No doubt he would
But he made his career in a time when few people were doing what he did, and the "industry" was nowhere near as industrialised as it is now. Back in those days, if you wrote good songs, and played them well live (or even just played them with energy, you didn't even have to play that well as Paul Simonon proved) then you could make a living out of it.
These days, you need to play well, look right, have a well produced record/demo, a press pack, a good website, a good myspace page, a music video, and THEN write good songs.
If Joe Strummer was just starting out now, he probably wouldn't get signed. Tragic as that is.
And don't get me wrong, I think it's fucking shit the amount of hoops a band has to jump through just to get noticed. It's like when you go past a pet shop, and the dogs in the window are all jostling with each other going "look at me! look at me!", when if they all teamed up, they could rip the throats out of the shopkeepers and run riot in the town, stealing sausages from butchers and pooing on everythign. Or something like that.
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PMGT -Bacon., Sun 18 Jul 2010, 10:36,
Reply)