewing albums on national holy days for the simple fact that my often critical deconstruction of a phenomenon into its structural foundations is to me a dishonestly opportunistic pursuit at times like that. 

This small project, however, is unique in that we are looking at the received perception itself. The phenomenon in question today thus becomes how did i arrive at reviewing Combat Rock by the Clash on Memorial Day? We'll start with the basic structural foundation that led to any album being reviewed today, then look a little deeper at the implications of the 3 basic interpretations of the phenomenon, namely intention, coincidence, and agency (not necessarily in that order). 

On Friday i decided to buy some number of albums to review this weekend. I ended up buying 3 and i correlated each to one of my fictional characters. I reviewed them in that order. What that shows us is an objective deterministic structure inside a bubble. The albums themselves were contingent upon the act of selecting them from the available options in a specific time and place. Their order was then further determined by my correlating them to fictional characters according to some much larger narrative structure i am writing. Finally, the actual manifestation of each review takes place inside that already assembled structure. What we see is that these phenomena in their object form exist as a nested structure of contingent choices, and we have to decide whether to look at them from front to back, or back to front. The difference is not trivial, and you the reader are in essence forced by the structure to work backward from the discrete phenomenon to the larger structural implication. I, the writer, am the only person holding the actual experience of having performed the actions, though keep in mind that i have given you the exact same chronological experience by publishing them in discrete steps without secretly working ahead behind the scenes. By that i mean that any thread you care to follow through the total process is, as best as i can control, the same accumulation of structural restrictions i have in writing each successive segment. No slight of hand, you can go back to the original A New Story and see the potential unfolding exactly as i have described it: 

https://albumsforeternity.blogspot.com/2022/05/a-new-story.html 

Before we keep going, i want to parenthetically insert the actual review here. Combat Rock is the Clash's best-selling album created as they were falling apart. It's often criticized as a "sell out" album because of it's intentionally danceable New Wave/Post Punk style, but most critics argue that it is a clear evolution for the band, rather than any type of fad chasing. That's where the cultural consensus would have me start, and you can probably guess that i would argue this is still actually Punk. A lot of Rock critics and historians (including myself) are of the opinion that Sex Pistols did not epitomize Punk, so much as intentionally destroy any possibility for its assimilation into the mainstream. In short, it will always be viewed as "against." That's kind of a problem because it means that anything that transgresses its Punk origins to become objectively popular is by definition no longer Punk. I've talked about that problem many times before, see my reviews of Green Day and Sum 41 for a start. Now, with that out of the way, back to regularly scheduled programming. 

1) Intention 

You could look at Combat Rock on Memorial Day and interpret it as a completely intentional decision on my part. Bottle did all the mental arithmetic and put it here on purpose. He stood there in Target and constructed the whole plan as he was shopping. Forget the fact that i told you i didn't, or pretend i'm lying about it, and it becomes obvious that if you ascribe any level of deep intellectualism to my essays, it is completely logical to interpret that i did it all on purpose, meticulously planned how it would happen and fiddled only with the minutia of grammar and vocabulary after transcribing it. I've told and showed you i didn't but in this scenario you've already decided that you don't believe me. 

2) Agency 

What if i didn't plan it, but nevertheless it was predestined? Fate, God, political politics, my subconscious, deep data marketing that places me as a demographic exactly where they want me? Some force of nature exerted its power to make it happen. Coincidentally, this is the slightly skewed perception most people have about both coincidence in general, and Marxist criticism in particular. 

To be clear, you're reading an actual Marxist critique of the way social structures shape our choices and our interpretations of the phenomenological object. Somewhere at a higher level of the hierarchy this essay exists inside the social force exerted by the major corporate retailer named Target, and every single one of us ascribes some degree of personified agency to that name. Target is a person in our minds, and therefore my review exists inside the structural consequences of Target's goal in life being to financially profit from my needs, wants, and interests. Target, the person, is a Capitalist who redistributes the profit it makes from purchasing commodities and making them available to me to its friends and family in the manner of its choosing. We could say that Target has wagered that these are albums that people will potentially buy, and i have proven them right by buying them. To what extent, though, does the social standing of Target artificially limit my choices? 

Right now, the influence of Target is enormous. Remember, when it comes to these records, this is not the old school empirical approach to corporate media distribution. Sony and UMG and the others aren't carefully selecting what is or isn't available in a particular market, Target is choosing what albums it will or will not buy as their own exclusive capital property. Having chosen to buy records at Target that day, my choices are completely restricted by the decisions of the individual Capitalist Target based on the calculated probability of extracting the maximum amount of sustainable profit from the imaginary preferences of my local geographic market. Thus, my choices are not free at all. They are completely regulated by Target, whose market influence is directly proportionate to its own economy of scale. We can keep going like that forever, eventually getting to the peculiar influence of Memorial Day being the Monday of a 3-day weekend and the impetus for bulking up inventory in preparation for increased consumer spending, so i'll just stop it here, and we'll move on. 

3) Coincidence 

Coincidence is the remarkable occurence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection. I would argue that this instance of listening to Combat Rock on Memorial Day is an example of coincidence. The occurence of the national day of recognition did not cause me to pick this album today, nor did the fact that i set out to tell a specific story determine that it would happen. The two things happened to happen at the same time. It is remarkable, but there is no causal relationship between these phenomena. 

There is, however, the structural limitation of interconnectedness itself. All of these social forces interact, push and pull us in specific directions, limit our interpretational freedoms to exactly these types of coincidental occurrences. 

So, i end this essay not with any commentary upon the subject matter, but a question about structural dissonance. I consider and honor the service and sacrifice of our armed forces in defending our freedoms, but i find that our freedoms are only as available as the profit that can be extracted from them will allow. 

I think, then, that a fair bit of the criticism that keeping it the last Monday in May undermines its purpose and value in favor of the blatant commercialism of the entire concept of the 3-day Holiday weekend is completely valid; the answer to the inverted question "why, in spite of the coincidence that this Monday is the originally intended May 30th, is today Memorial Day?"

Skip's Interlude