‘Magnificent Seven’: Did The Clash create the first-ever rap song?
The Clash, perhaps more so than any of their punk contemporaries, are noted for their ability to incorporate various different musical genres and styles into their punk-rooted sound. This acceptance and enthusiasm about musical genres that were being ignored by the masses is one of the reasons why The Clash are such an interesting and much-loved institution of punk rock, and led to some of their biggest hits, from the soul-inspired ‘Rock the Casbah’ to the reggae influence on ‘(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais’.
While recording the band’s fourth album, Sandinista!, in New York City, the group became infatuated with the early hip-hop and graffiti art scene. This is particularly true for guitarist Mick Jones, who later leaned into these influences with his group Big Audio Dynamite. The first track on Sandinista! immediately thrusts audiences head-first into this new hip-hop and rap sound. ‘The Magnificent Seven’ was recorded in 1980 at Electric Lady Studios in New York and built around a funk-inspired bassline provided by Norman Watt-Roy, the bassist for Ian Dury and the Blockheads.
Watt-Roy had been drafted into the group as a temporary replacement for Paul Simonon, who was away shooting the cult film Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, in which he played a bassist. Although not credited for songwriting on the album, the stand-in bassist laid down basslines for both ‘The Magnificent Seven’ and ‘Lightning Strikes (Not Once but Twice)’.
The lyrics to the track were written in one sitting as a stream of consciousness and, in terms of content, are classic Clash – covering commercialism, police brutality and the plight of living under capitalism. In fact, Marx himself even makes a brief appearance, but it is Strummer’s delivery that is worth noting. There is no doubt about it; he is rapping. Punk scene peers Blondie are often credited with being the first white band to embrace hip-hop on their track ‘Rapture’, but The Clash’s ‘Magnificent Seven’ predates that release by six months.
As a result of the hip-hop influence found whilst recording Sandinista!, hip-hop acts like Grandmaster Flash and The Sugar Hill Gang were invited to support the band on their exhaustive run of 17 shows at Times Square in 1981. Much like ‘The Magnificent Seven’, which failed to chart in the US and only reached number 34 in the UK singles chart, these support acts did not prove to be a major success. Grandmaster Flash, for instance, was reportedly pelted with beer cans by an angry Clash audience.
Sandinista! was not a great success either, peaking at number 19 in the album charts, thereby making it the least successful of any Clash studio album in a commercial sense at least. Although this lack of success cannot be entirely attributed to the band’s newfound hip-hop influence – the 36-song triple album proved to be too much even for die-hard Clash fans – it is fair to say that white audiences in the early 1980s were not very receptive to this new sound.
‘The Magnificent Seven’ was not the first example of rap or hip-hop music, but it was certainly the first time that an all-white rock band took notice of the blossoming musical movement and incorporated it into their own sound. Despite its lack of commercial success, it was not a total failure by any means; the song brought hip-hop into the mainstream, and for audiences outside New York City, it was likely the first time they had heard anything resembling rap music.
