Gang Of Four - Entertainment!

Almost 500 posts into this leviathan and the words "Gang of Four" not yet uttered?! What is this Satanic transgression?! Herein my attempt to right the wrongs, the carnal sins of this blog with a burnt offering of Entertainment!

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David Fricke wrote in the Rolling Stone: Entertainment! isn't just the best debut album by a British band – punk or otherwise – since the original English release of The Clash in 1977. Nor is it simply a fierce, emotionally taut dramatization of youth's loss of innocence as seen through the clouded lens of neo-Marxist dogma and ambitiously obscure free verse. Stripped of its own pretensions and the burden of sociopolitical relevance forced on it by a knee-jerk leftist English music press, Entertainment! is a passionate declaration of discontent by four rock & roll agents provocateurs naive enough to believe they can move the world with words and music. It's also the first real political partying record since the MC5's booty-shaking 1969 broadside, Kick Out the Jams.

The power, the glory and the paradox of the Gang of Four's mission on Entertainment! is neatly, if unconsciously, capsulized in the last line of "5.45," a typically kinetic dance tract about television news. "Guerrilla war struggle is a new entertainment," rails Jon King in demagogic sing-speak set against a wall of Gatling-gun guitar chords and snowballing bass and drum patterns. Contracted to two of the biggest corporations in the music business (EMI in Britain, Warner Bros. in America), the Gang of Four undoubtedly fancy themselves cultural guerrillas based in the heart of the beast, using its oppressive but efficient offices to issue an encouraging revolutionary word.

Like their namesakes (the four top Communist officials purged from the party in China's post-Mao upheaval), the Gang of Four have drawn scorn from their more extremist New Wave brethren in England for their ties with major labels. The charge, of course, is that mass-marketing dollars spent on behalf of an LP as radical (even in rock & roll terms) as Entertainment! merely reduces both the album and its message to just that: entertainment–no different from a Beatles reissue or the latest Doobie Brothers release.

Yet this is exactly the level on which Entertainment! is most effective and the Gang of Four most subversive. Guerrillas they may be, with weighty political statements to make, but vocalist Jon King, guitarist Andy Gill, bassist Dave Allen and drummer Hugo Burnham have also made a damned entertaining record, angst and all. Allen's explosive bass and Burnham's deft command of funk, reggae and revved-up disco meters form a one-two punch whose tactility and musical strength equals that of the Rolling Stones and the Wailers. Gill ignores routine rock-guitar riffing, preferring instead to fire off polyrhythmic volleys of crackling dissonance that have more in common with ex-Dr. Feelgood guitarist Wilko Johnson than Johnny Ramone.

With King ranting in a pronounced British accent against declamatory harmonies, a background of the other three group members, the effect is one of orgasmic dance-floor release. Going into overdrive in a manic James Brown mutation ("Not Great Men") or in their implosive variation on three-chord, Chuck Berry classicism ("I Found That Essence Rare"), the Gang of Four dare you to go wild–if not in the streets, then at your local rock disco. Sure, their lyrical concerns may be the stuff of furrowed brows in dank college coffeehouses (three of the four Gangsters were students at Leeds University). But even the dour rationalizations about love and sex in "Damaged Goods" and "Contract" aren't enough to neutralize the icy sting of Gill's guitar or to snuff out the propulsive blast of the latter tune's ricochet rhythms, which recall the shotgun thrust of Captain Beef-heart's Magic Band on Trout Mask Replica.

There's certainly a fine art to the Gang of Four's grooving. In "Armalite Rifle" (from their 1978 Fast EP, Damaged Goods, issued in America as part of a Fast compilation called Mutant Pop), the band twisted conventional rock & roll basics to subtle advantage. In his solo break, Andy Gill fought Hugo Burnham's steady tempo with a contrapuntal landslide of harmonically contrary chords. Then, in a split-second reversal of roles, Gill kept time with a single repeated note over Burnham's strident acceleration of the beat. The group's latest English 45, "Outside the Trains Don't Run on Time," employs a similar gambit, each musician taking turns holding to the springy Sly Stone pace while the others chip away at it.

Entertainment! features more advanced but no less danceable applications of the rhythmic possibilities in the Gang of Four's backbeat. Not surprisingly, most of them are initiated by Gill. First, he denies the harmony implicit in most rock rhythm-guitar styles by playing everything from one isolated note to a sputtering cough of distortion, all independent from King's austere vocal outline. Then he fortifies the band's pivotal bass-and-drums structure by creating one of his own in a simulated contest of wills. This guy even creates a conflict with himself in the argumentative guitar overdubs of "Guns before Butter."

"At Home He's a Tourist," the group's best recorded work to date, summarizes Gill's innovative approach to his instrument. Barely seconds into Dave Allen and Hugo Burnham's freight-train intro, Gill is furiously punching his strings with random atonal glee, stepping into a severely abbreviated chord progression to punctuate King's vehement observations about ulcers and urban tension. Like Keith Levene in Public Image Ltd., Andy Gill doesn't play the guitar. He uses it as a medium to transmit a new code of rock & roll signals that describe the social and spiritual turmoil at the heart of the Gang of Four's sound.

Often lost in Gill's blitzkrieg is the ghostly chanting of Jon King, who somehow manages a fascinating fusion of John Lydon's Sex Pistols snarl, a conversational drone and a bit of feverish pulpit pounding. But the three-way instrumental debates between Gill, Allen and Burnham are so absorbing that they stand as great rock art without any words at all. At their hardest and heaviest, the Gang of Four can sound like a goose-stepping Led Zeppelin or a lusty Plastic Ono Band. They can just as easily work up a funky Parliament-Funkadelic sweat ("Not Great Men") or slip into a psychotic stream of echoed PiL-like dub to the melancholy refrain of King's melodica ("Ether"). With all this going on, there exists the very real possibility that one can listen–and dance–to Entertainment! without paying much attention to the issues and imagery contained in the lyrics.

That would be unfortunate. "Guns before Butter" should be required listening for Americans, age nineteen and twenty, facing the possibility of a new military draft. The idea of sex as false emotional advertising is heightened by Jon King's bittersweet readings of "Natural's Not in It" and "Damaged Goods." And in "Anthrax," Andy Gill's orgy of introductory feedback is the cue for a discussion between King, who likens love to a cattle disease, and Gill, who explains why the Gang of Four don't sing about love like everybody else. "These groups and singers," Gill says like a student reading his homework in front of the class, "think they appeal to everyone singing about love because apparently everyone has or can love or so they would have you believe anyway...."

The Gang of Four would have you believe that the body politic is a higher authority than the body physical. But the exclamation point on Entertainment! suggests they really know better. All revolution and no rhythm makes their more radical British peers (the terminally eclectic Pop Group and the sub-Ramonesish, reactionary Crass) extremely dull entities. A brilliant, ferocious dance band, the Gang of Four have something to say, and they say it best with body language. These musicians may not change your mind, but they'll definitely grab your attention.

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