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zombie land. “I'm all lost in the supermarket; I can no longer shop happily.” -The Clash, “Lost In The Supermarket” constancexxxxxxxenglish281xxxxxxxdecember2016
page !2 table of contents. cover. contents. “you! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable—mon frère!” the clash. “constant consumerism had led to unavoidable political apathy.” “lost in the supermarket.” “this apocalyptic, politically charged rant.” “london calling.” t. s. eliot. “the figures worship false gods, reflecting Eliot's interpretation of Western culture after World War I.” “the hollow men.” “the poem shifts between voices of satire and prophecy.” “the waste land.” bibliography.
page !3 “you! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable—mon frère!” Tim Burton’s 1990 film Edward Scissorhands features a neighborhood of epically suburban proportions; the houses inside it consist of flawlessly lined up one-stories painted pastel colors to match their pastel-colored vehicles. The apparently endless expanse of uniform homes screams conformity, cleanliness and commercialism, as do the inhabitants of the homes themselves. It’s the first image that comes to mind when I hear Joe Strummer’s lyrics to “Lost In The Supermarket,” which discusses the life of a character who grew up in the suburbs of London with “a hedge back home…over which I never could see.” The songs Strummer wrote for The Clash’s London Calling seem to be largely directed at a number of London inhabitants not unlike those of Burton’s suburbia. In the title track of the album, he writes that London is calling to “the imitation zone,” the perpetrators of “phony Beatlemania.” “London calling, and I don't wanna shout,” sings Mick Jones, “But while we were talking, I saw you nodding out.” As much as today’s society might get harped on for walking around town with their pupils glued to lit-up phone screens, T. S. Eliot describes Londoners crossing London Bridge in the same manner in a poem written in 1922, and he was drawing inspiration from an image in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Throughout time, we’ve all got our eyes fixed on our feet as in Eliot’s “Unreal City.” And throughout time, there have been those who walked around banging metaphorical pots and pans together in a big metallic clash in efforts to provoke passersby into looking up to see what’s going on around them. I focus in this anthology on the work of poet T. S. Eliot and that of punk rock band The Clash— specifically, Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and “The Hollow Men” and The Clash’s “Lost In The Supermarket” and “London Calling,” both off of the album of the latter’s same name. Eliot’s 1922 and The Clash’s 1979 are probably infinitely different to each other in regards to political ideals and morals, but they’re not so dissimilar in their basic concepts. Both artists see a London they find themselves in disagreement with, and create grand works of art with a message of protest directed at its inhabitants. Both feel the people of their worlds have grown dead-like and apathetic, whether due to their lack of Eliot’s morals and religion or Strummer’s politics. The city of London and, by extension, a large portion of the world is not unlike a kind of zombie land from their respective viewpoints. The zombie phenomenon hasn’t gone away, in my own opinion, at least. The smartphones and ever-expanding consumeristic BS of modern society aren’t leaving any time soon, and while the former might be helpful in keeping us in contact with the rest of Earth, the two together largely contribute to our own ignorance. There’s so much I don’t know. There’s so much I don’t feel because I’m processing someone else’s emotions via films and books and other media rather than living out my own odd life. We are forever moving closer to each other with the introduction of new technology and at the same time becoming more and more isolated, a feeling Strummer expresses in “Supermarket” when talking about how lost the speaker of the work feels, although he
page !4 is constantly around other Londoners. Even from the news, I’m just getting the facts of all these things that happen every day around the world. The emotions are mostly absent. Zombie media’s been getting popular these days with the rise of The Walking Dead and books like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Warm Bodies, World War Z, all those works. We don’t spend nearly as much time contemplating our own lost, Waste Land-like states of demise as we do the entertaining, feet-dragging things that get their heads blasted off on the big screen in an enormously bloody mess. But we’re not so dissimilar. Just gotta get our eyes off our feet, our phones, our television sets. The truth’s right there. “London Calling” is quite literally a call to reform a bent, skewed society (“London calling to the zombies of death/Quit holding out, and draw another breath”) but so is “Lost In The Supermarket”, along with the works of T. S. Eliot. While Strummer talks of zombies, Eliot paints them for us vividly in “The Hollow Men” (“We are the hollow men/We are the stuffed men/Leaning together/Headpiece filled with straw”). “Our dried voices, when/We whisper together,” he writes, “Are quiet and meaningless.” But these written works and others are a method by which even the silent can communicate (although The Clash weren’t exactly reticent). I too might be somewhat undead in a metaphorical sense of the word, but at least these writers and artists give me hope that I can promote a little change, too, even without entirely functioning organs.


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The Clash Formed in 1976, The Clash was a British punk rock band composed of Joe Strummer (lead vocals, rhythm guitar), Mick Jones (lead guitar, lead vocals), Paul Simonon (bass guitar, vocals) and Nicky "Topper" Headon (drums, percussion). Their third album, London Calling, was declared by Rolling Stone to be the best album of the 1980s. (The album was released in December of 1979 in the UK, but in January of 1980 in the United States.) Guitarist Jones said to The Big Issue magazine in 2013 that “We started as punk, but we developed into all sorts of things. We didn't have a barrier, like, 'you can't do this!' We wanted to do a different album every time, not the same one over and over. As we traveled and experienced more, we became more creative and open-minded. We kept the spirit and the ethics of punk, faced our contradictions and did our best as a big group rather than a small indie group.” The Clash were known for their musical experimentation within the punk rock genre, combining elements of punk rock, reggae, ska, rockabilly and traditional rock and roll music among other styles in their albums. The band did much to influence generations of music to come with this experimentation, combined with politicized lyrics and an infamously rebellious outlook on the world. When asked by New Music Express in 1976 who The Clash were, vocalist Strummer answered, “I think people ought to know that we're anti-fascist, we're anti-violence, we're anti-racist, and we're pro-creative. We're against ignorance.”
page !7 “constant consumerism had led to unavoidable political apathy” -wikipedia "Lost In The Supermarket” was originally released on The Clash’s 1979 album London Calling. The song was penned by rhythm guitarist Joe Strummer in collaboration with lead guitarist Mick Jones and produced by Guy Stevens. According to Jones, “Supermarket” “was actually Joe writing for me to sing. It’s how he imagined almost my life was as a child or something. Not all the details—I didn’t live in the suburbs—but some were very close.” Strummer said later in a 1999 interview that the concept for the piece “occurred to me as I stumbled around dazed by the color and the lights” of the International, a supermarket neighboring the home he shared with his girlfriend of the time. The store was located at 471-473 Kings Road in Chelsea, London. “Supermarket” describes a consumeristic London in which its inhabitants seek sales in an effort to find themselves (“I came in here for that special offer/A guaranteed personality”). Lines like “I empty a bottle and I feel a bit free” suggest that the speaker of the lines feels depersonalized and trapped himself in such a society. Repetition of the phrase “I'm all lost” suggests a similar theme of mental emptiness brought on by a culture with a tendency to replace genuine emotions and political ideals with material objects and desires. Like London Calling’s title song, “Supermarket” addresses a society that Strummer felt had grown politically apathetic in his time. Such a sentiment is not unlike that of T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” which describes the rather undead life of a people grown empty and dreamless. Eliot’s The Waste Land echoes similar ideas throughout itself, notably describing a dreary scene in which “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many…/Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,/And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.”
page !8 THE CLASH "Lost In The Supermarket� [Chorus] I'm all lost in the supermarket I can no longer shop happily I came in here for that special offer A guaranteed personality I wasn't born so much as I fell out Nobody seemed to notice me We had a hedge back home in the suburbs Over which I never could see I heard the people who lived on the ceiling Scream and fight most scarily Hearing that noise was my first ever feeling That's how it's been all around me [Chorus] I'm all tuned in, I see all the programmes I save coupons from packets of tea I've got my giant hit discoteque album I empty a bottle and I feel a bit free The kids in the halls and the pipes in the walls Make me noises for company Long distance callers make long distance calls And the silence makes me lonely [Chorus] And it's not [here] It disappear I'm all lost
page !9 Tesco supermarket in London, 1980s. 


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page 1! 1 “this apocalyptic, politically charged rant” -wikipedia “London Calling” was the title track off The Clash’s 1979 album of the same name. Like “Lost In The Supermarket,” it was written by band members Joe Strummer and Mick Jones; in December of that year it reached No. 11 in the UK charts. The title references the station identification line of the BBC World Service, "This is London calling…” which was often used when broadcasting to occupied countries during World War II. This seems to insinuate that the album and its title track were not merely a local message to the people of 1979 London but one to be broadcasted worldwide. “London Calling” was in part a response to the Three Mile Island accident of 1979, in which a partial nuclear meltdown in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania prompted a significant amount of concern over the safety of nuclear power plants. Strummer said to Melody Marker in 1988 that "I read about ten news reports in one day calling down all variety of plagues on us.” The song includes an extensive number of references worthy of further study; for example, the lines “London calling, see we ain't got no swing/‘Cept for the ring of that truncheon thing” are an allusion to Strummer’s concerns over the prevalence of police brutality in the UK. In an interview with Uncut magazine, the rhythm guitarist cited his original inspiration for the song as a conversation with his then-fiancee, saying, “There was a lot of Cold War nonsense going on, and we knew that London was susceptible to flooding. She told me to write something about that.” Strummer’s concept of a drowning London can be considered not only literally, in reference to the flooding concerns that led in time to the construction of the Thames Barrier, but also metaphorically; T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land refers to a similarly decaying London, but speaks of a loss of morals and religion. Strummer’s taciturn and politically apathetic “zombies of death” are not unlike those described in the London Bridge scene of Eliot’s poem, in which “Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,/A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,/I had not thought death had undone so many.” Both works seem to attempt the sending of a desperate message to the populace of a world gone wrong that is centered in London, although Strummer and Eliot have differing intentions, ideals and morals that they wish to express through their work.
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THE CLASH "London Calling" London calling to the faraway towns Now war is declared, and battle come down London calling to the underworld Come out of the cupboard, you boys and girls London calling, now don't look to us Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust London calling, see we ain't got no swing 'Cept for the ring of that truncheon thing The ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin Engines stop running, but I have no fear 'Cause London is drowning, and I live by the river London calling to the imitation zone Forget it, brother, you can go it alone London calling to the zombies of death Quit holding out, and draw another breath London calling, and I don't wanna shout But while we were talking, I saw you nodding out London calling, see we ain't got no high Except for that one with the yellowy eyes The ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in Engines stop running, the wheat is growing thin A nuclear error, but I have no fear 'Cause London is drowning, and I live by the river Now get this London calling, yes, I was there, too An' you know what they said? Well, some of it was true! London calling at the top of the dial After all this, won't you give me a smile? London calling I never felt so much alike [fading] alike alike alike 
page !13 “London Calling” music video, filmed next to Albert Bridge on the south side of the Thames


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T. S. Eliot Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was a British poet, essayist, literary and social critic, publisher and playwright. While born in St. Louis, Missouri, the poet moved to England in 1914 at the age of twenty-five and thirteen years later renounced his American citizenship to be naturalized as a British subject. His work is heavily featured in both American and British anthologies of writing. In 1948 he was given the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry.” In his Nobel presentation speech on Eliot, Swedish poet Anders Österling said, “His career is remarkable in that, from an extremely exclusive and consciously isolated position, he has gradually come to exercise a very far-reaching influence. At the outset he appeared to address himself to but a small circle of initiates, but this circle slowly widened, without his appearing to will it himself. Thus in Eliot's verse and prose there was quite a special accent, which compelled attention just in our own time, a capacity to cut into the consciousness of our generation with the sharpness of a diamond.” Eliot’s most popular poems today are "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), The Waste Land (1922), "The Hollow Men" (1925), "Ash Wednesday" (1930), and Four Quartets (1943).
page !16 “the figures worship false gods, reflecting Eliot's interpretation of Western culture after World War I” -wikipedia T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” was first printed in the author’s collection Poems: 1909–1925, published in November of 1925. The work is in part an amalgamation of previously published smaller poems and drafts; for example, the shorter “Poème", originally published in 1924, became Part I of the final work. While penning the poem, Eliot had recently gone through a divorce from his wife, Vivienne, and was struggling in the throes of a religious agnosticism that he would only later resolve in converting to Anglicanism. The piece is not unlike his earlier The Waste Land in referencing a kind of moral paralysis that Eliot believed had overtaken Europe post World War I. “The Hollow Men” describes a people characterized by their inactivity, represented as scarecrow-like “hollow men” who are dead yet reside in neither heaven nor hell post their passing. “Those who have crossed/With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom,” writes Eliot, “Remember us-if at all-not as lost/Violent souls, but only/ As the hollow men/The stuffed men.” The people he describes in the poem are emotionless, with their “lips that would kiss” only managing to form prayers to broken stone. “Between the desire/ And the spasm,” he later expresses, “Falls the Shadow,” an entity that may be considered to be the physical representation of the cultural apathy the poem bemoans. Joe Strummer’s ending line to “London Calling” perhaps references a similar monotony to the people of England that Eliot speaks of: “I never felt so much alike alike alike…” The very repetition of the word implies an endless uniformity and lack of feeling.
page !17 The Hollow Men Mistah Kurtz-he dead A penny for the Old Guy I We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats' feet over broken glass In our dry cellar Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion; Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom Remember us-if at all-not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men. II Eyes I dare not meet in dreams In death's dream kingdom These do not appear: There, the eyes are Sunlight on a broken column There, is a tree swinging And voices are In the wind's singing More distant and more solemn Than a fading star. Let me be no nearer In death's dream kingdom
page !18 Let me also wear Such deliberate disguises Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves In a field Behaving as the wind behaves No nearerNot that final meeting In the twilight kingdom
III This is the dead land This is cactus land Here the stone images Are raised, here they receive The supplication of a dead man's hand Under the twinkle of a fading star. Is it like this In death's other kingdom Waking alone At the hour when we are Trembling with tenderness Lips that would kiss Form prayers to broken stone. IV The eyes are not here There are no eyes here In this valley of dying stars In this hollow valley This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms In this last of meeting places We grope together And avoid speech Gathered on this beach of the tumid river Sightless, unless The eyes reappear
page !19 As the perpetual star Multifoliate rose Of death's twilight kingdom The hope only Of empty men. V Here we go round the prickly pear Prickly pear prickly pear Here we go round the prickly pear At five o'clock in the morning. Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow Life is very long Between the desire And the spasm Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom For Thine is Life is For Thine is the This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends
page !20 Not with a bang but a whimper.
page !21 “the poem shifts between voices of satire and prophecy” -wikipedia T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, composed in its entirety of a lengthy 434 lines, was originally published in the UK in The Criterion and in the United States in The Dial in 1922. The poem consists of five sections: The Burial of the Dead, A Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon, Death by Water and What the Thunder Said. The poem in part follows the template of the quest for the Holy Grail and that of the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King, which tells the story of a king wounded who seeks to renew the health of his kingdom, whose land has been laid to waste. The epigraph to the poem reads, “For I myself have seen the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a glass bottle, and when the acolytes asked, ‘Sibyl, what do you wish,’ she answered them, ‘I wish to die,’” recalling a character of Gaius Petronius’ Satyricon, a woman given eternal life who wastes away until she is sickly and small enough to be put into a bottle. Eliot seems to imply with these introductory words that the Sibyl’s life is not unlike that of a resident of his waste land, London—hollow, sickly and meaningless. He goes on to credit Ezra Pound, “the better craftsman”, for his large part in helping Eliot to complete the poem. Pound’s main role in doing so consisted of cutting lengthy unnecessary sections from the work, an operation Pound later referenced in a poem describing the process, “Sage Homme,” whose first lines are as follows: “These are the poems of Eliot By the Uranian Muse begot; A Man their Mother was, A Muse their Sire. How did the printed Infancies result From Nuptials thus doubly difficult? If you must needs enquire Know diligent Reader That on each Occasion Ezra performed the Caesarean Operation.” Like the other works in this collection, The Waste Land describes London as a ravaged, dead land, empty of the morals and godliness Eliot believed ought to be important to his society. Eliot twists references to spring and to various religions from things of happiness and hope into things with darker meanings, beginning his magnum opus with the famous line “April is the [cruellest] month,” arguing that it only serves to reveal the truths which the snows of winter had temporarily obscured. He finishes the first section of the poem with the closing lines from Charles Baudelaire’s “Au Lecteur,” which translate to read, “Hypocrite reader, my double, my brother!” The words are jarring, an attempt to snatch readers into the world of Eliot’s London waste land not unlike the desperate messages of The Clash’s “London Calling” and “Lost In The Supermarket.”
page !22 The Burial of the Dead from The Waste Land “Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σιβυλλα τι θελεις; respondebat illa: αποθανειν θελω.” For Ezra Pound il miglior fabbro. I. The Burial of the Dead April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar kine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s, My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
page !23 Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zu, Mein Irisch Kind, Wo weilest du? “You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; “They called me the hyacinth girl.” –Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. Oed’ und leer das Meer. Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, Had a bad cold, nevertheless Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations. Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring. Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: One must be so careful these days. Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson! “You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! “That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
page !24 “Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? “Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? “Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men, “Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again! “You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable—mon frère!”


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page !26 bibliography. Beaton, Cecil. T. S. Eliot. 1956. Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, Sotheby’s, London. National Portrait Gallery, http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw18412/TS-Eliot? LinkID=mp01450&displayNo=60&wPage=0&role=sit&rNo=6. Accessed 27 Nov. 2016. Clash, The. “London Calling.” London Calling, CBS Records, 1979. Clash, The. “Lost In The Supermarket.” London Calling, CBS Records, 1979. Edward Scissorhands. Directed by Tim Burton, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 1990. Eliot, T. S. “The Hollow Men.” T. S. Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1971, pp. 56-59. Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land. T. S. Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1971, pp. 37-39. Gruen, Bob. The Clash. Photographs by Bob Gruen. London: Omnibus Press, 2015. “London Bridge, 1923.” The Passion of Former Days, 5 April 2011, http://www.formerdays.com/2011/04/london-streetview-1920s.html. “Shopping at Tesco, 1980's - Film 33139.” YouTube, uploaded by HuntleyFilmArchives, 15 Jan. 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEExf5el1Ws. “The Clash - London Calling (Official Video).” YouTube, uploaded by theclashVEVO, 3 Oct. 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfK-WX2pa8c.