Three Things (Okay, four): The Clash - Police On My Back
Accepting an Answer No One Will Offer
As part of therapy, I've been tasked to write more, specifically about music. This particular task was to write three things I love about a piece of music I deeply enjoy. I ended up writing four. For this exercise, I selected The Clash’s cover of Police on my Back.
1. The opening siren wail lets me know we’ve been dropped into the middle of a frantic search on the part of the police for these proletariat punks. Tensions are stretched to the nervy limit, aching for the moment of either capture or clean exfiltration so one can finally, at last, breathe, free or otherwise.
2. That opening gun crack of the drum salvo tells exactly what is at stake. Our very freedom, or at least that of the band itself, is in question. The band is screaming at us they’ve been running every day of the week, and then the question, the howling question they know they’re never going to get a reasonable answer to: what have I done??? They know the answer is nothing, but it’s an answer they must accept without actually hearing the apparatuses of authority admit it.
3. The call and response between Mick and Joe, echoes of The Wild Bunch’s Pike and Dutch… “Running! (police on my back), hiding! (police on my back)” tells me these men know each other profoundly, love each other dearly and will support each other even through a police chase, especially through a police chase, because loyalty means little at high tide. Running from the cops was merely a lovely, fine-print addition to their birthright. ‘Twas always a package deal, lads. This is a refrain from the opening salvo and they’re doing it again just to remind us of their enate unity – the combining gravitational force that brought them into orbit.
4. Everything is at a breakneck pace. Everyone is locked in for this getaway attempt. Everyone has a job to do, and each must perform this high-wire act independently and paradoxically, as part of a team. Mick is the transmission, down-shifting through the hard turns and back up into high gear for the exhilarating straightaways. Topper is the engine, pure propulsion, straining against the transmission for maximum output always. Joe, Saint Joseph, is in the passenger seat firing out of the window over his shoulder, determined to empty all his chambers. Paul is the tires of this machine, grounded, where the rubber connects at a molecular level to the road. Locked in the struggle together, they are, to borrow from Jean-Luc Godard, a Bande à part, a band of outsiders. A band. The only one that mattered.