Hook the Rock--Rock the Hook

 

NOT the Clash

In their song “Hook,” Blues Traveler tells us that no matter what they say, the Hook will bring you back—that catchy little phrase that we all like to sing with when the chorus comes around.

                In the 1982 song by Clash, the hook was all I seemed to listen to, or at least quite understood.  There was something about the order of the prophet, but other than that, the chorus was the most singable part—sort of.  To my youthful ears, I was unsure of what we were supposed to be rocking.  It sounded like “catbox,” but why on earth would anyone want to shake the litter box?  Eventually I decided it must be “catwalk.”  Perhaps I decided that about the time Right Said Fred’s 1991 song “I’m Too Sexy” came out—he was always singing about models on the catwalk, after all.

So whenever the Clash’s song came on the radio, I always sang along:

"Sherri don’t like it. :: Rock the Catwalk, :: Rock the Catwalk.”

                 And then I found out that they were rocking the casbah.  What the heck is a casbah?  It is an Arabic word describing a citadel or an old part of a city.  I then began to suspect the song was more like something out of Arabian Nights with rajahs and harems and all that stereotypical stuff.

                Nope.  This is no Bollywood opening night thing.  The chorus actually tells us,
“The sharif don’t like it.”  Sharif is a term used to describe a noble and is a traditional Arab title.  The whole song came out of the banning of rock music by certain governments.  It’s a 1980s “stick it to the man” hit.  I really had it all wrong.

                So—the hook may bring us back, even if we have no clue of what the hook even means.  We will still “Rock the Casbah.”

                One day when I had grown up and knew the word was casbah, I was working an event which involved collecting money.  When the event had finished, I took the box of money back to wherever it was to be stored.  I held the box in my arms and began rocking it like a baby.  The people with me asked what I was doing.  I told them, “Rock the cash box!”  Yeah, the ones who got it groaned.  The others were like, “Huh?”  Some people just don’t get the hook (even if they should).