I was about 12 years old when I began my long and contentious, co-dependent relationship with the Clash's London Calling. Only recently have I realized that it has loomed larger in my life than all but a few friends or family members. Over the last nine years, I've listened to that album hundreds of times. In the last month alone, I must have put it on a dozen times or more. Only one of my friendships has lasted as long, and sadly, I haven't spoken to that particular friend since January.
London Calling, though, I can't stay away from too long. I crave its familiar energy, its rough, warm texture. More than anything, I relate to London Calling as if she were an old girlfriend. The carnal, half-reflexive twitch that gets my vinyl copy from the milk crate to the turn table resembles nothing so much as that crazy/selfish, self-destructive urge that gets me texting my ex late at night when I'm too drunk and lonely to be much of any good to her anyway.
On the other hand, TV programs and bands and old girlfriends change and grow in unexpected, beautiful and often frustrating ways; an album doesn't. An album is safer than that, static and unchangingly gorgeous, a fly stuck in amber for eternity.
Lick for lick, London Calling sounds just the same today as it did when it was first pressed. For any number of albums or movies or girls that could have fallen into a central role in my life, that lack of dynamism could have posed a problem, with this thing or that refusing to grow with me and my life and my increasingly post-adolescent concerns.
London Calling, even if it fails as great elegant ‘art', manages to approximate certain human qualities better than most media. Again, it appealed to me the same way a really great girlfriend might have. I spent time with her and somehow only wanted more when I had finished. Maybe you've experienced a similar relationship with a media work. I recently read that many TV watchers relate to the characters of their favorite shows as if they were good friends; so after watching ""The Office"" and hanging out with Jim and Pam for half an hour, fans actually report lower rates of depression-related attitudes.
The sketchy, dotted outlines of a pattern are out there: Smart, well-adjusted, good-looking kids so-willingly out-crowding other boys and girls, replacing them eagerly with less frightening, more interesting stuff. Kids like me scratching that aching, death-null angry itch that wants to be alone and entertained, goddamn it!
It's the same two-headed impulse that scared the daylights out of our parents back in the 80's when communism was still deadly serious and nukes a-flyin' were just around the corner. Then again, it was also the impulse that kept the capitalist war-pigs and Soviet bureaucrats alike from launching an attack, because they would have had a hard time catching that next episode of ""Family Ties"" from an Earth-sized clump of nuclear ash.
In the 1980's, direct human-to-human communication still figured prominently in the daily lives of many Americans. But even then, I imagine that our parents tended to shower their records and TVs and six-packs of beer with more love and attention than most of their friends or family members.
Isn't it inevitable? Ever since human experiences could be recorded and played back, man's aversion to his fellow man (dumb, crass, tasteless louts that they are) hasn't grown so much as it been allowed to manifest culturally. In 2011, we spend more and more time with our digital .mp3 collections. And in a very real and often beautiful way, we love our .mp3 collections.
Who, after all, hasn't felt that special, heartbreakingly real connection with a song or an album, in which you and your life are forever changed for the better? I say without hesitation that London Calling has irrevocably helped me become a better human being. It comforted me when I was lonely and scared throughout high school. It gave me the courage to be righteously angry about at least a few of the injustices those I care about have suffered. Miraculously, it has for years now better and better equipped me to face the morning sun day in and out.
I remember when ""Wilco (The Song)"" first debuted on the Internet in 2009, I read that Jeff Tweedy intended for the song to make explicit the formerly implicit relationship Tweedy had with the records he really loved.
""This is a man with arms open wide, a sonic shoulder for you to cry on,"" he sings on that track. ""Wilco will love you baby.""
Wilco isn't necessarily the band I would go to first in a time of personal crisis, my tender affection for Being There non-withstanding. That said, I appreciate the sentiment. I believe that our favorite music really does love us back. It keeps us sane and shows us real beauty in a difficult world, but I can't help but wonder what we have given up in return.
Are you a little weirded out by Alex's love of this album? Does it make you uncomfortable? He's applying for our music columnist spot, so let us know at arts@dailycardinal.com.
