Rock the Casbah
by The Clash
- 129
- BPM
- A minor
- Key
- 8A
- Camelot
- 80
- Danceability
- 29
- Acousticness
Topper Headon wrote the music for "Rock the Casbah" alone. Finding himself in the studio without the rest of the Clash, he taped the drums, piano and bass himself, building on a piano part he had been toying with. The other three members heard it and felt it was essentially finished. Only minor overdubs like guitars and percussion followed.
Headon also handed Joe Strummer a page of lyrics. A guitar technician, Digby Cleaver, called them a soppy set about missing a girlfriend. Strummer crumpled the page and threw it over his head. He already had phrases of his own, "rock the casbah" and a line about letting that raga drop, and after hearing the music he went into the studio bathroom and wrote the words to match it. The first came from a jam with his violinist friend Tymon Dogg, who misheard the shout as "stop, you cadger". The second came from manager Bernie Rhodes, who asked if everything had to be as long as a raga.
The Clash released it on June 11, 1982 as the second single from Combat Rock. It reached number eight on the Billboard Hot 100, their only US top 10 single. Headon left the band over a drug problem before the song came out. Terry Chimes drummed in the video, filmed by Don Letts in Austin, Texas.
Rock the Casbah runs at 129 BPM, the tempo of house, disco and most club dance music. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.86 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 465 ms. It is in A minor, Camelot 8A, which shares its notes with C major and mixes cleanly with D minor and E minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.