Talk about a missed opportunity. New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, a former Sandinista summer camper, is trying to tie the presidential race to his fondness for the Clash and saying his favorite album of the English punkers is London Calling.

What a betrayal of the revolutionary cause, Mr. Honeymoon in Cuba! How could you forsake the band’s salute to your old comrades?

Okay, okay, London Calling is the Clash’s best album, so let this be marked down as the first time I’ve ever agreed with Comrade Big Bird about anything. Still, de Blasio’s analysis of London Calling is a bit . . . off. He thinks it’s some sort of hope-and-change saga. He thinks the Clash are the Peter, Paul, and Mary of Gen X. “Their music spoke about a different, better world,” de Blasio said on CNN today.

I wonder where in London Calling he is hearing the gentle swoosh of the arc of history bending towards justice. Is it “the ice age is coming, the sun’s zooming in?” (Not sure how both of those things can be true, but then again there’s an element of spoofing paranoia in “London Calling”). Is it “engines stop runnin’, and the wheat is growin’ thin”? Is it remembering defeat in the Spanish Civil War (“Spanish Bombs”)? How about “I wasn’t born so much as I fell out/Nobody seemed to notice me” (“Lost in the Supermarket”)? “Clampdown,” with its anti-authoritarian message, is probably a song much to de Blasio’s liking, but then again he is a government leader, so if the song’s directive “Kick over the wall, cause governments to fall” came to pass, Bill and his pals in the ruling class would be defenestrated. Punk was about raging and tearing things up. The punks were not liberals. As for “Rudie Can’t Fail,” I’m guessing Bill has been unable to listen to that since the Giuliani era.


The anarchy bop of London Calling is not on-message for de Blasio, unless he’s subtly trying to remind us that he is the ostensible leader of a city where no one seems to be in charge. In that case, the final words of the album, from “Train in Vain,” might as well be the city talking to its mayor: “Did you stand by me? No, not at all. Did you stand by me? No way.”