“The Sound of Sinners” appears exactly half-way through The Clash’s massive 1980 triple-album Sandinista! (that is, at the end of side three on the vinyl, and at the end of disc 1 on the CD). Lyrically, it has typically been read as a sarcastic parody of a Gospel song; the basis for this reading is largely based on: 1) the fact that The Clash are a Punk band, the same genre that (as we’ve noted before) gave us Dead Kennedy‘s “In God We Trust, Inc.,” Minor Threat‘s “Filler,” The Avenger’s “We Are the One,” and pretty much the entire corpus of Bad Religion; and 2) the biting line “After all this time/To believe in Jesus/After all those drugs/I thought I was Him.”
And of course I do not dispute that a band of The Clash’s credentials would be as naturally suspicious of organized religion as they would be of literally any other established institution; nor do I dispute that Joe Strummer’s delivery of these lines are as thoroughly sarcastic as anything else in this parody Gospel tune. But like anything else sarcastic, it’s not as clear to me that just because the song is sung as a joke doesn’t mean it isn’t being completely serious (indeed, as we’ve noted before, jokes are often the most serious statements we make).
By way of comparison, The Velvet Underground were an important influence upon the early Punk movement that produced The Clash, and whose signature song is generally agreed to be “Heroin.” An early post on this very site discussed how the lyrics make a similar identification between drugs and a desire for religious transcendence:
‘With his trademark deadpan delivery, Lou Reed narrates the story of a man trapped, desperate to feel good again, yet the very thing that “saves” him (for it makes him “feel just like Jesus’ son”)—is also what is destroying him. But then, are we not also supposed to lose our lives to save it?
‘Because that is exactly what Lou Reed has described in “Heroin”: in the absolute depths of his directionless life (“I don’t know where I’m going”), he decides that “I’m gonna try for the Kingdom if I can”. It’s transcendence he desires: transcendence from all those “politicians making busy sounds/and everybody putting everybody else down/And all the bodies piled up in mounds…” Simply put, that New York Jew, like his elder brother Christ before him, seeks after the Kingdom of God for the same reason you or I do: to transcend and escape the miseries and injustices and oppressions of this wicked world.’
Lou Reed here takes the artificial high of heroin in place of the actual transcendence he is unable to find elsewhere: a feeling that he is a son of God as well, to be at-one with Christ, “And ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s,” saved in the Kingdom of Heaven. Reed’s deadpan delivery is only sarcastic on its face; it actually expresses a sincere yearning.
As does Joe Strummer in “The Sound of Sinners.” Him claiming to have felt like he was Christ while on drugs would just be a bit of cheap blasphemy for most of mainstream Christianity, and but a delightful piece of Punk rock provocation among most Clash fans. But for those of us essaying to be Latter-day Saints, it is an expression of very real yearning that we suspect everyone shares on a very primeval level: that if man is now, God once was, and as God is now, man may become; if we are all children of God and therefore Gods in embryo; if our ultimate fate somewhere in the distant eternities is, in the words of the King Follet discourse, to “learn to be Gods yourselves,” then Joe Strummer is only articulating–even if only in half jest–what we all desire to be.
The drugs of course only created an artificial feeling of his inner divinity; but, like Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground, they had turned towards the drugs to recreate a very real feeling he couldn’t find anywhere else. The Clash were a political Rock band, and perhaps nothing is as politically revolutionary and a form of resistance than the inward–almost unconscious–conviction that we are all, no matter what the systems that oppress and crush us might say otherwise, all children of God, beings of eternal existence and eternal worth, fully capable of becoming Gods ourselves. In this sense, The Clash’s “The Sound of Sinners” is a sort of Punk rock sequel to The Velvet Underground’s “Heroin.”