ROUND 19 - THE FINALS - V
Posted: 17 Jul 2019, 10:42am
The high road is just luxury condos now for international investment bankers.
Fair points. His output was so sporadic and erratic too. You have a ton of material 87-89, then basically nothing except a muddy bootlegged soundtrack in 93 until 99 (i'm sure I'm forgetting some stuff) and then a ton of material 99-02. Even the 87-89 material was erratic - one proper solo album, one heavily latin/folk soundtrack with three vocal tracks, another soundtrack that amounted to an EP with a new band, two basically solo tracks from another soundtrack. It's less of a straight than Mick proceeded with. With BAD, it's pretty easy to understand where he started and where he went. Far less so with Joe.Flex wrote: ↑17 Jul 2019, 10:53amYikes, this is another one that's going to take some thinking. Yalla Yalla may be the more epic and well put together song, but Trash City is such a perfect distillation of its form, and GDM is Joe's last great shamanic performance. Who knows.
Anyways, I was thinking about some of the the complaints about the wrong songs making it, etc. I'd posit that this is at least in part because Joe's output hasn't really been canonized yet. The Clash's catalog is pretty well-worn territory, and while we had a couple upsets here and there we pretty much stuck to the critical and fan consensus on tunes that should have deep runs in a tournament - even when we were debating, it was all over fairly well-trod ground. Even BAD, I'd argue, reflected a sort of common knowledge about the catalog and what should rise to the top - the unimpeachable first album, the highs of the strummer/jones collaborations, the strong first half of tighten up, the minor gems of megatop, etc.
I don't think there's really a similar narrative around Joe's solo work yet - partly because the strongest material is also decades newer than everything else we've discussed. We're still getting new tracks and live material and such all these years later that the picture of what we're working with is just starting to crystallize. Add in that there's still a lot of (relatively) fresh personal attachment to his later material and I think we're doing some of the initial sorting work of what constitutes a Joe solo canon, really. I mean, with The Clash and BAD I basically knew what matchups would count as an upset if one song advance much further than another, but - apart from a couple Meskies singles - I couldn't have really told you the same thing for Joe's stuff.
Less of a roadmap to go by, so the debates can feel a bit more personal and the results can be a touch more jarring when we see what's getting voted to move forward and what gets cut and when.
That's the nut of the problem to me. Mick went in a fairly clear direction and had immediately released two stellar documents reflecting that style, then played around off that blueprint. There is no single Joe album that we can say, yup, that's what he was about after 1985. We can laud his restless creative impulses but it's next-to-impossible to summarize, especially when there's so much disagreement about which styles succeeded and which didn't. Joe's post-Clash career will always have a certain Chinese restaurant menu quality to it for fans.
There is a general love of (for lack of a better term) world music that is a common theme throughout his solo work (something that you'd think he'd be cooler about by 2000 than feel the need to write Bhindi Bhagee (sorry, I can't help myself)). But the flood/drought releases is really jarring. I love the broad breadth of his work and strongly prefer it to BAD, but yeah, Walker to It's a Rockin' World to Minstrel Boy is whiplash inducing.Dr. Medulla wrote: ↑17 Jul 2019, 11:38amThat's the nut of the problem to me. Mick went in a fairly clear direction and had immediately released two stellar documents reflecting that style, then played around off that blueprint. There is no single Joe album that we can say, yup, that's what he was about after 1985. We can laud his restless creative impulses but it's next-to-impossible to summarize, especially when there's so much disagreement about which styles succeeded and which didn't. Joe's post-Clash career will always have a certain Chinese restaurant menu quality to it for fans.
Well said.Flex wrote: ↑17 Jul 2019, 10:53amYikes, this is another one that's going to take some thinking. Yalla Yalla may be the more epic and well put together song, but Trash City is such a perfect distillation of its form, and GDM is Joe's last great shamanic performance. Who knows.
Anyways, I was thinking about some of the the complaints about the wrong songs making it, etc. I'd posit that this is at least in part because Joe's output hasn't really been canonized yet. The Clash's catalog is pretty well-worn territory, and while we had a couple upsets here and there we pretty much stuck to the critical and fan consensus on tunes that should have deep runs in a tournament - even when we were debating, it was all over fairly well-trod ground. Even BAD, I'd argue, reflected a sort of common knowledge about the catalog and what should rise to the top - the unimpeachable first album, the highs of the strummer/jones collaborations, the strong first half of tighten up, the minor gems of megatop, etc.
I don't think there's really a similar narrative around Joe's solo work yet - partly because the strongest material is also decades newer than everything else we've discussed. We're still getting new tracks and live material and such all these years later that the picture of what we're working with is just starting to crystallize. Add in that there's still a lot of (relatively) fresh personal attachment to his later material and I think we're doing some of the initial sorting work of what constitutes a Joe solo canon, really. I mean, with The Clash and BAD I basically knew what matchups would count as an upset if one song advance much further than another, but - apart from a couple Meskies singles - I couldn't have really told you the same thing for Joe's stuff.
Less of a roadmap to go by, so the debates can feel a bit more personal and the results can be a touch more jarring when we see what's getting voted to move forward and what gets cut and when.
The difference between the two perhaps throws into very sharp relief who the driving force of the Clash's experimentation was. Mick was obviously the tunesmith, but I wonder how much of it was Joe saying "let's do this one as a soca tune."
Maybe, but it's also possible that without Mick, Joe's "wilderness years" never ended. Which is to say, Mick grounded him and gave him a confidence that he had a harder time regaining afterwards.