It Keeps Going… And Going – Bludgeon Your Horizons E1: Sandinista!

Bludgeon Your Horizons is where we throw at each other ‘difficult’ albums that we love, and most everyone else will despise. This week we listened to the Clash’s triple album Sandinista!, the celebrated punk outfit’s two-and-a-half hour festival of every music genre, ever.

---

 

If you’re new to the podcast, the premise is simple: there are some albums that you keep to yourself in a hidden playlist in a hidden Dropbox under a hidden account, some record that absolutely cannot see the light of day, lest your social and professional lives be ruined. In Bludgeon Your Horizons, we (Dave, Eric, Andrew, and occasionally Peter) subject these albums to each other, and then revel in each others’ pain.

This week we heard Peter’s pick, Sandinista! by the Clash. It’s definitely one of the best-reviewed Clash albums ever and shows up on multiple Best Of lists, both in terms of the group’s discography and of rock albums in general, and yet few Clash fans have heard it. Why? The answer is simple: the record is a whopping, two-and-a-half hour triple album wherein the Clash seek to try their hand at every music genre known to man, and some previously unknown to man, like white people rap.

So check out our podcast above, and check out some highlights from the show below:

Peter:
“A good third of the songs are almost unlistenable… I don’t know if it’s an official saying, but hidden in all the songs of this album, there’s one solid regular-length album, if you take out all of the crap.”

Andrew:
“My girlfriend was like ‘Is this a Spotify ad? No, it’s a Clash song huh!’ but no, it was an ad for insurance! It was a Spotify ad for insurance, and at that moment I was like ‘that’s so fucking true… anything can play on Spotify right now, and it could conceivably be a Sandinista track.”

“This is like a parallel universe where you turn on the radio and the Clash are playing every single song. You go into any store and the Clash are playing every song, every style…”

Dave:
“I categorized the songs into five categories: songs I think are good that I’d put in my Ipod, weird songs, songs that I think I like but I’m not really sure, reggae, and then after-school special music… ‘Career Opportunities’ kinda fits into all of these.”

“A lot of the songs are all ‘THIS IS FUN, THIS IS GOOD,’ and then I’d look up the lyrics—half I didn’t understand because it was British slang—look, somebody got murdered. I was like ‘yeah this song is so good!’ then I looked up the lyrics and I was like… I don’t understand, people are dying in this song and it’s so happy…”

Eric:
“They wanted to release a triple album,  but their record company was like ‘Holy shit, are you crazy? Nobody wants to hear a Clash triple album, and no way is anyone going to pay for a Clash triple album,’ so The Clash was just like ‘well, we don’t really care how much money we make, so we’re just gonna release it as a single with two free discs.’”

“There’s definitely a sense of ‘Let’s try this genre, and this genre, and we haven’t done this yet, and what if we had a radio DJ do a skit with us, and now the children will sing and it’ll be great and for this one we’re gonna chew bubblegum and then…”