Was the punk rock of my youth secretly conservative?

I was listening to a Classic Punk playlist on Spotify the other day and heard the song “Safe European Home” by the Clash.

I always assumed this song was making fun of uptight British and European vacationers who preferred not to venture too far from the safety of their milquetoast white societies.

The Dead Kennedys saw that liberal college students were too brainwashed to understand how lucky they were.

That’s how it was back in the 1980s. Europe, England, and America were so safe and law-abiding that young people had to seek out exotic locations to have real travel adventures.

I thought “Safe European Home” was about boring, bourgeois people who would never consider visiting Africa, or the Caribbean, or Central America, mostly because they might be exposed to poverty and crime — much of which was created by their own countries’ capitalist exploitation of these third-world countries. At least that’s what the Clash would say.

Or at least that’s what I thought they’d say.

¡Viva la Revolución!

The Clash always presented as left-leaning. They were always singing about third-world revolutions, police brutality, resisting military conscription.

They even named one of their albums after Nicaragua’s socialist revolutionary party: “Sandinista!”

But hearing “Safe European Home” again, I realized that I had never listened closely to the lyrics. Was my interpretation correct? What was the Clash trying to say with this song? So I Googled it.

It turns out I was wrong. The real story of that song was that in 1977, Clash members Joe Strummer and Mick Jones traveled to Jamaica to write songs and soak up the reggae vibes.

But once there, they had a rude awakening, which they described in the lyrics of “Safe European Home”:

I went to the place where every white face
Is an invitation to robbery
And sitting here in my safe European home
Don’t wanna go back there again

Mick Jones said after the trip: “I’m surprised we weren’t filleted and served on a plate of chips. We went down to the docks, and I think we only survived because they mistook us for sailors.”

So it turns out that “Safe European Home” was not a jab at unadventurous European travelers. Jones and Strummer were actually horrified by the lawlessness of Jamaica!

They weren’t making fun of anybody. They were genuinely relieved to get back to Western civilization.

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Jello and the boys

Another influential punk band, the Dead Kennedys, had their own song about traveling in dangerous places: “Holiday in Cambodia” (1980).

In this song, lead singer Jello Biafra taunted sheltered American college kids by suggesting they visit war-torn Cambodia, where the population was being brutalized by communists.

So you’ve been to school for a year or two
And you know you’ve seen it all
In Daddy’s car, thinkin’ you’ll go far
Back east, your type don’t crawl

It’s time to taste what you most fear
Right Guard will not help you here

On a holiday in Cambodia
Where you’ll do what you’re told
A holiday in Cambodia
Where the slums got so much soul

Of course, if you were a college student in the United States at that time, you probably had leftist professors telling you communism was a good thing.

But the Dead Kennedys were not telling you that. They were telling you the truth. Cambodia was an absolute nightmare. And for college kids, who thought Mao and Trotsky and Che Guevara were “cool,” it would be a devastating reality check.

California Über Alles

The Dead Kennedys claimed they had no official ideology. But they obviously leaned left.

They mocked President Reagan and accused Governor Jerry Brown of turning California into a fascist police state in their song “California Über Alles.”

Imagine that: thinking the biggest problem in California was too many police! I wonder what the Dead Kennedys think of California now?

A liberal who hasn’t been mugged yet

So yeah, two of the most left-leaning punk bands were clearly aware of the privileges they enjoyed by living in Western societies.

In both cases, these musicians outwardly supported leftist causes. But when push came to shove, they showed an instinctive conservatism.

The Dead Kennedys saw that liberal college students were too brainwashed to understand how lucky they were.

And the Clash was a classic case of “a liberal is just a conservative who hasn’t been mugged yet.”

Throughout their career, the Clash maintained “left-wing revolutionaries” as their public image. But they still preferred Europe to Jamaica. Or at least they did back in 1977, when Europe was still predominantly European.

What would they think of it now? We can only guess at the answer to that.