Rot the Casbah

Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of the 1979 Islamic revolution that overthrew the Shah of Iran and removed an important US ally from the geopolitical chessboard, served as a natural foil for the irreverent spirit of Anglo-American pop culture and MTV in its inaugural decade. Killing Joke’s 1984 music video for “Eighties” simulates the Iranian firebrand’s assassination, and the grotesquely humorous 1986 Genesis video for “Land of Confusion” juxtaposes Khomeini with Benito Mussolini, implying a totalitarian equivalency. The Ayatollah also served as partial inspiration for Neil Young’s 1989 single “Rockin’ in the Free World” with its line “Don’t feel like Satan, but I am to them” [1]. U2 frontman Bono “offered shelter and support to [Salman] Rushdie while he was under a fatwa issued [by Khomeini] in 1989” following the publication of The Satanic Verses; and, seeking “to publicly show support for the embattled Rushdie,” Bono “invited him onstage during a Zooropa tour stop in London in 1993.” [2] The musical moment that probably best encapsulates the trans-Atlantic response to the Iranian revolution, however, is the Clash’s 1982 hit “Rock the Casbah”.

With its infectious beats and snarls, the song is undeniably a classic achievement of British rock, but one that nevertheless warrants interrogation. Clash drummer Topper Headon concocted the essential instrumental elements, but frontman Joe Strummer dispensed with Headon’s originally “pornographic” lyrics and “took the meaning in an entirely different direction. ‘Rock the Casbah’ turned into an anthem centered around the persecution of the Iranian people for enjoying music,” writes Tina Benitez-Eves. “I started to think about what someone had told me earlier, that you get lashed for owning a disco album in Iran,” Strummer recalled [3]. Apparently either not knowing or not caring about the difference between Iranians and Arabs, Strummer populates his lyrics with a “Sheikh”, a “Sharif”, and “Bedouin” people, with Wikipedia summarizing the song’s narrative as follows:

The song gives a fabulist account of a ban on Western rock music by a Middle Eastern king. The lyrics describe the king’s efforts to enforce and justify the ban, and the populace’s protests against it by holding rock concerts in temples and squares (“rocking the casbah”). This culminates in the king ordering his military’s fighter jets to bomb the protestors; however, after taking off, the pilots ignore his orders and instead play rock music on their cockpit radios, joining the protest and implying the loss of the king’s power. [4]

The story thus illustrates the formidability of Anglo-American soft-power-projection through pop culture, with the values propagated via rock challenging and undermining the hold of an authoritarian and traditionalist regime on the loyalty of the people. Reinforcing the globalist message of boundary-dissolution through commercial culture is the music video for “Rock the Casbah”, lensed by a young Barry Sonnenfeld and depicting an Arab and Jew who bond through their shared enjoyment of the Clash as they ride together through a Texas desert landscape in a Cadillac, later stopping at Burger King for some junk food before attending a Clash concert. Symbolically visualizing the concept, meanwhile, is an armadillo – a desert animal with a defensive shell – whose path through the desert parallels that of the Sheikh, the Clash effectively penetrating the Arab’s figurative shell with the lure of their catchy music. It may be worthwhile to take note, as well, of the way in which the video misleads in its framing of the power dynamic between Arab and Jew, with the latter serving as chauffeur to the former. (For those who like to keep track of these things, Joe Strummer was one-eighth Jewish, while bandmate Mick Jones is half.)

The Clash advertised the song’s relevance to Iran while on tour. “Throughout the show the Clash used slide projections to illustrate their music,” observes a concert review that appeared in The Hartford Courant in August of 1982: “‘Rock the Casbah’ was punctuated with flashing images of Ayatollah Khomeini and Menachem Begin.” [5] The idea, presumably, is that right-wing authoritarianism is bad wherever it manifests, the Clash rather taking their inspiration from, for two examples, Nicaragua’s Sandinistas and the leftist side in the Spanish Civil War. The Clash’s vocal identification with radical causes, however, did nothing to prevent neoconservatives from appropriating “Rock the Casbah” as their own. When US Armed Forces Radio launched its Desert Shield Network at “Camp Schmooz” in Saudi Arabia in 1990, during the run-up to the 1991 Gulf War, the first song to hit the air was “Rock the Casbah” – a decision reportedly reached after “a lot of schmoozing” [6]. Years later, during George W. Bush’s “War on Terror”, National Review even included the Clash’s hit on a list of the top “conservative” rock songs for its championing of liberty over Islamic fundamentalism.

Ayatollah Khomeini

“It is a natural tendency of puritanical religious movements to try to stop the rest of us having fun,” wrote the anonymous author of “Rock and the Nomad”, a brief item that appeared in a July 1979 issue of Britain’s Daily Telegraph – nevertheless expressing a small degree of sympathy with the revolutionaries’ impulse to rid themselves of noxious foreign pop:

Now Ayatollah Khomeini, true to his type, has denounced music as an opiate […] Ayatollah Khomeini, like Karl Marx, is clearly of the opinion that opium is not to be recommended for mass consumption. […]

Yet there is perhaps something amid his fatuous ideas to consider seriously. To regard all music as merely sensual or deadening to the mind is obviously wrong-headed […] or is he merely talking about the modern Americanised pabulum which is ludicrously dignified as “cultural imperialism”? To the Iranian nomad the latter kind is incomprehensible. In the cities American music stands for modern Western culture, and in this Ayatollah Khomeini comes down heavily with the peasant. It is a revolt against the rapid, oil-fuelled development of Iran, a hopeless revolt in the long run, no doubt, but understandable. None of this excuses the Ayatollah – but at least it makes some sense to them. [7]

As Roger Simon of the Chicago Sun-Times propagandized later that same year, however:

The leader of Iran has called the United States “the great Satan which gathers the other Satans around it.” His people, however, are coming to the United States in droves to enjoy the freedom they don’t have at home.

As an angry American shouted at Iranian students in New York: “We’re gonna ship you back and you aren’t gonna like it! No more booze. No more Bic Macs. No more rock music. No more television. No more sex. You’re gonna get on that plane at Kennedy, and when you get off in Tehran, you’re gonna be back in the 13th Century. How you gonna like that?”

They aren’t gonna like it much. The great Satan may be evil, but the Iranians in America have found out he’s a lot more fun than the Ayatollah Khomeini. [8]

Topper Headon

There is some irony in the fact that the Clash’s Topper Headon, without whom the rallying “Rock the Casbah” would not exist – and whose personal trajectory exemplifies as well as any the dizzying-rise-and-downward-spiral rock-and-roll lifestyle cycle of legend, with even his surname suggesting hedonism – would succumb to a heroin addiction at the pinnacle of the Clash’s success with the song, being replaced by Terry Chimes in the “Rock the Casbah” video and on the band’s 1982 concert tour. Headon continued recording music, but lived a life of diminishing quality as the eighties progressed. He “recalls the mini-cabbing job he took in west London in the late 1980s to fund his heroin addiction. ‘I look like death […] I’m driving a Talbot Solara with a dodgy starter motor […]” A 2009 Independent profile continues:

By 1989, when the mini-cabbing work became too much for him, he had taken to the London Underground, busking with a set of bongos. “Every hundred people who passed, there’d be one who’d stop and ask, ‘Are you Topper Headon from The Clash?’” He shrugs, “I’d have to say, ‘Yeah, this is what I do now.’ It was so humiliating.” [9]

And Strummer’s “Sharif” – the one that “don’t like it”? “Since its 1979 revolution, Iran has developed a reputation as having some of the world’s harshest drug penalties,” write Vanda Felbab-Brown and Bradley S. Porter for the Brookings Institution:

After the 1979 revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared drug use “un-Islamic”, […] seeking to reduce addiction. Although the Ayatollah called the shah’s drug executions “inhuman”, the revolution put in place a “purification” program that extensively jailed and executed drug offenders.

A notorious chief justice of the Revolutionary Tribunals and simultaneously head of the Anti-Drugs Revolutionary Council, Sadeq Khalkhali, previously a minor cleric, sentenced to death at least 582 drug dealers during his 11-month reign in 1979, along with the hundreds of others […] The use of capital punishment for drug crimes intensified after 1988, and some 10,000 people have received the death penalty for drug-related offenses since then.

The revolution also ended domestic experimentation with legal cultivation of poppy. Despite the economic impacts on Iran’s farmers, any illicit cultivation was also effectively suppressed. [10]

As the obese and dope-addicted collective West (“the Free World”) with its degenerated unfaithful increasingly looks to be headed for bongo-banging for spare change in subways (“The crowd caught a whiff …”), one begins to wonder when and if its own jet pilots, eager to have their overlords “outta their hair”, will tune out “the cockpit radio blare”, reject it as kosher, and lend an ear instead to that muezzin “a-standin’ on the radiator grille”.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Endnotes

[1] Greene, Andy. “Flashback: Neil Young Unveils ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ at 1989 Seattle Gig”. Rolling Stone (July 14, 2015): https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/flashback-neil-young-unveils-rockin-in-the-free-world-at-1989-seattle-gig-158334/

[2] Brady, Buzz. “Salman Rushdie Speaks about His Friendship with U2’s Frontman Bono”. Irish Central (September 26, 2012): https://www.irishcentral.com/culture/entertainment/salman-rushdie-speaks-about-his-friendship-with-u2s-frontman-bono-171386631-237530341

[3] Benitez-Eves, Tina. “The Meaning behind the Clash’s 1982 Hit ‘Rock the Casbah’”. American Songwriter (May 20, 2022): https://americansongwriter.com/the-meaning-behind-the-clashs-1982-hit-rock-the-casbah/

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_the_Casbah#Lyrics

[5] Rizzo, Frank. “Rock Warfare: Dispatches from the Front”. The Hartford Courant (August 31, 1982), p. C6.

[6] “Rock the Casbah: Soldiers in Desert Get Radio Station”. The Atlanta Journal and Constitution (October 10, 1990), p. A-4.

[7] “Rock and the Nomad”. The Daily Telegraph (July 25, 1979), p. 18.

[8] Simon, Roger. “Let Us Close the Doors Both Ways”. The Parsons Sun (November 16, 1979), p. 6.

[9] Lucas, Mark. “‘I Forgive You’: The Clash’s Drummer Topper Headon Makes Peace with the Man Who Sacked Him”. Independent (June 28, 2009): https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/i-forgive-you-the-clash-s-drummer-topper-headon-makes-peace-with-the-man-who-sacked-him-1717627.html

[10] Felbab-Brown, Vanda; and Bradley S. Porter. “Out with the Old, in with the Old: Iran’s Revolution, Drug Policies, and Global Drug Markets”. Brookings (January 24, 2019): https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/01/24/out-with-the-old-in-with-the-old-irans-revolution-drug-policies-and-global-drug-markets/