The Clash - Rock the Casbah

What this video is

Released on 11 June 1982 as the second single from The Clash's fifth studio album Combat Rock, 'Rock the Casbah' became the band's only US Top 10 hit, reaching #8 on the Billboard Hot 100. The video arrived at the dawn of MTV (launched August 1981) and became one of the network's defining early clips. Lyrically, the song satirizes the Iranian Revolution's ban on Western music, reframing geopolitical censorship as…

Why it matters

A landmark document of post-punk's commercial maturation and British punk's absorption into American mainstream culture via the MTV industrial complex. The video's mixed performance-narrative structure, low-key realism, and politically-coded casting established a template for issue-driven music…

The director

Donovan Letts (born 10 January 1956, London) is a British film director, DJ, and musician of Jamaican heritage. He rose to prominence as the DJ at London punk club The Roxy in 1977, where he introduced reggae and dub to the punk scene. He directed his first…