The Card Cheat. The Clash. 1979. Epic.

 Taken from The Clash’s third record, the towering ice berg London Calling, The Card Cheat closes side three, a four song commentary on the devastating human effects of succumbing to economic stress. Like Bruce Springsteen here in the States, the Clash wrote extensively about the working poor, often producing scathingly original metaphors that lesser talents would have sentimentalized into a meaningless pathos. The Card Cheat begins as a gambling narrative, an unnamed card player attempting the risky move of playing a king of spades that he was not dealt. But this character may also be the failed musician from Death Or Glory, now an enlisted man on the battlefield, being warned of its risks; the real time business of a military detail just another reckless stab at chance, another gamble. He’s also the well dressed, cocaine addled advertising executive on the fifty-first floor, preparing to jump from an office window to his death on the street below. The gambler, it turns out, is us all, desperately in service to a centuries old power structure, and, having convinced himself that he is capable of cheating it out of a pittance, fails miserably in his attempt to do so and, without the means of redress, ends up paying with his life. The Card Cheat’s tone is empathy, an almost insurmountable challenge to perform in rock and roll. “If you’ve been trying for years, we’ve already heard your song,” Joe Strummer sings before The Card Cheat, in a brilliantly honest lyric that prefigures the song’s closing lines about our human propensity for brutality. A terrible inevitability drives The Card Cheat’s great drama, pulling together its lyrical themes and restating them in Mick Jones’ impassioned vocal. Guy Stevens’ Wall of Sound production contextualizes the historical role of London Calling’s sweeping evocation of the rock and roll past, validating The Card Cheat’s closing lines about the importance of love. More than any other working rock group of the twentieth century, it was the Clash who best understood the multilingual directions that American pop music would soon be taking. Today, Sandinista! plays remarkably like a record from the day after tomorrow, only bolder, and comprised of strangely familiar modern street noises curated by studio adventurers restlessly conversant with the music of global cultures. The Clash were presciently fluent with both past and future. They were ultimately the premiere twenty first century rock band.

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