You grow up and you calm down

You're working for the clampdown

You start wearing the blue and brown

You're working for the clampdown

"Working for the Clampdown" is the only song on London Calling with the Clash's old bang-it-out-and-mow-them-down ferocity. The other songs employ speeded-up reggae, pop harmony, heavily produced ballads, or Jamaican swing to get essentially the same political points across to a larger audience. London Calling contains only one love song, and it's the worst on the record.

IF GREAT ART is art that renders labels meaningless then London Calling should finally do in the "new wave." Its lyrical and musical fertility recalls another celebrated double album, Exile on Main Street, far sooner than any Sex Pistols product. Like the Stones' masterpiece, London Calling has its longueurs; but its two discs conjure the end of the '70s as unmistakably as Exile did their beginning. The title track does so best. Over the ominous bleating of Mick Jones's slightly off-key guitar and a despondent, resigned chorus that drops off into silence, Joe Strummer launches into a chronicle of the new barbarism:

London calling to the faraway towns

Now war is declared--and battle gone down

London calling to the underworld

Come out of the cupboard, you boys and girls

London calling, now don't look to us

All that phoney Beatlemania has bit the dust

London calling, see we ain't got no swing

Except for the ring of that truncheon thing

The ice age is coming the sun zooming in