by Bill Bullock

Let's get down to brass tacks first, because there's no easy way to slide into this. Joe Strummer, the former co-lead singer, songwriter, and guitarist of the Clash, died on Sunday, December 22, at his home in Somerset, England. As of press time, the autopsy had not yet been performed, but the apparent cause of death was a heart attack. Strummer was 50.

Reading the various message boards at music-related websites, there's been a lot said coupling the loss of Strummer with the deaths of Joey and Dee Dee Ramone in the last few years. Strummer's death seems so different in its tragedy, though, not only in its suddenness as opposed to Joey's long and fairly well-known battle with cancer or Dee Dee's struggles with heroin, but because Strummer seemed to be coming back into a period of intense creativity and vitality in his music.

When I bought Global a Go-Go, Strummer's last album with his backing band the Mescaleros, I'd recently come out of a very nasty breakup and woken up to witness the televised deaths of thousands of innocent people in New York. I listened to that album almost constantly in the weeks following September 11, because it seemed to straddle both the small personal trauma that was wracking my life and the sociopolitical trauma that engulfed and dwarfed it. Like "Straight to Hell," the best of the late-era Clash songs, it was furiously angry, funny, heartbroken, and hopeful, and it was musically eclectic, complex, and catchy as hell. It was the most punk rock thing I had heard in years.

Strummer could see punk as part of a holistic continuum of music, rather than a doctrinal cult. As we've learned over the last 10 years, the stylistic approach of three chords and a back beat could only go so far before it lost its momentum as a force in and of itself, and the fashion of tattoos, piercings, and funny hair colors lost their power to shock surprisingly quickly as they were adopted by the mainstream (Blink-41, take notes). Instead, Strummer and the Clash championed punk as emotional honesty and social engagement, connecting it with a lineage stretching back to Woody Guthrie and stretching forward to Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine.

The beauty of the Clash wasn't just the fact that they were political, but that their politics seemed so rooted in human passion and desire and even weakness. Unlike bands such as Crass, you never got the feeling that you might be the first against the wall if the Clash ever won the revolution that they sang about. They understood their limitations, their inherent middle-classness (or upper-classness in Strummer's case), and they poked pins in it regularly. Go listen to "Safe European Home," the best of the Clash's straight-forward punk songs off of their underrated second album, Give 'Em Enough Rope, and you'll find some white-boy Brits keenly aware of the fact that their romanticizing of cultural tourism is not all it's cracked up to be.

Joe Strummer and the Clash knew they couldn't save the world with their music, no matter how amazing it was, but they did save the souls of God knows how many kids in ways that nobody else--not the Ramones, and certainly not the Pistols--could have. And this salvation wasn't just limited to the generation in which they originated, either. Even for those of us who came of age in the early to mid-'90s, the discovery of the Clash, in an older sibling's record collection or "because we heard Eddie was into them, dude," was a revelation in the face of the self-absorbed nihilism or detached artiness of the available "alternative" music of the time. Strummer's anger wasn't the kind of blind, unfocused rage that would ever give the enemy the satisfaction of seeing him put a shotgun in his mouth. It was a smart anger, an anger with purpose, and, most importantly, the kind of anger that was immensely powerful in the blinding obviousness of the fact that it was rooted in love for human dignity and communication and freedom. It seems somehow horribly unjust that a man who helped so much to give a movement its heart would meet his end by the failure of his own.