Rock the Casbah" is a song by the English punk rock band The Clash. It was released as the third single from their fifth album, Combat Rock. The song reached number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the U.S. (their only top 10 single Stateside) and, along with the track "Mustapha Dance", it also reached number eight on the dance chart. It is the band's highest charting single worldwide.
The song gives a fabulist account of a ban on rock music by the Sharif or King being defied by the population, who proceed to "rock the casbah". The King orders jet fighters to bomb any people in violation of the ban. The pilots ignore the orders, and instead play rock music on their cockpit radios.
The song′s lyrics feature various Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, and Sanskrit loan-words, such as sharif, bedouin, sheikh, kosher, rāga, muezzin, minaret, and casbah.
In 2006, the conservative National Review released their list of the top 50 "Conservative Rock Songs", with "Rock the Casbah" at #20, noting its frequent requests during the Iraq War.Despite, or perhaps because of, its popularity with soldiers during the Gulf War, "Rock the Casbah" was one of the songs deemed inappropriate by Clear Channel following the September 11, 2001 attacks.
In one of the campfire scenes late in the 2007 documentary Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, a Granada friend states that Strummer wept when he heard that the phrase "Rock the Casbah" was written on an American bomb that was to be detonated on Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War.
audio link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bn1Ca8izXto
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