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Song's chords Dm, G, F, C, Am, Em, D, E, Gm, A
Album Combat Rock
Info about song
According to the Rock The Casbah Songfacts, Clash Drummer Topper Headon wrote the music and the original lyrics. Vocalist Joe Strummer then decided to take Headon's lyrics in a different direction, to tell the story of an Arab ruler (the Shereef) who hates music, but is defied by the citizens . According to former Clash co-manager Kosmo Vinyl, Headon's original words were a filthy ode to his girlfriend. Vinyl recalled to Rolling Stone: "He had really pornographic lyrics for it if I remember correctly. Very, very pornographic lyrics." Strummer's inspiration for re-working the song came from the Clash's other manager, Bernie Rhodes, who asked the band, "Does everything have to be as long as a raga?" after a particularly long take of the track "Sean Flynn." Strummer told Rolling Stone shortly before he died in 2002: "I got back to the hotel that night and wrote on a typewriter, 'The King told the boogie men You gotta get that raga drop.' I looked at it and for some reason I started to think about what someone had told me earlier, that you get lashed for owning a disco album in Iran." Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.
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