Uploaded April 2018 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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"The Magnificent Seven" is a song and single by the English punk rock band the Clash. It was the third single from their fourth album Sandinista!. It reached number 34 on the UK Singles Chart.

The song was inspired by old school hip hop acts from New York City, like the Sugarhill Gang and Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five. Rap was still a new and emerging music genre at the time, and the band, especially Mick Jones, was very impressed with it, so much so that Jones took to carrying a boombox around and got the nickname "Whack Attack". The song was recorded in April 1980 at Electric Lady Studios in New York City, built around a funky bass loop played by Norman Watt-Roy of the Blockheads. Joe Strummer wrote the words on the spot, a technique that was also used to create Sandinista!'s other rap track, "Lightning Strikes (Not Once But Twice)".

"The Magnificent Seven" represents the first attempt by a rock band to write and perform original rap music, and one of the earliest examples of hip hop records with political and social content. It is the first major white rap record, predating the recording of Blondie's "Rapture" by six months. Strummer said of the group's encounter with hip-hop:


Metropolis is a 1927 German expressionist science-fiction drama film directed by Fritz Lang. Written by Thea von Harbou, with collaboration from Lang himself, it starred Gustav Fröhlich, Alfred Abel, Rudolf Klein-Rogge and Brigitte Helm. Erich Pommer produced it in the Babelsberg Studios for Universum Film A.G. (Ufa). The silent film is regarded as a pioneering work of the science-fiction genre in movies, being among the first feature-length movies of the genre. Filming took place over 17 months in 1925-26 at a cost of over five million Reichsmarks.

Made in Germany during the Weimar Period, Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and follows the attempts of Freder, the wealthy son of the city's master, and Maria, a saintly figure to the workers, to overcome the vast gulf separating the classes of their city, and bring the workers together with Joh Fredersen, the master of the city. The film's message is encompassed in the final inter-title: "The Mediator Between the Head and the Hands Must Be the Heart".

Metropolis was met with a mixed reception upon release. Critics found it pictorially beautiful and visually powerful – the film's art direction by Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut and Kurt Vollbrecht draws influence from Bauhaus, Cubist and Futurist design, along with touches of the Gothic in the scenes in the catacombs, the cathedral and Rotwang's house – and lauded its complex special effects, but accused its story of naiveté. H. G. Wells described the film as "silly", and The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction calls the film's story "trite" and its politics "ludicrously simplistic". The film's alleged Communist message was also criticized.