The Clash classic Joe Strummer wrote as a response to music censorship
The late Joe Strummer cared passionately about the power of music and its ability to make the world a better place. He was unafraid to stand up to authoritarian world leaders who tried to silence the truth, and Strummer wouldn’t have stayed true to himself if he didn’t say something when Iran banned Western music in 1979.
According to a New York Times report from the time, the country’s leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini decided to ban music from all radio and television broadcasts because he considered it “no different from opium.” In his statement, Khomeini also claims the act of listening to music “stupefies persons listening to it and makes their brain inactive and frivolous.”
He announced the ban on music to an audience of employees of Radio Darya. It was the latest Western export to be prohibited, following alcoholic drinks and most Hollywood films. Khomeini also made the practice of men and women swimming or sunbathing together illegal because he viewed them as relics of the old “satanic” regime.
Iran was a country close to Strummer’s heart, and seeing Khomeini tear apart the nation’s cultural fabric was harrowing for him to witness. Due to his father’s line of work, Strummer liked a nomadic childhood which included a spell in Iran.
When Strummer discovered the news about Khomeini’s authoritarian regime, he was heartbroken as it was a far cry from the version of Iran he lived in as a youngster. In response, he decided that the best way to fight back was through rock ‘n’ roll, and Strummer felt compelled to pen ‘Rock The Casbah’.
The song was one The Clash already had kicking around thanks to drummer Topper Headon, but the original lyrics were a graphic tribute to his girlfriend. Former Clash co-manager Kosmo Vinyl told Rolling Stone: “He had really pornographic lyrics for it if I remember correctly. Very, very pornographic lyrics.”
Strummer kept the musical arrangement but changed the lyrics following hearing the news coming out of Iran. “I started to wail about the muezzin and the sheikhs and the oil in the desert. Somebody told me earlier that if you had a disco album in Tehran, you got 20 lashes. And if you had a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label whiskey, you got 40 lashes,” Strummer explained.
He added: “I couldn’t get this out of my mind, so I was trying to say fanaticism is nowhere. There’s no tenderness or humanity in fanaticism. That’s what I was trying to say in ‘Rock the Casbah.'”
Speaking to Rolling Stone shortly before he died in 2002, Strummer reflected on the song and said: “I got back to the hotel that night and wrote on a typewriter, ‘The King told the boogie men You gotta get that raga drop.’ I looked at it, and for some reason, I started to think about what someone had told me earlier, that you get lashed for owning a disco album in Iran.”
Following Khomeini’s death in 1989, music began to creep back into popular culture, but it took a step backwards in 2005 when the rule was re-introduced. Unfortunately, over 40 years on, Strummer’s rock ‘n’ roll missile is still as relevant today as it was upon its release.
