#13, “Lost in the Supermarket,” The Clash (1979)

150 Favorite Songs: #13, “Lost in the Supermarket,” The Clash (1979)

“You’re living the wrong life” is a theme in a lot of art. There’s an eerie, horror-movie quality to the idea that any of us might be meant for something other than what we have, that a wrong turn—whether taken by negligence or malevolent forces or simply bad luck—can shunt us onto a path that wasn’t meant for us. It can be conveyed in over-the-top, brightly-colored ways like, I dunno, Back to the Future 2, or it can come across more pensively—there’s a movie out this year called I Saw the TV Glow that explores the theme in a tense, paranoid way, really capturing the sense that the walls are closing in because you—specifically you—ended up on the wrong path. There’s something to the idea that you can be trapped in a life that’s different from the one you should be living, whatever “should” means in that context, that’s always felt powerful to me.

“Lost in the Supermarket” is about that feeling, too. It’s from The Clash’s seminal 1979 double album London Calling, which is a collection of nineteen songs that, despite The Clash ostensibly being a punk rock band, span genres; in addition to the punk rock of the title track or “Four Horseman,” there’s the reggae of “Jimmy Jazz” or “Revolution Rock,” the early ska of “Rudie Can’t Fail,” the pop of “Train in Vain”… And then there’s “Lost in the Supermarket,” which sounds more or less like what indie rock wound up sounding like from, I dunno, 2001-2015 or so.

The song was written by Joe Strummer, like most Clash songs (at least the words), but Mick Jones sings it. The metaphor in the title gives you a sense of the frame of the song—the narrator is living a quiet life laced with an undercurrent of fear and disappointment, a sense of smallness. It opens with one of Strummer’s most devastating lines: “I wasn’t born so much as I fell out / nobody seemed to notice me,” and continues from there, creating a mood of childlike fear that makes the small life its narrator is stuck living feel inevitable. “I heard the people who live on the ceiling scream and fight most scarily / hearing that noise was my first ever feeling, and that’s how it’s been all around me,” Jones sings to wrap the first verse. It’s quietly sung, delivered matter-of-factly. Brutal.

But what makes Strummer such an interesting songwriter, and “Lost in the Supermarket” such an interesting song, is that at no point in listening to it do I hear contempt for the song’s narrator. It’s a song about empathy as much as it is about alienation or loneliness. And I have a hunch as to why.

Mick Jones sings the song, and according to Strummer, it was also very much inspired by Jones’s childhood. And so you can hear “Lost in the Supermarket” as Strummer imagining the life his friend might have lived with a few turns down roads that turned out to be the wrong ones (and, presumably, the same for himself, at least to some extent). Accordingly, the song is compassionate to its narrator. It’s kind in the way it imagines it, and Jones sells that in the way he sings the song; there’s a line in the second verse where Jones sings “long distance callers make long distance calls,” which could be a nonsense lyric or maybe an attempt at pointed commentary about the meaninglessness of modernity and the lives that people like the narrator live, but Jones delivers it with a yearning that gives it an entirely different meaning: It sounds like he just wishes he had someone to call. It’s subtle in a way that art exploring this theme isn’t usually subtle.

And that matters to me, because I’ve thought a lot about the idea of living the wrong life. I found “Lost in the Supermarket” when I was eighteen, through a sort of roundabout means; I was a volunteer music writer for a small, short-lived alt-weekly in McAllen, Texas and I got paid in CDs, and one of the ones that came in was a tribute album to The Clash called Burning in London. The Afghan Whigs did “Lost in the Supermarket” on that one, and the version they turned in—soulful and sad, without being maudlin—connected with me at a point in my life where the number of paths available were vast. (I’ve written a lot about songs the Afghan Whigs have covered over these entries by now, I think that version of “Lost in the Supermarket” is the one I like most. In the final chorus, Greg Dulli somehow gets the idea to start singing “Stand By Me” by Ben E. King, which he then takes into “Train In Vain,” and it’s strange and perfect.)

I grew up in the suburbs, and most of the paths I had seen people like me go down felt more like being lost in the supermarket than chasing their dreams. I connected with certain parts of the song strongly; that opening line reads as devastating to me perhaps because, as a middle child, I related to it more than other listeners might. And I think “Lost in the Supermarket” felt to me like a warning, that it would be easy to find myself buying the giant hit discotheque album, empyting a bottle to feel a bit free. There’ve been a lot of signposts in my life that led me to make decisions that kept me off that path, and “Lost in the Supermarket” and the sadness in its words and the way its sung, whether by Jones or Dulli, is one of the biggest.

And I keep coming back to the idea of empathy in the song, because that doesn’t sound particularly empathetic, but I think that just means that I haven’t explained well what I mean by it yet.

But I think it’s the Mick Jones of it all. I think it’s the fact that it was written by someone who had in mind his friend who was living a thriving, creative life, and imagining what it would be like if he hadn’t been able to do that, and writing it specifically as a song for him to sing. “Lost in the Supermarket” is too personal to come off as condescending toward or contemptuous of everyone who isn’t out there playing guitar in a punk rock band, because how could you give Mick Jones that song to sing? Rather, it’s about the very specific pain of feeling like you might have had something you dreamed of, but instead were forced to settle for things that you didn’t. Because, like, American Beauty came out the same year that I found “Lost in the Supermarket,” and I did not hold that movie in high esteem even though it’s about the hollow heart of suburban blah-blah-blah. I never heard “Lost in the Supermarket” as being about a way of life. I always heard it as being about me.