The Optical Files #78: The Clash - Sandinista! (1980)

Sadly, I don't think I have anything to say about the whole of Sandinista! (don't forget the exclamation point) that hasn't already been said a thousand times. The album is undeniably bloated--even the Clash admitted that. If London Calling represented the band's expansive & experimental instincts finely tuned to produce a masterpiece, then Sandinista! is the result of those instincts running unchecked--songs spewing forth from the high-powered factory machinery too fast for anyone to quality-inspect everything on the conveyor belt.

You'll be hard-pressed to find a Clash fan who would dispute that "Something About England," "Somebody Got Murdered," "One More Time," "Police On My Back," "Washington Bullets" & "Charlie Don't Surf" are among the best songs that the band ever recorded. Add to that my personal jams like "Hitsville U.K.," "Rebel Waltz," "Up In Heaven (Not Only Here)," "Corner Soul," "The Sound of Sinners," & "Lose This Skin," we can easily assemble the proverbial choice-cuts LP with a consistency approaching London Calling's, just a little weirder.

One-upping the already generous sonic variety of their previous record, the band used this one to explore even more genres. The most conspicuous one is rap (album opener "The Magnificent Seven" & "Lightning Strikes (Not Once But Twice)", but they also dip their toes in disco ("Ivan Meets G.I. Joe"), jazz ("Look Here"), gospel ("The Sound of Sinners"), calypso ("Let's Go Crazy"), & something vaguely akin to zydeco ("Lose This Skin"). One reason for the sonic sprawl is the band having partially relocated to New York, & the album continues an Americanized (& globalized) trajectory that would find its logical end in the more concise Combat Rock. In this regard, tracks like "Ivan Meets G.I. Joe" & "Charlie Don't Surf" sound like rehearsals for "Rock the Casbah" & "Straight to Hell," respectively.

Speaking of which, the punk rock lens on geopolitics was one of the major factors that drew me to the Clash in the first place, & Sandinista! boasts some of their best material in this vein. For my money, "Washington Bullets" is the major album masterpiece. Over a deceptively cheerful, marimba-driven instrumental (recalling the band's previous-album fixation on the Bo Diddley beat with tracks like "Hateful" & "Rudie Can't Fail"), Joe cleverly repurposes the name of the D.C. NBA team to mount a critique of the US imperialist practice of arming oppressive regimes against leftist uprisings. The song's main subject is Nicaragua's Sandinista rebellion, but the 3rd verse zooms out to condemn imperialist interference worldwide: "If you can find an Afghan rebel that the Moscow bullets missed/Ask him what he thinks of voting communist/Ask the Dalai Lama in the hills of Tibet/"How many monks did the Chinese get?"/In a wartorn swamp, stop any mercenary/Check the British bullets in his armory." The song is a brilliant interrogation of the global interconnectedness of politics & warmongering--one of the crown jewels in Joe Strummer's lyrical catalog.

Because of its sprawling length (making it nearly impossible to absorb in 1 sitting), some of its arcane subjects, & its generally maligned reputation, Sandinista! has a certain mystique around it that the rest of the Clash albums don't. I think of it sort of like graduate school for Clash fans: after you've absorbed all the other studio albums, plus Super Black Market Clash & some of the more significant bootlegs, then maybe you're ready to assay Sandinista!. The old cliche is that there's a really great single LP's worth of songs hiding among a triple LP's worth of jetsam. You can see my picks for a single LP above, but it's hard to argue that the remixes, covers, dub versions, & assorted weirdo interludes don't add to the aforementioned mystique. It's easy to armchair quarterback an album like this, but in reality I wouldn't have it any other way.