I'm So Bored With The USA

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I'm So Bored With The USA is a song by the band The Clash from their first album, The Clash.

With typical early punk briskness, the song uses little more than a hundred words and only 2 minutes 25 seconds of track time to declare the US Army to be composed of heroin addicts, the US dollar to be the supporter of the world's dictators, and criticize the murder rate and political corruption. The song ends with the hope that the USA will be destroyed by a wave from which no one will escape - an apocalyptic and surreal image reminiscent of J.G. Ballard and pre-figuring the band's later London Calling.

Despite its early punk conciseness, probably inspired by The Clash's admiration for The Ramones, and being written at the beginning of The Clash's career, the song also takes time to wryly acknowledge the inescapability of the USA's influence and the irony of singing an anti-US song in an American-created idiom like rock.

The song was almost certainly the first classic song the Clash would write and the first example of the way politics would be important in their music: the documentary Westway to the World tells the story that Joe Strummer took an existing song about another band member being bored with his girlfriend and turned it into a political anthem at his first practice session with The Clash.

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