In a 2000 interview with George Plimpton for The Paris Review, gonzo overlord Hunter S. Thompson explained: “An outlaw can be defined as somebody who lives outside the law, beyond the law, and not necessarily against it.” William Faulkner, in an interview with the same magazine conducted nearly a half-century earlier, offered this: “The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life... and hold it fixed so that 100 years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again.”

Deeply and fervently preoccupied with revolutionizing both the political and artistic standards of their time, the Clash opted to dedicate themselves to cross-breeding an entirely new kind of artist-outlaw, as violent as it was cerebral. 1979’s London Calling became the ultimate expression of that collective fascination, a double album both intensely unsettling and undeniably clever, full of mouthy indictments and unbridled celebrations. That most contemporary “punk” music actually sounds nothing like the Clash is not surprising; by the late 1970s, principle songwriters Joe Strummer and Mick Jones had been mining musical traditions (reggae, dub, rockabilly, roots) so diverse that to recreate the Clash’s specific recipe circa London Calling has become nearly impossible. Twenty-five years later, the record still moves—an astoundingly diverse, ambitious, and inspired bit of politically charged punk rock, as relevant and revolutionary today as it was in 1979. –Amanda Petrusich / Pitchfork.com