The Alternative Number Ones: Big Audio Dynamite’s “Just Play Music!”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every single #1 hit in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for Members only.

Mick Jones must've been sick of talking about the Clash. I get it. I sometimes get sick of talking about the Clash, and I wasn't in the Clash. For everyone involved in the entire enterprise, the Clash must feel something like a millstone. The Clash were a miracle -- the pure-hearted leftist punks who carried themselves as messianic prophets and who actually had the songs, and the cultural resonance, to back it up. That's a tough act to follow.

The Clash lasted for 10 years -- maybe too brief, maybe too long. Mick Jones was only in the band for seven of those years. By 1988, Jones had been out of the Clash for half a decade, and he was four years and three albums into a whole new project that sounded, looked, and operated very little like the Clash. The Clash's narrative was always quixotically romantic, but most of that came down to Joe Strummer, the flag-waving firebrand whose rebel-rocker pose and gnarled bark helped define a way forward for a genre that, at least at the beginning, was way more interested in negation than sustainability. Jones was Strummer's counterbalance -- the mercurial and slightly weedy south London kid who didn't go to boarding school. He was the one who actually sang a whole lot of the hits: "Lost In The Supermarket," "Train In Vain," "Should I Stay Or Should I Go." Then he got fired.