This was published in the old version of NYLPM, which was never archived. But I liked it so I resurrected it.
AFGHAN WHIGS – Lost In The Supermarket
Now let me say first of all that I don’t know The Clash at all, not being one of those public schoolboys who liked playing at being public schoolboys playing at being punks. (I wanted to be black or Morrissey or both, but that’s another story). I do know the Afghan Whigs, though, and their broadly excellent 1965 album, which was touted as being happy-and-horny whereas it was really just less crassly fucked-up-and-horny than their earlier stuff. This reading of Lost… takes the occasional outbreaks of voluptuousness you got there and runs with them, the Whigs’ limber shuffle-beat supporting garlands of cooing and sighing, and Greg Dulli singing “I’m lost” as “Mmm luhhhsst”, as well he might given supermarkets’ totemic status as shag-temples in our Bridget Jonesian times. The rest of the pro-situ lyric (well done as these things go) he bevels into another of his bliss-struck lover’s pledges, finally dropping all pretence at ‘social comment’ and singing Stand By Me over the coda instead: glorious.