ABSTRACT
The Future Is Unwritten, the new documentary about The Clash’s Joe Strummer (who died in 2002) made me feel less embarrassed about being locked on that phrase 25 years after it was first coined to cry up the Clash’s album Sandinista. It got me thinking (again) about how we’ll keep First burning down the road. The movie is built around blue-hoursin-the-cities scenes of Stummer’s friends reminiscing around campfires with dark waters behind them. (Their lost Promethean boy apparently loved a bonfire in the night.) Those scenes evoke Strummer’s attraction to social living (to use the Rastas’ term for socialism) and his openness to world musics/cultures.
