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There would never come a chance in my life to see Joe Strummer perform live in any musical incarnation. The Clash were broken up by the time I would have gone to see them, The Mescaleros weren’t playing in a city near me. So I am left only with the memories of what The Clash meant to me as a young person, a feeling that it was my duty, in some small way, to work towards enabling the freedom and empowerment I personally enjoyed to be shared by everyone.
I walked in to see Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten knowing a great deal about The Clash and came out realizing I knew so little of its front man and principal songwriter. It’s easy, five years after his passing, to talk about him in hushed romantic overtones that are reserved for dead rock stars. But what is contained in Julian Temple’s poignant and unreserved biographical expose is a story of the struggle for a kind of salvation through music — a man who was so vehemently anti-rock star that he became driven to self-torture, forced to reject the trappings of his own fame for the sake of his humanity.
A picture is painted of a true journeyman, often in first person narrative by Strummer himself: one who was raised in a kind of privilege, slowly rejecting his upbringing and the privileges that came with it as he went to art school, becoming exposed to the fiery atmosphere of the late 1960’s and, by inclusion, the injustices of the world around him. Coming of age in the hippie culture of the late 1960’s, his experimentations with hippiedom could well have sealed Strummer’s fate in the years which followed. But Strummer came to embody the complete D.I.Y. ethos that fuels punk rock, and merely by turning a few odd corners came to recognize his place. While a handful of pundits of the punk era consider Joe Strummer to be an opportunist, even Steve Jones of The Sex Pistols (a band whose appearance at an early performance of Joe’s band The 101’s would change the course of punk music forever) calls Joe Strummer “…the real deal.”
Throughout the documentary, many friends, cohorts, former band mates and loved ones (including the likes of Bono, Jim Jarmusch, John Cusack, Matt Dillon, John Cooper Clarke, and Don Letts to name a few) are interviewed, and the majority of these interviews illustrate the positives. Here is a man whose works have served as inspiration to two generations of artists, musicians, performers and individuals seeking out ways to correct injustice and end hatred. The Clash and Joe Strummer’s gift was in how their musical world successfully melded a gritty, unbridled speed with Jamaican dub music and soul — and he did it organically from influences that were all around him. If some deemed him arrogant, it was because of his distaste for anything which reeked of a certain falsehood. Unlike many modern reinterpretations of punk, Joe Strummer’s punk rock ethic was far more than simply a cliched bored white punk on dope. His rebellion had purpose, he believed in what he was fighting for as deeply as he loathed the hypocrisies against which he fought.
In his arrogance, it would seem he brought down the house The Clash had built. He made more than his fair share of detractors and enemies in process. But the Joe Strummer which I took from this film was neither evil nor harsh. I see in this film a man so hellbent on a quest for human rights, so impassioned about what he stood for, so sincere in his beliefs about equality and global unity that he often found the need to push aside anything which stood in his way.
Joe Strummer believed, correctly so, that his music bore his message. He was both hero and anti-hero, populist and demagogue, loving father and deeply tortured artist. But the message of his music and his unabashed care with and for music from all corners of the world, from people of all backgrounds, races, and nationalities, is a message which should continue to be heard.
Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten is by far one of the, if not the, finest documentaries about the birth of punk rock and its aftermath from the vantage point of its most important voices. His untimely death left a void in the world of music that can never be properly filled. The story of his life is filled with the kind of lessons we can all use.
Listen to The Clash - The Magnificent Seven (12″ Version)
You can learn more about Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten by visiting the official site here. You can purchase “The Magnificent Seven (12″ Version)” as part of The Clash: The Singles Box Set from Amazon by clicking here.
