"Straight to Hell" | ||||
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Single by The Clash | ||||
from the album Combat Rock | ||||
B-side | "Should I Stay or Should I Go" | |||
Released | 17 September 1982 | |||
Format | 7-inch and 12-inch single, cassette tape | |||
Genre | Post-punk, new wave | |||
Length | 5:30 6:56 (Unedited version) 3:57 (Edited version) |
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Label | CBS CBS A 13-2646 | |||
Writer(s) | Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, Topper Headon | |||
Producer(s) | The Clash | |||
The Clash singles chronology | ||||
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"Straight to Hell" is a song by The Clash, from their album Combat Rock. It was released as a double A-side single with "Should I Stay or Should I Go" on 17 September 1982 in 12" and 7" vinyl format (the 7" vinyl is also available in picture disc) format.
"Straight to Hell" was written and recorded towards the very end of The Clash's New York recording sessions for the Combat Rock album. Mick Jones' guitar technician Digby Cleaver describes the sessions as "a mad, creative rush" that occurred on 30 December 1981, the day before The Clash was due to fly out of New York on New Year's Eve 1981.
Joe Strummer reflected on this creative process in a 1991 piece about "Straight to Hell":
I'd written the lyric staying up all night at the Iroquois Hotel. I went down to Electric Lady and I just put the vocal down on tape, we finished about twenty to midnight. We took the E train from the Village up to Times Square. I'll never forget coming out of the subway exit, just before midnight, into a hundred billion people, and I knew we had just done something really great.
"Straight to Hell" has been described by writer Pat Gilbert as being saturated by a "colonial melancholia and sadness".
Like many songs by the Clash, the lyrics of "Straight to Hell" decry injustice. The first verse refers to the shutting down of steel mills in Northern England and unemployment spanning generations, it also considers the alienation of non English speaking immigrants in British society. The second verse concerns the abandonment of children in Vietnam who were fathered by American soldiers during the Vietnam War. The third verse contrasts the American Dream as seen through the eyes of an Amerasian child with a dystopian vision of American reality. The final verse broadly considers the life of immigrants throughout the world.
The reference to "Amerasian Blues" describes the abandonment of children fathered by American soldiers stationed in Vietnam during the Vietnam War: an Amerasian child is portrayed as presenting an absent American father, "papa-san," with a photograph of his parents, pleading with his father to take him home to America. The child's plea is rejected. "-San" is a Japanese rather than Vietnamese honorific, but it was used by US troops in Vietnam who referred to Vietnamese men and women, especially older men and women, as "mama-san" or "papa-san".