10 Massive Drops In Quality Between Albums

How the hell did punk manage to die at the turn of the '80s? Even though we had bands coming out of the underground thriving well into the MTV generation, all of the heavyhitters like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols were either done or irrelevant to the starlets that were selling out on television. For a brief moment, it looked like the Clash were going to stay the course, only for everything to unravel right before Cut the Crap.

Although you could hear tension on Combat Rock, Joe Strummer and Mick Jones used that kind of tension to create some of the best songs of their career like Straight to Hell or Rock the Casbah. When that tension became too much though, Strummer decided that he could continue on with the Clash without Mick or even drummer Topper Headon, drafting in a new set of Clash members and making some of the most directionless songs of the band's career.

Across every single track on this record, you can feel that Joe just doesn't have that same kind of punk spirit in him anymore, being more frustrated than anything else and realizing the mistake that he made by firing Mick. With the one exception of the song This Is England, this is considered some of the most inferior songs to be put under the name the Clash. The original Clash songs made you want to start a rebellion from the ground up, but these songs just sound like they were made out of exhaustion.