The Jam's first two LPs, In the City and This Is The Modern World, were full of powerful street images, fire and skill, but the group were celebrating the images, not the streets. They are a reactionary group in that their musical dreams lie in a golden rock past—schoolboy dreams….

The peculiarities of the Jam are Paul Weller's. He's a prickly auto-didact…. [He] still hears the great era of rock lyric writing as the 60's, Pete Townshend and Ray Davies, social relevance wth Mod nonchalance. (p. 43)

I ask Paul Weller if he will run out of things to say, exhaust the experience—dreary youth—that still informs his songs, but he takes himself seriously, doesn't value spontaneity anyway. All Mod Cons, the Jam's third LP, is a wonderfully clever record, particularly when you hear through its Mod artifacts and references, scattered about like debris from a party that went on too long. It's a record about disillusion, Weller's success songs, weariness/wariness at the top and all that. And, more powerfully, it's a record about the vacant heart of crowd culture, the teenage apathy that is the other side of the coin of rock's community. The Jam's best street song is here: "Down At The Tube Station At Midnight," a sour slab of London violence, tight and vengeful, skins and fascists, Dr. Marten's apocalypse. The truth is that the other punks, the Pistols and the Clash, were naive, cheerful, romantic. The Jam, last of the big three, have never been romantic. Love, as Weller says, is about hard work.

Setting Sons, the Jam's new album, is Paul Weller's most ambitious work. It is more diffuse than All Mod Cons, less immediately sharp, but its sophistication, depth, control, could open American ears at last to a classic British group. Weller is using increased artiface—puns and imagery, the Jam orchestra—to explore his sense of waste. The record is packaged, like All Mod Cons, in debris, but literal war relics now, uniforms and spent shells, the sense of victory promise: 1918, 1945, Britain and the land fit for heroes. And it is 1980, every promise long forgotten. People have grown old in work that only made sense if something better came. It didn't.

"Hate the system! What is the system?" the Jam chant, like yobbos and then, on "Eton Rifles" tell us, as Weller takes on punk populism and marvels, mockingly, at a class consciousness that struts through the streets in safety pins. The punks, at long last, take on the nobs (on the playing fields of Eton). They find out what the Jam knew all along: in this sort of cultural clash, ruling class wit will always win. The kids troop back to Slough, and the Jam's new music has got the mood just right. Britain is swinging into the 80's with a government which is calling on folk memories of patriotism and promise and adjusting us to the sharpest decline in the standard of ordinary living we have ever known. Waste indeed, the move is from punk refusal to the Mod sense of fate. (pp. 43, 61)