Weighing the punk legacy of the Clash’s Joe Strummer

THANKS for Robert Hilburn’s appreciation of Joe Strummer of the Clash (“A Force in the World of Punk,” Dec. 24). I’m a 34-year-old singer-songwriter from East L.A. (whose only audience these days is my 4-month-old daughter) and, any sentimentality aside, Joe Strummer is the reason I picked up a guitar. I was influenced by Andy Partridge, the Cocteau Twins, Woody Guthrie and Los Lobos, but I wanted to write songs like Joe Strummer. He made it OK to write songs that were angry and purposeful.

Jesse Nunez

Whittier

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IF the form of entertainment that we continue to call popular music ever hit rock bottom, it was certainly with the sounds of punk bands. How someone privileged to have his view printed in a major newspaper can praise any punk noisemaker, dead or alive, defies my imagination. What really galls is the concept of the “buzz-saw sound” of punk being described as “serious reflection on politics and social protest.” The only thing good about the punk sound is that it drowned out the inane, puerile lyrics of the Clash.

Don Mac Brown

Studio City