Joe Strummer’s father was a diplomat; Joe was born in Turkey and before being sent to a boarding school with its own crest, he lived in Egypt, Mexico, and elsewhere. He was a rich white kid among people who were neither, and spent the rest of his life trying to make up for it.

The Clash covered Stax instrumentals, rockabilly rave-ups, rollicking blues laments. (And for a while in the early ’70s, Strummer was a folkie going by “Woody.”) But the majority of their covers are reggae songs: “Pressure Drop” (Toots and the Maytals), “Police and Thieves” (Junior Murvin), “Police on My Back” (Eddy Grant), “Armagideon Time” (Willie Williams), “Wrong ’Em Boyo” (the Rulers), “Revolution Rock” (Danny Ray), plus their own original contributions to the reggae genre (among many others). Pop quiz: Name another punk band whose singles routinely came between dub versions.

On last year’s Live at Shea Stadium, Strummer’s between-song patter is more like an ethnomusicological lecture: “Ask your neighbor what that’s about,” is how he introduces “Guns of Brixton’s” outlaw reggae. “We’d like to take you from New York to Jamaica and back,” he says, introducing a medley of “The Magnificent Seven” and “Armagideon Time”, admitting to the local crowd that the strutting bassline of the former is “a kind of black New York rhythm that we stole one night,” making sure that the crowd—there to see the Who, remember—didn’t take for granted the cultural cross-pollination all around them.

Julien Temple’s overly hagiographic biodoc, Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, featured excerpts from Joe Strummer’s London Calling, a radio show he did for the BBC World Service during the last years of his life. You can hear him introduce Doctor Alimantado, Tim Hardin, and, heartrendingly, Nina Simone’s cover of “To Love Somebody.” You don’t know what it’s like… but oh, Joe did, or at least tried to understand as much as he could by listening to as much music as he could. The last bit of Strummer’s recorded legacy was the mutually posthumous release of his and Johnny Cash’s cover of Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” Strummer became, like his father, something of an ambassador.

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Now, though, seems like there’s nothing but white men in Hammersmith Palais. Strummer’s lifelong world tour was a fact-finding mission (what is Sandinista! if not travel writing?), but he helped open up territory for tourists. For those of us who live in New York, it’s hard not to be blasé about our expeditions to the far side of the world—or the far side of the record store—when all we have to do to get there is walk a few blocks from the place where we pay rent now. (Even if we do tend to stick to our own coffee shops.)

Another pop quiz: Name a more bored-sounding singer than the James Murphy who too-cool-to-actually-sing sings “Losing My Edge.” “The kids,” he lets us know, voice dripping with sarcasm, “are coming up from behind,” “art-school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered ’80s,” “internet seekers who can tell me every member of every good group from 1962 to 1978.” Not that he’s immune to it: In an acute self-parody, he lets us know that he, like vagabond Strummer, “was there” (where? Everywhere, all the right places—he tells us about them with unerring specificity). And like Strummer, he ends by showing us his record collection. Except that he doesn’t play any of the hip-hop, early house, proto-punk, post-punk, noise, or krautrock records he lists for us. No, he knows we know already that there’s no new territory to discover, and he’s just presenting his credentials. His delivery is deadpan, but I wonder if there isn’t a bit of self-loathing in the way he makes his descent into cool-hunting sound so inevitable.

We are North American scum: We’ve read all the pamphlets, watched the tapes, and we don’t even have to leave our own house to see Daft Punk. What Murphy gets at in “North American Scum” is the sense of inertia that comes from being at the center of the world—that detached voice is pretty ironic on the subject of privilege, on people who’ve “got someone to pay the rent.” “I love this place that I’ve grown to know,” he says, in character, reversing the usual order of things.

The reason loft-party kids feel like Murphy is laughing with them, not at them, is because we all have the same sense of gentrification anxiety that Strummer must have felt on all his dad’s postcolonial assignments. The comedown on Sound of Silver is “New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down”, in which Murphy channels every artsy kid’s fondest wish: For a city unsullied by, well, himself. (“So the boring collect… in the neighborhood bars I’d once dreamt I would drink.”)

The solo project of a co-founder of New York’s most influential label, DFA Records, LCD Soundsystem is something of a house band (making house music) for the city. Murphy’s jokes are inside (Do any bands but New York bands sing about their mayor and expect listeners to care?), but they’re pretty funny. Too funny, really, for us to expect that Murphy will be content to make them forever: Your city’s a sucker, he knows better than anyone. “Should I stay or should I go?” Strummer’s bandmate once asked. Strummer’s answer today is the same as Joe’s was: It’s time to get away.

Watch: ”Guns of Brixton” by the Clash [at youtube.com]

Watch: “New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down“ [at youtube.com]

Tags: Joe Strummer, James Murphy, The Clash, LCD Soundsystem

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