Gang of Four's Entertainment!

ENTERTAINMENT!

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Forthcoming in the series:

Smile by Luis Sanchez

Biophilia by Nicola Dibben

Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha

The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild

Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Mike Foley

Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy

Live Through This by Anwyn Crawford

Donuts by Jordan Ferguson

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves

Dangerous by Susan Fast

Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven

Blank Generation by Pete Astor

Sigur Ros: ( ) by Ethan Hayden

and many more …

Track Listing

Side One

“Ether”

—3:52

“Natural’s Not in It”

—3:09

“Not Great Men”

—3:08

“Damaged Goods”

—3:29

“Return the Gift”

—3:08

“Guns Before Butter”

—3:49

Side Two

“I Found That Essence Rare”

—3:09

“Glass”

—2:32

“Contract”

—2:42

“At Home He’s a Tourist”

—3:33

“5.45”

—3:48

“Anthrax”

—4:23

•

Contents

Acknowledgments x

Introduction 1
Keyword #1: Keywords 23
Keyword #2: Ideology 29
“Ether”/“Guns Before Butter”

Keyword #3: Nature 51
“Natural’s Not in It”/“Contract”

Keyword #4: Theory 69
“Not Great Men”/“Glass”

Keyword #5: Alienation 87
“At Home He’s a Tourist”/“5.45”

Keyword #6: Consumer 100
“Return the Gift”/“I Found That Essence Rare”

104

Keyword #7: Sex 117
“Damaged Goods”/“Anthrax”

121

Conclusion: An Apology; an Epiphany

136

•

Acknowledgments

I’m grateful for the cooperation of the original four

band members—Andy Gill, Jon King, Dave Allen, and

Hugo Burnham—who each met with me to discuss

Entertainment! and answer my questions. I hope that this

small book can in some measure repay the great pleasure

their music has given me. Thanks are due, as well, to

two of my colleagues in the Department of English at

Pomona College, Jonathan Lethem and Joe Jeon, who

read an early version of the proposal for this book, and

helped to make it much stronger. Finally, my thanks to

the good people at Bloomsbury—David Barker, who

picked me, and Ally Jane Grossan, who helped me across

the finish line.

•

Introduction

When I’m pressed (as one sometimes is), Gang of Four

is the band I avow my favorite of all time. Certainly they

played the best show I’ve ever seen, at the 200-seat—

or, rather, 200-standing—U.C. Davis Coffee House on

November 9, 1980. (When I spoke with him, drummer

Hugo Burnham even claimed to remember that gig—

just being polite, perhaps.) It was my second senior year

(that’s a long story that polite people don’t ask me about),

and since Gang of Four was coming to campus, they

were being played pretty heavily on KDVS, the campus

radio station. I found what I heard thrilling—intoxi-

cating—and went to the local record store to buy the

album, Entertainment!

All I remember now of that concert, at this distance

of more than three decades, is Andy Gill’s searing,

aggressive, spare guitar playing, alongside Jon King’s

flat, affectless singing and haunting melodica—and the

fact that the lead singer, guitarist, and bass player were

careening around the small stage and caroming off one

another like molecules in an overheated vessel, in a

way that seemed unscripted, unpredictable, and fright-

ening. Forget The Clash: it was pretty clear to me that

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this was The Only Band That Mattered. I still think

Entertainment! (1979) is one of the most consistently

great rock albums ever recorded; at their best, Gill,

King, Dave Allen (bass), and Hugo Burnham were able

to wed throbbing, angry music that propelled your body

to sophisticated lyrical content that played and replayed

in your mind. (And misplayed, but more on that later.)

Side Two, Track Four,

“At Home He’s a Tourist”:

could

there be a better 3½-minute introduction to the Marxist

concept of alienation? But you don’t feel like you’re

listening to a lecture; if these were mini-Marxist soap

operas, they were leavened with a late-punk post-funk

beat, and a narrative and linguistic sophistication and

ambiguity that belied any charges of “vulgar” Marxism.

On Entertainment!, if only unevenly thereafter, Gang of

Four embodied the George Clinton/P-Funk dictum,

“free your mind and your ass will follow” (as well as its

waggish, chiasmic corollary: “free your ass …”). King and

Gill, ideologists-in-chief, were there to free your mind:

but your ass, my friend, belonged to the rhythm section

of Burnham and Allen.

In his recent book on Talking Heads’ Fear of Music

for the 33

⅓ series—another 1979 album, as fate would

have it—my colleague and good friend Jonathan Lethem

returns regularly to the figure of “the boy in his room,”

15 years old, trying to make sense of that album and—by

means of that album—to articulate himself to himself and

understand his world. I’m a bit of a slow study but the

following year, though it was my second senior year of

college, I was doing the same thing with Entertainment!: in

my case, it was the boy in the studio apartment, and he’d

just turned 21. When Jonathan and I recently listened

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

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together to Entertainment!, he remarked how powerfully

it recalled to him his freshman year at Bennington. For

that 15-year-old boy had finished high school, left his

room, and gone off to college, and Entertainment! was

already there, waiting for him; whereas I got to college

and had to wait four full years for the record to arrive,

to find me—and, musically, those years of waiting were

pretty fallow ones. Somehow the “dorm records” of my

years as an underclassman—Steve Miller’s Fly Like an

Eagle, Frampton Comes Alive, and the mellow tones of

Boz Scagg’s Silk Degrees in 1976, followed by Fleetwood

Mac’s Rumors and the soundtrack for Saturday Night

Fever in 1977, and Billy Joel’s 52nd Street in 1978—didn’t

move me. I arrived at college as a pre-med, dammit, and

I had important things to do. And nothing that I was

hearing wafting through the hallways sounded remotely

like a siren’s call.

Meanwhile, of course, there was a riot goin’ on: I’m

not sure when it happened, exactly, but apparently punk

broke. It certainly hadn’t happened as of the summer of

76, at least outside of London and New York; and then,

suddenly, it was for all intents and purposes left for dead

at the Sex Pistols’ last gig at Winterland on January 14,

1978. So that if you lived in the suburbs, and sneezed—or

had just started college (check), fallen in love (check),

discovered dope (check)—you could easily have missed

it. What Simon Reynolds writes of his own experience

in Rip It Up and Start Again goes double for me: “Punk

bypassed me almost completely at first.”

Like Reynolds, I never knew (in Gina Arnold’s defiant

phrase) “punk in the present tense.” I was a middle-class

white kid from the Southern California suburbs—but even

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coming to it belatedly as I did, punk still mostly scared the

shit out of me. I vividly remember sitting in my friend Ian’s

living room to watch the Sex Pistols play Saturday Night

Live on December 17, 1977, home for Christmas break

from college, a week before my nineteenth birthday.

Perhaps you already know how this story turns out: turns

out Ian and I weren’t the only ones scared by punk, and

the Pistols were denied visas to enter the United States

two days before the broadcast. At the last minute a knock-

kneed nerd named Elvis Costello was hustled on to take

their place. We’d never heard of him … and had never

heard or seen anything like him. (Apparently assuming

the scheduling snafu was the fault of Pistols’ manager

Malcolm McLaren, Elvis’s drummer Pete Thomas wore

a t-shirt reading, “THANKS MALC”—which merely

compounded our excited confusion.)

After an unsettling performance of “Watching the

Detectives” during the broadcast’s first half-hour, Elvis

launched into “Less Than Zero” to close the show—only

to bring the song to an abrupt halt. This was Saturday

Night Live, after all, even if we were watching it on tape

delay in Pacific Standard Time. Articulating clearly, even

fussily, Elvis sang: “Calling Mr. Oswald with the swastika

tattoo / There is a vacancy waiting in the….” In the—in

the what? That opening line I could make out well enough,

even if its meaning, on first listen, remained opaque; but

in the middle of the second line (before arriving at the

phrase “English voodoo,” which would have been utterly

Not quite 30 seconds into the broadcast, John Belushi (in character)

tells Laraine Newman, “I plan to be dead by 30.” Somehow he made

it to 33, if not quite 33

⅓, but it’s chilling today to hear him say it.

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

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impenetrable), Elvis turned to his band, waved his arms,

shouted, “Stop! Stop!,” and turned back to address the

audience. “I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen: there’s no

reason to do that song here.” His band The Attractions

stopped playing mid-phrase, with suspicious precision;

E.C. and the band then swerved into an impeccably tight

“spontaneous” version of “Radio, Radio,” a song NBC

had expressly forbidden them to play. I want to bite the

hand that feeds me, indeed: Elvis was, as a result, slapped

with a lifetime ban from Saturday Night Live (only to

return on probation in 1989). What a punk!

Something had just happened, though like Mr. Jones

in Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” Ian and I didn’t

know precisely what it was. Like many in Elvis’s American

audience, we instinctively equated “Mr. Oswald” with

Mr. Lee Harvey of Dallas, and the menace of Elvis’s

demeanor and the urgency of his address seemed to

be jabbing violently at America’s most appalling open

wound. Never mind that the song was actually about

Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists:

not only did we not know this, but on some level

Elvis knew and reveled in the fact that we would not,

almost could not, have known this. “Mr. Oswald”? Who,

conceivably, would have addressed Oswald Mosley this

way? It would be like referring to Ronald Reagan as

“Mr. Ronald.” Our confusion, that is to say, is built into

the song, part of its DNA. Elvis, in a word, was fucking

with us.

Elvis’s debut LP My Aim Is True had been released

in July 1977 in the United Kingdom, but wouldn’t be

available from Columbia Records in the United States

until March of the following year. So Ian and I went

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•

down to the Licorice Pizza in Tarzana, California the

following Monday morning and bought the import on

Stiff Records—all 33 glorious minutes of it. The 1970s

had finally produced some music it could be proud of;

Kevin was a punk rocker now.

* * *

A century earlier, British cultural arbiters and Oxbridge

dons Walter Pater and Matthew Arnold were wrestling,

albeit covertly, over “the function of criticism at the

present time”—and, more urgently, about how criticism

ought to be done. For the rationalist Arnold, hoping to

hold onto some of the cultural prestige that literature

was rapidly ceding to the sciences, the goal was simple

and sounded scientifically precise: “to see the object as

in itself it really is,” as he proclaims in an 1862 essay.

While pretending to agree, Pater introduced a crucial

qualification, and thereby turned the whole argument

on its head—performed a sort of proto-Situationist

détournement, to invoke a context important for Gang of

Four. “In aesthetic criticism,” Pater wrote in the preface

to his 1873 Studies in the History of the Renaissance, “the

first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to

know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate

it, to realize it distinctly.”

It’s tempting to say that Arnold

was arguing for an objective mode of criticism, Pater a

subjective. But an avowedly subjective response to the

work of art, such as Pater’s famous evocation of the

Mona Lisa—“like the vampire, she has been dead many

times, and learned the secrets of the grave”

—would

have been indefensible. Instead, Pater nominally agreed

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

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that objectivity is indeed the goal of all criticism worthy

of the name: he merely (merely!) shifted the object of

criticism from the thing in the world to the thing in

the head, from Kant’s Ding an sich (“thing in itself”)

to his Erscheinung (“phenomenon”). The moral and

ethical imperative of aesthetic criticism then becomes

the fastidious description of one’s object “as in itself it

really is”—as manifest through one’s sensual experience

of it. We are after all, as Kate Bush was so much later to

insist, living in the sensual world.

When it comes to writing about rock & roll, Pater is

infinitely more useful than Arnold (never mind that both

would have heartily disapproved of the very project).

Critics and readers are no longer very interested in the

object, but one’s object; or, as we say in American, my

object. Not (for instance) Emily Dickinson, “as in herself

she really is,” but poet Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson

(1985); and not Gang of Four’s Entertainment! but my

Entertainment!—or Gang of Four’s Entertainment! for

purposes of my entertainment, and yours.

There are some elements of my Entertainment!

that aren’t, in Matthew Arnold’s sense, part of

Entertainment!—but I’ll be exploring them here anyway.

To wit: Entertainment! wasn’t made for Anglophiles;

it was made by Angles, to be sure, three university

kids from Leeds and a bass player they found via an

advert, and implicitly made for a British audience. But

I consciously listened to the record, just as I’d tuned in

for the Sex Pistols and been terrorized by Elvis Costello,

as an American lover of all things British and Irish—

and that investment powerfully shaped the album that

I heard. Just how serious was that investment? In our

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eleventh-grade English literature class, Ian and I had

done our semester project and presentation on … Yes.

The British progressive-rock band Yes. I don’t remember

what we said; I can’t imagine what we could possibly have

said. I don’t think now I could eke out a 33

⅓ book on

all the Yes albums combined. (I do however remember

that we spent a great deal of time and money making

Kodachrome slides of those far-out Roger Dean album

covers.) When I think of the albums that I took away to

college with me in 1976, I don’t recall a single American

artist in the mix: Neil Young was as close as I got, and

everyone knew that, even though he was living in Laurel

Canyon (just miles from my childhood home), he was

really a Canadian. And besides, as he proudly sang of his

adopted Southern California home, “everybody knows

this is nowhere.”

Spinning on my turntable, then, Entertainment! wasn’t

just a British album: it was a British album devoured by

a suburban American kid with a hard-on for all things

British. But not just any suburban American kid, either.

I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, the oldest child

of a second-generation German immigrant father from

Queens, N.Y. and an Ulster girl fresh off the boat—

one who had turned down a scholarship to Queen’s

University, Belfast, having grown up a British army brat

in Malaya, India, Egypt, England, and Northern Ireland.

Put all those accents in a bag together and shake. One

thing I can tell you for sure: it’s still no preparation for

decoding the strident mumblings of art students from

Leeds. I loved Entertainment! immediately, the first time

I heard it; as the album itself has now passed 33

⅓ years,

however, there are still lines I can’t understand. Nothing

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

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resembling definitive lyrics was available until the 2005

Rhino reissue of the album; even in that package, Andy

Gill’s largely unintelligible lecture on sexual politics

from

“Anthrax,”

though dutifully transcribed, is squir-

reled off in an unlikely corner of the liner notes, where

it took me years to find it. (And anyone who thought

that the version of the song on the

“Damaged Goods”

single might offer help would be sorely disappointed: on

that first recording, as we’ll explore later, Gill’s verse is

entirely different.)

Perhaps in some measure because King’s and Gill’s

warring sets of lyrics render each other practically

incomprehensible, one of postpunk’s most perceptive

critics, Simon Reynolds (along with co-author Joy Press),

badly misread

“Anthrax”

in their 1994 book, The Sex

Revolts. Here’s their take on the song:

With the key image of the lovesick victim as “a beetle
on its back,” this bunch of neo-Marxists seemed to
regard love as a disabling, paralysing force that diverted
energy from the righteous business of political analysis
and activism. The track has two vocalists. One sings,
lamenting his lovelorn addiction; the other speaks in
a dry monotone, dissecting the way love is privileged
in pop. It’s as though Gang of Four regard love as the
twentieth century’s equivalent to religion, Marx’s “opiate
of the people.”

And that’s it. Gang of Four crops up three more times in

the almost 400-page book, always as a kind of shorthand

gesture in Reynolds and Press’s blanket condemnation of

the thoroughgoing misogyny of rock & roll.

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Without wanting to dwell on the song here (we’ll

have plenty of time later), I’ll only quickly suggest that

if read as narrative rather than reportage—if we under-

stand the King lyrics as sung by a character, like one

of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues, and also

recognize in Gill’s mumbled speech a critique of the

King character’s lovesick narcissism—then the song is

in fact diagnosing and critiquing the very ideological

blindness for which Reynolds and Press condemn it.

Thus the song’s target is properly not women, nor does

it voice a fear, as Reynolds and Press suggest, of relation-

ships with women; it argues, instead, that bourgeois

notions of love (especially as expressed in that ideology’s

sublimely reductionist vehicle, the three-minute pop

song), are finally destructive of, rather than conducive to,

true love.

“Anthrax”

isn’t about love, but about love songs;

like The Sex Revolts itself, then,

“Anthrax”

is an explicitly

ideological critique of rock music. This makes it the

spiritual older sibling of Public Image’s “This Is Not a

Love Song,” a track that Reynolds and Press similarly

misinterpret, suggesting that punk “rejected the love

song, and by implication love, as escapist and sentimental.”

Here I’d suggest only that there’s no such implication.

But what can it mean that a band that put so much

emphasis on its songwriting—pop songs as political

theory—actively resisted making that theory more

legible? To the degree that even intelligent and sympa-

thetic critics have sometimes badly misread the work?

One answer—the one I’ve adopted here—involves taking

the mondegreen seriously.

For better or worse, we seem to be stuck with

the term that was coined in 1954 by Sylvia Wright,

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

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in a piece in Harper’s Magazine: which is to say, the

mondegreen is approximately the same age as rock

& roll itself, an altogether fitting coincidence. In her

mother’s recitation of the poem “The Bonnie Earl

of Murray,” Wright as a child misheard the phrase

“laid him on the green” as “Lady Mondegreen” and

wove a coherent narrative around the mistake, or

“mondegreen.”

The phenomenon is familiar, even if

the (somewhat awkward) name is not: another, more

helpful (if even more awkward) description might be

“’Scuse me while I kiss this guy,” the legendary misun-

derstanding of the chorus of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple

Haze.”

This is one of the signature malaises of music in

the age of mechanical reproduction: words that are

unintelligible in a recording often remain unintelligible,

or indeed harden in our memories through multiple

listenings into the misconstrued forms in which we’ve

stored them away. If a line or a word is difficult to

decipher, it remains so through multiple “performances”

of the recording; for, when listening to a song, we hear

what we think it says. If this is true for an American

listener wrestling with American recordings, how much

more so when he’s trying to decipher the diverse regional

accents of the United Kingdom. William S. Burroughs

(and ventriloquized by him, Laurie Anderson) warned

us that language is a virus; but utterance that hovers

at the margins of intelligibility is perhaps even more

seductively virulent. In just over two hundred taut pages,

Dave Marsh tells the secret history of “Louie Louie,”

a story concerned entirely with that song’s unintelligi-

bility: a story that transforms a harmless sea shanty into

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an X-rated ballad along the lines of “Barnacle Bill,” and

thereby into the subject of an extensive FBI investigation.

Marsh closes his story, charmingly, on a conversation

with John Lydon (the erstwhile Johnny Rotten of the

Sex Pistols, and leader of PiL) about the incomprehen-

sibility of Nirvana’s massive 1991 hit “Smells Like Teen

Spirit.” Having studied the song carefully, Marsh is sure

that the chorus opens with the line “Well the lifestyle it

was dangerous” (rather than, “With the lights out it’s less

dangerous”), and that it concludes “with two thoroughly

incomprehensible lines in which he [Cobain] could be

hollering anything: ‘It’s an idol,’ ‘I’m in denial,’ or

‘revival,’ or ‘I’m on vinyl,’ followed by ‘I’m a Beatle’….”

Whereas “everybody knows or else should know,” it’s “A

mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido: yeah.” The

old joke has it that the title of R.E.M.’s debut album

should have been not Murmur, but Mumble: true, so far

as it goes. My argument is that Mumble is a fitting title,

too, for rock & roll’s Greatest Hits compilation. When

Marsh learns the “true” lyrics of “Teen Spirit,” he insists,

“what I imagined was quite a bit better (at least, more

gratifying) than what Nirvana actually sang. The story I

constructed made sense out of both the restless noise the

group created and their own rebellious, self-immolating

posture in the face of fame.”

The real and ever-present danger with Gang of

Four was always their marginal propensity to preach:

rock audiences for the most part don’t appreciate being

lectured to. (Indeed, in Reynolds and Press’s reading of

“Anthrax,”

it’s not difficult to isolate the noise that’s been

created by the band’s press representation as wild-eyed

radicals: “this bunch of neo-Marxists” sounds like a

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

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scolding from Sergeant Joe Friday.) Could the monde-

green represent the listener’s unconscious resistance

to dogma—the way our minds turn something rigid

into something malleable, something the fan can work

with rather than simply obey? A way to make the

experience of listening to rock truly interactive, rather

than simply assimilative? Perhaps the synergy between

my Anglophilia and Jon King’s (or especially Andy Gill’s)

educated British mumbling, created, in my mind at least,

productive ambiguities, the perfect conditions by which

to tease out my own unarticulated (and largely inchoate)

political and cultural agenda. Might the mondegreen

itself, then, be a kind of Rorschach’s inkblot of ideological

critique?

I misheard a good deal of Entertainment!, it turns out,

and those misunderstandings hardened into dogma as I

rehearsed the errors in my head; what’s surprising to me,

though, is how often, even though I had the letter of the

song wrong, I got its spirit just right. A great example

is the closing lines of Entertainment!’s opening track,

“Ether,”

as chanted by Andy Gill: “There may be oil /

Under Rockall.”

I’ll talk about it in more detail in that chapter; without

digging into the details here, I’d only suggest that my

mishearing the line wasn’t simply an error—or, if an

error, a productive and seductive one. Sylvia Wright

insisted that “the point about what I shall hereafter call

mondegreens … is that they are better than the original”;

Dave Marsh maintains that his lyrics to “Smells Like

Teen Spirit” were better than Kurt Cobain’s.

What I

heard at the end of

“Ether”

may not have been what

King and Gill meant, but having my interpretation

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revealed through my misreadings does tell me something

about those places my mind prefers to go. And that is,

precisely, the work of ideological critique: surely King

and Gill would be pleased about where their mumbling

had allowed me to wander.

“Ether”

taught me not, or not

only, about Gang of Four’s politics: more powerfully, it

also taught me about my own.

When I first heard Entertainment! I was not just a

kid, but a college kid: and while I appreciated clever

ironic music, I hadn’t yet developed a way (seemingly

second-nature for most of my students) to consume

music ironically. My friends and I liked “good” music—

challenging music, smart music, “difficult listening” we

used to call it (like Elvis Costello, for instance)—but

we had no mechanism, besides just ignoring it, to deal

with “bad” music. Musical cheese, that is to say, didn’t

exist for us.

If I was going to listen to something, it had

to be important. I’m not sure through what loophole

I grandfathered in Neil Young, but the rest of the

records I carted off to my dorm room had impeccable

aesthetic and intellectual credentials: Genesis (before

Peter Gabriel left, of course)

; Emerson, Lake, and

Palmer; King Crimson; Soft Machine; Gentle Giant;

Van der Graff Generator; the aforementioned Yes. Now,

please: I won’t stoop to defend the high-cultural bona

fides of these bands. Genesis’s 1973 album Selling England

by the Pound, for instance—note the clever Anglophile

In this preference I’m a perfect rock snob, and the polar opposite of

Brett Easton Ellis’s Patrick Bateman, who waxes poetic for an entire

surreal chapter of American Psycho on the sublime pleasures of the

post-Gabriel Genesis (New York: Vintage, 1991, 133–6).

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

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pun!—features a song based on a section of The freakin’

Waste Land, for pity’s sake. Listening to it was practically

like studying for the SAT.

Which goes some way toward explaining another

aspect of Gang of Four’s appeal for me: they were

making college rock before the fact (R.E.M. didn’t drop

Chronic Town, erstwhile harbinger of the genre, until

1982). We wouldn’t have called it college rock back then,

of course; and much as I like the term art punk and

dislike the term postpunk, those rubrics wouldn’t have

been available to us either. Hard-driving new music

like Gang of Four, especially British music, was in our

crude cataloging system either punk or new wave: that

was really the full spectrum of descriptors for what any

of us was listening to. Gang of Four wasn’t new wave:

that was XTC, say, or Talking Heads, or the poppier

bits of the Buzzcocks. For us, perforce, Gang of Four

was punk. But pretty brainy punk: the members of Gang

of Four were actually as smart as Greil Marcus makes

out that Johnny Rotten was. Lipstick Traces, Marcus’s

glorious, obsessive 1989 study, makes some pretty strong

claims for the intellectual pedigree of the Sex Pistols’

wordsmith; whereas in his 1994 memoir, Rotten, Lydon is

quick to disavow the theoretical framework Marcus had

so carefully constructed: “All the talk about the French

Situationists being associated with punk is bollocks. It’s

nonsense! Now that really is coffee-table book stuff.”

Whereas the Situationists were avowedly an

important cultural and artistic touchstone for Gang

of Four. King claims to have learned about the project

of the Situationist International (SI) at the age of 15,

and T. J. Clarke, one of two mainstays of the British

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•

chapter of the SI, came to the art department at Leeds

during Andy and Jon’s junior year. “When we recorded

Entertainment!, Jon recalls, “I was very interested in

Situationism and Andy & I were excited by the ideas

of Foucault & Lacan & behind all this how much of

what we do or think is a construct. Our professor,

the brilliant T. J. Clarke, who later became a friend,

challenged us to deconstruct what we received and hunt

down the meaning within the meaning.”

One aspect of

Situationism that clearly left its mark on Entertainment!

is an anarchic style of verbal play. The character-

istic gesture of Situationist critique is the détournement.

Think of Marcel Duchamp’s moustache on the Mona

Lisa (although it predates the SI by almost four decades):

a flourish by means of which the authoritative voice

of official culture is given a devious turn and made to

articulate its own repressed.

This may sound complicated, but it can be so wonder-

fully simple. For those lucky enough to have cars at my

high school, among the boys at least, it was de rigueur

to get a bumper sticker from the popular Southern

California drive-thru chain In-N-Out Burger, and use

a razor blade to disappear that “B” and terminal “r”: it

seemed both hilarious and true, the way that détourned

sticker gave voice to our deepest hungers. (And when the

first Devo album was released in the summer of 1978,

and KROQ DJ Rodney Bingenheimer [“Rodney on the

ROQ”] put the opening track “Uncontrollable Urge”

into rotation … well, it seemed like fate.)

But rather than restricting themselves to a purely

linguistic métier, the Situationists were at their best

when exploiting the unstable interface between visual

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

•

and verbal culture. Jon is fond of recalling in interviews

an advertising poster defaced during the student riots in

Paris in May 1968—a speech bubble added to the photo-

graph of a model who is made to say, “Je sais que je vous

exploit mais je ne le fais expresse” (“I know I’m exploiting

you but I’m not doing it on purpose”). In the 1960s and

1970s, both the visual arts (owing in large part to the

ubiquity of advertising imagery) and literature (“the

literature of exhaustion”; “the death of the novel”) were

wrestling with traditional claims for the central role of

originality in art. But the cut-and-paste aesthetic of the

Situationists opened up the possibility of throwing words

and images—none of them original, none of them even

“artistic”—into creative collision. For the Situationists

and those artists influenced by them (like Jamie Reid,

designer of the iconic sleeve for the Sex Pistols’ “God

Save the Queen” single), the secondhand nature of

imagery and language constituted not a problem but a

creative resource.

The most powerful evidence of the Situationists’

influence on Gang of Four, fittingly, is right on the

surface: on their record covers. The jacket for the

“Damaged Goods”

single, for instance, released

December 10, 1978, screams out from the bin with its

bold black sans serif title on a deep pink background (the

very design scheme, in fact—and no coincidence, one

suspects—of the famous 1914 modernist little magazine

BLAST). Scrolled around the band’s name, in type not

one-tenth the size, is the clumsily self-referential text,

“the sleeve for a Gang of Four recording of ‘Damaged

Goods,’ ‘Love Like Anthrax,’ and ‘Armalite Rifle.’” That

meta-comment—like the tracked changes in a Microsoft

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•

Word document an author has forgotten to hide—

functions as what German playwright Bertolt Brecht (an

important influence on King and Gill) would have called

an “alienation effect,” rendering opaque the processes by

which the commodity arrives, charmed, into the life of

the consumer.

But it’s the back cover where things get really inter-

esting. In addition to the standard information about

recording place, dates, and personnel, we’re essentially

presented with a mock-up of the cover art: the stock

newspaper photo of a woman matador, and the band’s

instructions for how that image is to be détourned. The

dialogue between matador and bull comes from one of

the seminal episodes in the band’s history. In an early

show in Carlisle, Gang of Four had been preceded

onstage by a comedian telling racist jokes … and a

stripper. The lads had had a bit to drink, and became

somewhat boisterous backstage, criticizing the bad faith

of these two performers. It turned out the stripper was

beyond shaming, however, and gave back as good as

she got—a small lecture on the realpolitik of the sex

industry: “You know, we’re both in the entertainment

business, we have to give the audience what they want.

I don’t like to do this but I earn double the amount if

I were in a 9 to 5 job.” Entertainment! The stripper’s

glib use of the word came as a revelation: it gave their

first LP its title, of course, and its loose application to

cover over a host of miseries suggests its use in

“5.45”

“Guerilla war struggle is a new entertainment.” (The

band’s highlighting it would seem, as well, to have set

Paul Weller off on a train of thought resulting in The

Jam’s 1980 song “That’s Entertainment.”)

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

•

According to the band’s art direction, the bull was to

be given lines of his own—he’s unwilling to subscribe

to the stripper’s rationalizations, and his position is

essentially the band’s own: “I think at some point we

have to take responsibility for our actions.” To subject

the newspaper photo of a female torero to this kind

of détournement—including retaining the paper’s own

fatuous tagline, “Olé! The feminine touch from Senorita

Maribel”—models the kind of active participation in

consumer society preached by the Situationists, an active

intervention in the passive society of the spectacle.

In fact, though, the single’s back cover goes one step

further, one degree more “meta”: it doesn’t perform the

détournement so much as describe the act of performing

it—a détournement of the détournement, if you will.

Compared to this dizzying mise en abyme, the famously

polemical cover for the Entertainment! LP is actually less

sophisticated. The single’s blushing deep pink has flared

up into a ridiculously oversaturated, deeply embarrassed

red, in an almost tongue-in-cheek reference to the

band’s vaunted Marxism. The front is emblazoned with

the band’s name in all-cap block letters, a legacy from

the single, printed in hi-contrast cyan to make the eyes

throb; the album title declares itself quietly in burnished

gold lower-case, raked at a jaunty angle, asserted with

that faintly ironic exclamation point. Along the right

side, a sequence of frames from a Belgian “cowboys and

Indians” movie is repurposed to point a moral about

the predations of late capitalism: “The Indian smiles, he

thinks that the cowboy is his friend. The cowboy smiles,

he is glad the Indian is fooled. Now he can exploit him.”

In form and content, this resembles the détourned comic

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strips so beloved by the Parisian student revolutionaries

of May 1968; whiting out the actors’ faces adds to the

defamiliarizing effect, but serves as well a more practical

purpose, as Jon King explained to me—it calmed worries

in some quarters about copyright infringement. The back

cover extends the critique to the nuclear family. “I spend

most of our money on myself,” the patriarch announces,

unembarrassed, “so that I can stay fat”; “we’re grateful

for his leftovers,” wife and kids reply. As another caption

artlessly announces, “Those who decide what everyone

will do grow rich because the decisions are made in

their interest. They are pleased at how well they rule the

others. The others smile too, thinking that their rulers

know best.” That is to say, the cover as a whole, front and

back, presents the album as a Situationist comic book.

* * *

Part of my argument about Gang of Four’s Entertainment!

is that its intermittent incomprehensibility has strategic

importance: that the mondegreen is a figure for drawing

the listener into the song, insisting that he confess just

what it is that he hears. For more than three decades

now, I’ve been trying, periodically, to make sense of this

album, even as it continues to make sense of me. For

mondegreens force us to confront ourselves, to come

clean with regard to our own hidden agendas. As he has

so often on a wide range of subjects, Brian Eno hits the

nail on the head: “The important thing about lyrics is not

exactly what they say, but that they lead you to believe

they are saying something. All the best lyrics I can think

of, if you question me about them, I don’t know what

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

•

they’re saying, but somehow they’re very evocative. It

leaves a space in which the listener can project his or her

own meaning into.”

So if a rock or pop song is going to succeed in a

political aim, my argument is that it’s best served by

performing, rather than preaching, its politics. It must

dramatize the process of political analysis—force its

listeners into making choices wherein our most deeply

held political beliefs are revealed in the cold light of

day.

“Calling Mr. Oswald with the swastika tattoo / There

is a vacancy waiting in the….” In the what? In the

murmur; in the mumble; in the mondegreen. There’s a

vacancy waiting in that mondegreen. Go ahead: fill it.

Notes

My conversations with each of the band members have

influenced, in ways large and small and sometimes difficult

to single out, my analysis of the album. Interviews were

conducted with each member of the band that recorded

Entertainment!: Hugo Burnham, in Boston, on January

6, 2013; Dave Allen, in Portland, Oregon, on March 8,

2013; Jon King, in London, on May 28, 2013; and Andy

Gill, in London, on May 28, 2013. Quotations attributed

to the band members that carry no other citation are

taken from these interviews.

Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk

1978–1984 (New York: Penguin, 2005), ix.

Matthew Arnold, “On Translating Homer” (1862),

Lecture II, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew

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•

Arnold, ed. Robert H. Super (Ann Arbor: University

of Michigan Press, 1960–77), I, 40.

Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry,

The 1893 Text, ed. Donald L. Hall (Berkeley and Los

Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), xix.

Pater, The Renaissance, 99.

Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts:

Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ’n’ Roll (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1995), 47.

Reynolds and Press, The Sex Revolts, 46; emphasis

added.

“The Death of Lady Mondegreen,” Harper’s

Magazine, 209 (1254) (November 1954), 48–51.

Dave Marsh, Louie Louie: The History and Mythology

of the World’s Most Famous Rock ’n’ Roll Song (New

York: Hyperion, 1993), 205.

Marsh,

Louie Louie, 206.

Wright, “The Death of Lady Mondegreen,” 49.

On this, see Kevin J. H. Dettmar and William Richey,

“Musical Cheese: The Appropriation of Seventies

Music in Nineties Movies,” Reading Rock & Roll:

Authenticity, Appropriation, Aesthetics, ed. K. J. H.

Dettmar and W. Richey (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1999), 311–26.

John Lydon, with Keith and Kent Zimmerman,

Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs (New York:

Picador, 1994), 3.

Robin Murray, “Gang of Four Track by Track.”

http://www.clashmusic.com/feature/gang-of-four-

track-by-track (accessed June 5, 2013).

http://musicthoughts.com/t/79 (accessed August 22,

2013).

•

Keyword #1: Keywords

In one respect, each of the songs that makes up

Entertainment! is what journalists call a “think piece”: the

music may be built on a groove, but the song grows out

of the band—three university students and what political

theorist Antonio Gramsci would have called an “organic

intellectual,” Dave Allen—wrestling with a problem or

concept or insight. This is high-concept rock, which

thrilled a college-student listener like me: everyday

problems analyzed with the rigor of political and cultural

theory, but approached inductively, even intuitively—

neither deductively nor reductively. The messiness of the

real-world case studies always took priority: theory was

made to prove its worth in the arena of real life. Greil

Marcus gets at this element of the music of Gang of Four

and other postpunk bands: “The difference was, with

each of these groups you could hear people thinking,

trying to figure things out, as you listened to their songs.

It was as though they were talking to themselves, and

at the same time trying to speak to other people. It was

tremendously exciting.”

Their approach to cultural analysis may have been

inductive, but it was not naïve. As a result, there is a

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•

handful of key concepts from cultural theory, Marxist

and otherwise, that will come in handy in our exploration

of the record. I’ll be interposing a series of brief inter-

chapters, then, and these “Keyword” entries will serve to

introduce background material that will be used in the

ensuing discussion of particular Entertainment! tracks.

On the upside, this will help us to move a bit more deftly

through consideration of the songs, with theoretical

concepts laid out in advance. The downside risk is

that this organization might suggest that the members

of Gang of Four were narrowly serious theory-heads,

viewing the world exclusively through the distorting lens

of arid and academic political theory.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In the music

of Gang of Four, theory and praxis are synergistic to a

degree rarely seen in popular music. Lived experience

presented problems for analysis; political and cultural

theory provided a powerful framework for standing

outside one’s own experience and viewing it from a fresh

perspective. Theory, that is to say, suggested fruitful

lines of questioning, rather than providing definitive

answers. As Andy Gill wrote me in response to a question

about the band’s grounding in British Marxist theory,

“I remember thinking, as I often do with writers who

announce themselves first and foremost as committed

socialists [like hobsbawm for ex.], maybe the cart is being

put before the horse.”

In prefacing my chapters on

album tracks with short bits of theoretical background,

then, I hope not to be putting the cart before the horse

myself—or suggesting that Gang of Four did.

The term keyword was popularized by British Marxist

literary critic Raymond Williams in his 1976 book

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Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. The work of

Williams and others was an important presence in the art

department at Leeds in the mid-1970s, and Gill and King

confirm that they were familiar with Williams’s writing

during the period of Entertainment!’s gestation. Adopting

a keywords approach to the intellectual backgrounds of

Entertainment!, then, isn’t simply convenient—it’s also

historically accurate.

Keywords, as Williams explores them, are those most

common and everyday words that through their diverse

and sometimes contradictory meanings (both denotative

and connotative) disguise the covert work of ideology.

They’re the words by which we avoid saying the things

that “go without saying,” thereby keeping the politics of

everyday life under the radar—unarticulated, silent, and

invisible. Keywords, Williams writes, “indicate, power-

fully but not explicitly, some central formation of values.”

Keywords are powerful not just for what they allow us to

say, but for what they enable us to see: they are “particular

formations of meaning—ways not only of discussing but

at another level of seeing many of our central experi-

ences” (15). Implicit here is the belief, widely accepted in

academic circles, that language never merely describes,

but in important ways creates, or constructs, our everyday

reality: language is not a transparent plane of glass that

allows us unmediated access to the reality it designates

(cf. the Entertainment! track

“Glass”

), but instead, as

the Apostle Paul wrote, a glass through which we now

see only darkly. “Some important social and historical

processes,” Williams insists, “occur within language” (22).

Furthermore, we have no means to analyze and

critique the problems of everyday life other than through

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•

discourse and language—but the discourse we choose,

the language we use, is always going to participate to

some degree in those very problems. And this is not

a liability only of certain coercive forms of language,

such as the doublespeak of George Orwell’s Nineteen

Eighty-Four, but a quality, to varying degrees, of all

language: “the variations and confusions of meaning

are not just faults in a system, or errors of feedback, or

deficiencies of education,” Williams writes. “They are in

many cases, in my terms, historical and contemporary

substance” (24).

It’s important as well not to conflate keywords with

jargon. Because Gang of Four was powerfully influ-

enced by the insights of Marxist theory, especially in

its British variety, they’ve long been saddled with that

slightly misleading label; the title of one live bootleg

recording that can be found on the Internet, for instance,

is Anthrax Marxists. Not all keywords are jargon—but

some certainly are. Some are terms in common usage,

like alienation and ideology, although they have a particular

meaning within Marxism; others, like hegemony, for all

intents and purposes only live within that discourse. But

a handful of these terms are truly essential for purposes

of looking at the band, and the way they looked at the

world, and with a bit of attentiveness we’ll use them

when appropriate here. As Williams writes of keywords

in general, “they are significant, binding words in certain

activities and their interpretation; they are significant,

indicative words in certain forms of thought” (15).

Not to get too clever too early on, but one further

reason that keywords are so important in thinking about

Entertainment! is precisely because on the album, words

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•

are so key. I don’t mean this in the most obvious

sense: in all songwriting, of course, some mind must

be paid to the lyrical content, even if that content is

sometimes painfully banal (The Beatles’ “Ob-La-Di,

Ob-La-Da,” The Police’s “De Do Do Do, De Da Da

Da,” Hanson’s “MMMBop”). But on Entertainment!, the

words—individual words, even particles, even preposi-

tions—are doing very specific work. Even when, as we’ll

have occasion to examine, those very precise words are

very badly misunderstood by an audience. I’m tempted

to claim that not a word’s out of place on the album, not

a word is superfluous—though that’s probably going a bit

far. But it would be hard to overestimate the care given

to songcraft on the record, and the songs will repay our

careful attention.

The 1983 revised edition of Williams’s Keywords

contains 155 entries, including six I’ll be drawing on

in crafting my own Keyword chapters to set up discus-

sions of song pairs from Entertainment!: “ideology,”

“nature,” “theory,” “alienation,” “consumer,” and “sex.”

If you’re in a rush, or don’t feel like a lecture, you can

certainly skip them: the book hangs together without

them. But wouldn’t you always wonder what you’d

missed?

Notes

Paul Lester, Gang of Four: Damaged Gods. A Biography

(London: Omnibus, 2008), 90. Subsequent refer-

ences cited parenthetically in the text.

Andy Gill, email to the author, June 14, 2013.

•

Keyword #2: Ideology

On one level, Entertainment! is an experiment in the

musical demystification of the politics of everyday life, its

project precisely to unmask the ideology of our simplest

social interactions. As bassist Dave Allen put it, “Gang of

Four were about politics with a small ‘p’—the stuff that

affects your daily life. Not party politics. Although I do

like to party” (Lester, 17). [Rim shot.]

As Williams demonstrates in Keywords, the word

“ideology” itself harbors deeply contradictory meanings.

For cultural conservatives, “ideology” is the label affixed

to the left’s political agenda, and “ideologue” to its

blinkered adherents; but for the left, and left-leaning

intellectuals like Gill and King, ideology is the hidden

fabric of everyday life itself. From this perspective, every

act is ideological: one can acknowledge the fact openly

and engage in critique, as Gang of Four consistently

does, or one can deny the ideological underpinnings of

one’s own position—a stance, the left would argue, that

is itself deeply ideological (see “Keyword #3: Nature,”

pp. 51–4). But there is no permanent and secure position

outside of ideological mystification: any point of vantage

is gained only with great labor, and remains tentative,

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•

tenuous. The Solid Gold track “Why Theory?” opens

on the ideological question of questions: “We all have

opinions / Where do they come from?” To answer that

question, and to understand what (largely unremarked)

work those opinions do in the larger cultural economy, is

the goal of ideological critique.

The most elementary definition of ideology is

probably the well-known phrase from Karl Marx’s Das

Kapital (1854): “Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es” (“they

do not know it, but they are doing it”).

At base, then,

ideology functions as a kind of intellectual autopilot:

the ideological subject is a zombie, her behaviors and

reactions dictated by voices she has so entirely inter-

nalized that she can no longer even hear them. This

unconscious or semi-conscious subject is a distinctly

modern construction. French intellectual historian

Michel Foucault dubbed both Marx and Sigmund Freud

“founders of discursivity”; the two are for Foucault

not mere examples of this class of thinker, but the only

examples he adduces in his celebrated 1969 essay “What

Is an Author?”

These two late-nineteenth-/early-

twentieth-century thinkers “produced not only their own

works,” Foucault explains, “but the possibility and the

rules of formation of other texts. In this sense, their role

differs entirely from that of a novelist, for example, who

is basically never more than the author of his own text.”

Marx and Freud, then, are two writers whose thought

fundamentally changed the rules by which the game

is played. And on one point (if few others) the two

agree: the modern subject goes about his daily life in a

state of (at best) semi-consciousness. For Freud, it’s the

repression of unconscious memories that prevents the

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

•

subject from being fully present to himself; for Marx, it’s

ideology. Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels put it this

way: “Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called

thinker consciously indeed but with a false consciousness.

The real motives impelling him remain unknown to

him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process

at all.”

“The very concept of ideology,” Slavoj Žižek

writes, “implies a kind of basic, constitutive naïveté: the

misrecognition of its own presuppositions, of its own

effective conditions, a distance, a divergence between

so-called social reality and our distorted representation,

our false consciousness of it.”

In other words, they do not know it, but they are

doing it. The typical protagonist of a Gang of Four song

suffers from precisely this kind of ablated consciousness,

a nagging sense of unease without any inkling of its

source: along with Thomas Kinsella’s Nightwalker, he

confesses “I only know things seem and are not good.”

classical Marxist thought, ideology is the means by which

the ruling classes perpetuate their class interests: by

popularizing a species of false consciousness among the

working classes, by consistently disguising the powerful

interests that are served by the status quo. “Ideologists,”

Marx and Engles write in The German Ideology, “make

the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their

chief source of livelihood” (quoted in Williams, 155–6).

Now the popular image of a guy who uses the word

“ideology” is that he’s a bit of a bore: a killjoy of the

first order, an overeducated neurotic who will in all

seriousness ask tiresome questions like “The problem

of leisure / What to do for pleasure” (“Natural’s Not

in It”). These are the folks who plop down next to you

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•

on the sofa while the TV’s on, nitpicking at every bit of

improbable dialogue and every unlikely plot twist while

you’re watching the detectives; they’re the kind of people

who never read a book without a pen in their hands.

And they’re … well, they’re my people. They’re me, or

I’m them, or something. And before you begin to throw

stones, face it: you’re reading a critical book about a pop

record album. So you too, dear reader: you’re one of us.

One of us. One of us.

Part of the reason Gang of Four got away with being

such people, certainly, is that the music they made

(especially the rhythm section, including electric guitar

played so as to be practically a rhythm instrument) was so

transcendently energetic, even joyous: it was ideological

critique of contemporary culture that blissfully partook

of, rather than disdaining, that very culture. No one

buys an album, or attends a concert, to be scolded;

and the ideological critique undertaken by Gang of

Four always contains a wary consciousness of their own

inability simply to quit those behaviors, to transcend

those attitudes, that they critique in their songs as a

species of bad faith. When discussing

“Not Great Men,”

I’ll introduce the idea of “history from below.” What

I’m talking about here is something intimately related:

critique from below, a style of analysis that recognizes

there’s no privileged spot of ideological purity from

which one might stand in judgment of a corrupt society.

If ideology is “abstract and false thought” (Williams,

155), none of us is free from it. A commitment to calling

it out wherever one sees it entails a strict critique of the

self as well.

In contemporary parlance, the phrase “paralyzing

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

•

self-consciousness” is a cliché: our anti-intellectual age

views thinking of most any kind—never mind thinking

about oneself, thinking about one’s own thought—as

the unpardonable sin. But the music of Gang of Four

is about liberating self-consciousness, in both senses of

that phrase. “Paralysed”—the title of another Solid Gold

track—is there the description not of self-consciousness,

but precisely of its absence. Tellingly, that song’s first

word is “blinkered.”

Notes

Marx, quoted in Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of

Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 28.

Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?”, Language,

Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and

Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Bouchard

and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

1977), 132.

Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 131.

Engels, Letter to Mehring, 1893; quoted in Williams,

Keywords, 155.

Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 28.

Thomas Kinsella, “Nightwalker,” Poems 1956–1973

(Portlaoise, Ireland: Dolmen, 1980), 102.

•

“Ether”/“Guns Before Butter”

Entertainment! starts the way it will end, 40 minutes

later: with a percussive bang. Even if that bang, in the

album’s closer,

“Anthrax,”

is really a disguised whimper, a

surrender, the way the world ends; even if the bang that

opens

“Ether”

is the fat twang of a bass note—four in

quick succession, actually, three in the next measure. The

record manages to make its tremendous racket with just

four instruments—percussion, bass, guitar, and voices

(with the occasional guest spot for Jon King’s melodica

stylings, such as at 2:35 here, in the second refrain). All

share the stage, comprising a genuine collective. Yes,

Dave Allen’s bass plays unaccompanied the first notes

we hear upon dropping the phonograph needle, Side

One, Track One; but Andy Gill’s guitar jump-starts

the next track,

“Not Great Men,”

and Gill’s and King’s

voices together plaintively chant, slightly off-kilter, in

the stereo channels to wrap up

“Return the Gift”;

Side Two’s run-out groove

“Anthrax,”

Hugo Burnham

robotically drums the album to a close, a regular flesh

and blood drum machine. Each member of the Gang,

then, enjoys roughly equal representation in the aural

space of the album. But given the traditional hierarchies

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

•

of rock & roll—with the lead singer and lead guitar

very much to the front—this leveling itself is a revolu-

tionary gesture. “That tradition of lead guitarists,” Gill

says, “who demonstrate their skill, their chops, over a

subsidiary rhythm section, was clearly something that

didn’t appeal to me. One of the things I liked about

the Stones, I suppose, was the way they almost kind of

worked on the same level.”

Let’s not get carried away, though: Gill’s discordant

rhythm guitar finds its way into

“Ether”

rather quickly, at

0:06, joined by Jon King’s lead vocal line just ten seconds

later. Almost instantly as they appear, however, those lead

vocals too are complicated by a subsidiary lyric from Gill.

Although “subsidiary” doesn’t quite do justice: the ends

of King’s lines are clipped and eclipsed by Gill’s. The

two aren’t so much trading lines as flinging them at one

another.

Trapped in heaven life style
  (Locked in Long Kesh)
New looking out for pleasure
  (H-block torture)
It’s at the end of the rainbow
  (White noise in … )
The happy ever after
  (a white room)

This is call and response, I suppose, if “response” can

encompass critique. King’s character sings of a particu-

larly bourgeois brand of boredom: it’s only the relatively

privileged subject who can view a “heaven life style” as a

trap. (One of the early, presumably tongue-in-cheek, band

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•

names King and Gill toyed with when they first started

making music together was The Bourgeois Brothers.)

Many other songs on the album—

“Natural’s Not in It,”

“Damaged Goods,”

“At Home He’s a Tourist”

—focus on

precisely this kind of middle-class malaise: that is to say,

these complaints are by no means dismissed as “first-

world problems,” not serious enough to warrant serious

attention, in the larger context of the album. Indeed,

the routine mystifications of everyday life constitute the

primary focus of the record’s critique.

But the entrance of Gill’s lyric does set up a stark

political juxtaposition. King’s speaker is “trapped” in a

heavenly lifestyle, but Gill responds with documentary

fragments pointing to literal imprisonment—that of the

political prisoners being held in the H-block of Long

Kesh Prison in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Given Gang of

Four’s reputation as a “political” band (whatever exactly

that might mean, or whatever the alternative might be),

the conventional wisdom is that they were always engaged

with the politics of the everyday. The way Burnham

explains it, the group’s real focus was “the politics of

relationships, personal behavior, how you fit into—or

not—the culture around you. It wasn’t like ‘Fuck Margaret

Thatcher!’ or, you know, ‘Fight the cuts!’ It wasn’t

Clash-like.”

“Ether”

is the only song on the album that

deviates from this interpersonal focus—one of the very

few in the band’s entire catalog. (“Armalite Rifle,” from

their debut single, is another—as well as being another

song about the Ulster Troubles—and it ultimately didn’t

win a spot on the album.) Entertainment! opens with a kind

of paradox, then: not only does it bring in Politics with a

big “P,” but it does so with the effect, at least potentially,

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

•

of suggesting that in the face of issues of world historical

import, the problems of two or three little people “don’t

amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,” as a

mid-century political philosopher famously put it.

Before the politics of the personal gets a proper

chance to establish itself, then, that position is seemingly

undercut, second-guessed—cast into a dialectical pas

de deux. Nowhere else on the record is the ideological

distance between lead and backing lyric this great; you’d

have to jump forward to the band’s minor 1982 hit

“I Love a Man in a Uniform” to get close, where the

deluded macho character King plays sings “Time with

my girl I spent it well”—to which the “girl” replies,

“You must be joking, oh man you must be joking!” It’s a

principle of the record worth identifying at the outset: no

single, simple position or statement is allowed to stand

unchallenged on Entertainment! Sometimes the tension

is interpersonal (or inter-personnel), with King and

Gill espousing incompatible ideologies, as in

“Ether”

;

sometimes it’s the irony of an unreliable narrator whose

point of view can’t bear up under the weight of its own

ideological contradictions. All of the songs, that is to

say, are constructed along dramatic, rather than confes-

sional, lines: a story is unfolding, and as in a Faulkner

novel, or Kurosawa’s Rashomon, we’re not provided a

stable position from which to judge the relative merits

of the arguments put forward. These aren’t, that is to

say, finger-wagging songs—these characters are victims,

rather than masters, of ideology—and in listening to

their stories, we participate in their confusion.

That’s a rather balanced understanding of the song’s

dynamic; it certainly wasn’t my first response to it. My

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•

grandfather was a Unionist Catholic Ulsterman; at age

17, my mother boarded a ship in Belfast and landed

in Long Beach, California; her maternal grandfather

was employed at the Harland and Wolff shipyard, and

worked on the Titanic. So while it’s only part of the song’s

complex narrative, Gill is singing about IRA prisoners

in Belfast, the “blanketmen”: and unlike most American

college students at the time, I suspect, I actually knew

something about those politics. I’d spent six long, gray

weeks in Belfast with my grandfather in the summer of

1969; I watched Neil Armstrong’s first moonwalk on the

fuzzy telly in my auntie’s front room, at her bitty row

house off the Falls Road.

(The Falls Road is the heart of

the Protestant area of the city—for we were staying with

my grandmother’s people, and my grandparents’ was a

mixed marriage. The story gets more complicated, but

we’ll leave all that to one side.)

If you know anything about the history of the Troubles,

you’ll know that I was at their epicenter for the darkest

and bloodiest season in a long, dark, bloody history—no

holiday in the sun, this. So I knew something about

H-block torture—the H-block of Her Majesty’s Maze

Prison (also known as Long Kesh), just southwest of

Belfast. An Amnesty International report issued in June

1978 had found the British government guilty of “the

administrative practice of torture,” including both the

hooding of political prisoners and the imposition of

painful physical postures (recently reprised by the United

States with equally horrific results at Abu Ghraib). To this

His famous words—“One small step for man, one giant leap for

mankind”—get détourned in

“At Home He’s a Tourist.”

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

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repertory the RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) added

an ingenious new assault: bombarding the prisoners with

violently loud white noise. This was not quite on a par

with the CIA’s bombarding Manuel Noriega with The

Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” a decade later,

but musicians are understandably uneasy with the notion

of music, even sound, as a form of torture.

On the night I saw Gang of Four perform in Davis,

a hunger strike protesting the prison conditions at Long

Kesh was concluding its second week. My hometown

paper, the Los Angeles Times, ran a story that morning:

“Since British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has

twice promised not to make concessions,” the item

reported, “the men are resigned to a lingering death,

which should reach its climax about Christmas or the

New Year.”

That first strike was called off in December

without any fatalities, when British officials seemed to

have acceded to IRA demands; it subsequently became

clear that the British in fact intended no compromise,

however, and a new hunger strike was started by Bobby

Sands on March 1, 1981. He died later that year, a martyr

to the cause; his boyish face beams from the walls of pubs

and flats today: a beatified secular icon.

When I heard

“Ether”

at 21, then, I heard it as a

rebel song: it’s not. (Just as Bono will insist before

concert performances of “Sunday, Bloody Sunday,” U2’s

great Northern Ireland “issue” song: “this is not a rebel

song.”)

“Ether”

doesn’t shout “Up the Provos” (the

Provisional IRA); rather, it’s using the precariousness

and violence of everyday life in Belfast to put King’s

bourgeois complaints into perspective. “Dirt behind the

daydream,” King repeats twice after each of the first two

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•

verses; in this political morality play, he plays the part

of The Daydream. Gill’s The Dirt: The Dirt-y little

secrets that the government does its best to keep off the

telly and out of the public eye, tawdry deeds that fuel

the machinery of Empire. In a book that meant much

to the band—Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1898),

from which they took the refrain for Home of the Free’s

standout track “We Live As We Dream, Alone”—the

narrator Marlow encounters “a miracle” in the midst of

the African wilderness, a European accountant dressed

in immaculate white from head to toe. When asked how

he accomplished this feat, he admits with some embar-

rassment that he’d trained a native woman who had

shown “a distaste for the work.” It’s an almost allegorical

image of hiding one’s dirty laundry. Dirt behind the

daydream.

If I initially missed some of the sophisticated dramatic

nuance of the song when first exposed to it, there’s no

shame in that: rock always takes a bit of a risk when its

narratives get this complex. I had not yet read the French

thinkers (the Situationists, like Guy Debord and Raoul

Vaniegem, and sociologist Henri Lefebvre) that gave a

counterbalancing weight to King’s complaint, turning

the parallel vocal tracks into a pretty even fight. But I

also made a series of much more elementary mistakes

in my reading of the song. Jon King’s second line, “New

looking out for pleasure,” I’ve always heard as “You’re

looking out….” It’s a pattern I’ve come to recognize in

my mondegreens—I seem to like my politics first or

second person, rather than third. In this instance, in any

event, there’s little at stake between the canonical and

my heretical reading. (Besides, by the time of the line’s

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

•

last iteration at 3:30, that word has inexplicably morphed

into “now.”)

Gill’s rejoinder to the first line of the second stanza

is “Fly the flag on foreign soil”—the Union Jack, that

is, flying on “Irish” soil. (Though I don’t want to argue

the point here, the insistence that Belfast is “foreign” soil

would be a thoroughly Republican position.) That line,

for some reason, I heard as “Foreign flag on foreign soil.”

It’s not altogether my fault: Gill’s down and back in the

mix, and it’s a bit hard to make out. But as Sylvia Wright

posited about mondegreens as a whole, mine makes good

sense, if it’s not quite better than the real lyric: Foreign

(British) flag on foreign (Irish) soil. The word “foreign”

is viewed from two competing perspectives in my (mis-)

reading of line: some syntactic gymnastics were required,

to be sure. But even hearing the line as I did, it worked as

King and Gill intended.

Two lines later, Gill’s riposte to King is, “Censor six

counties news” (that is, censor news coming from the

six counties of Northern Ireland); this I heard as “Sex

is sex, counts as news.” This I’m afraid is a bit harder to

defend—although it’s a sentiment (if not a phrasing) that

wouldn’t be out of place in a song like

“Contract”

(“Is

this so private? / A struggle in the bedroom?”). Sex, the

album tells us time and again—along with “guerrilla war

struggle”—is marketed to us as “entertainment,” and for

the most part, rather disappointing entertainment at that.

Perhaps, instead, sex is just sex. I think I could if pressed

defend my misreading, in the context of the album if not

the song (which really has nothing at all to do with sex).

These bloopers are all rather low stakes, but there was

also one pretty big one—and one that’s ultimately far

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•

more interesting. In the song’s closing refrain, the voices

trade places: not literally, between the stereo channels,

but rather Gill’s voice becomes the call to which King

responds:

There may be oil
  (Now looking out for pleasure)
Under Rockall
  (It’s at the end of the rainbow)
There may be oil
  (The happy ever after)
Under Rockall
  (It’s corked up with the ether)
There may be oil
  (It’s corked up with the ether)
Under Rockall
  (It’s corked up with the ether)
There may be oil

Rockall: WTF?, as we’d say today. What’s Rockall?

Certainly I’d never heard of it; and never having heard

of it, I couldn’t hear it in Gill’s singing, either. “Rockall”

simply didn’t exist for me as a lexical possibility.

But back in 1955, four men were deposited on the

“island” of Rockall by Royal Navy helicopter, raised the

Union Jack, and cemented a plaque to the rock that read:

By authority of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second,
[by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great
Britain and Northern Ireland] and of her other realms
and territories, Queen, Head of the Commonwealth,
Defender of the Faith, etc, etc, etc. And in accordance with

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

•

Her Majesty’s instructions dated the 14.9.55. a landing
was effected this day upon this island of Rockall from
H.M.S. Vidal. The Union flag was hoisted and possession
of the island was taken in the name of Her Majesty.
[Signed] R H Connell, Captain, H.M.S. Vidal,
18 September 1955

In 1972, the Isle of Rockall Act was passed, which

made Rockall officially part of the District of Harris,

Inverness-shire, Scotland; this annexation represents

the last territorial expansion to date of the British

Empire. And Rockall is indeed all rock, uninhabitable

and inarable: a barren chunk of peralkaline granite less

than two-tenths of an acre in size—tiny, even by the

standards of Southern California real estate—doused

continuously by waves, in the middle of the North

Atlantic. Rockall makes the Falkland Islands, the staging

ground for Britain’s next imperial folly in 1982, look like

Australia; its only permanent inhabitants are periwinkles.

Rule Britannia, indeed.

For the first 25 years of my life with Entertainment!,

however, that’s not how the song went—and to tell

you the truth, I’m still not entirely convinced. For if

Rockall—like Oswald Mosley—isn’t part of your intel-

lectual habitus, you simply can’t hear it. To me, at times

it was clear that Gill was suggesting the possibility of rich

undiscovered oil reserves under the British coalfields:

“There may be oil / Under our coal.” Given all those

pesky British miners’ strikes down through the years (the

most recent, in 1974, essentially brought down the Tory

government)—well, maybe that was a good thing, right?

I’m no petrochemical engineer, but isn’t this roughly

E N T E R T A I N M E N T !

•

correct—dinosaurs become tar become oil, underneath a

canopy of trees that falls on top of them and turns into

coal? (Mind you, I may be misremembering the lessons

of our elementary-school field trip to the La Brea Tar

Pits.) Oil under coal: it all made perfect sense to me. Or

at least I made it all make perfect sense. The lines as I

heard them were a vaguely ironic kiss-off to the working

classes, delivered in Gill’s Humorless Voice of British

Authority: “Fuck off, you irksome coal miners with your

demands and your needs. We’re going deep!” BP up;

BCC (British Coal Corporation) down. And it suggested

as well a stiff upper lip, “keep calm and carry on,” British

sort of thing: “our great expectation / A future for the

good,” as King sings on the album’s next track.

However in my darker moods, I’ll admit, I heard

still other words: “There may be oil / Under fuck all.”

When my parents were around, my granddad would

dodge the curse and say “damn all”—but when they

weren’t, he’d say it proper. As I’ve already noted, I’m

the eldest grandchild of that strange hybrid, a turn-of-

the-twentieth-century Ulsterman: an Irishman (as he

would have insisted) from the county Tyrone, territory

that was cut off from the 26 southern counties by the

Anglo–Irish Treaty of 1922; an Irishman who never-

theless once cold-cocked a guy for failing to take off his

hat during “God Save the Queen” (the British national

anthem, not the Sex Pistols’ second single). This “fuck

all” reading of

“Ether”

suggested to me the England of

Philip Larkin’s 1972 poem “Going, Going” (“that will be

England gone, / The shadows, the meadows, the lanes, /

The guildhalls, the carved choirs”), rather than that of

Sir James Thompson (“Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

•

the waves!”—a song, it so happens, like the original “God

Save the Queen,” with music by Thomas Arne).

I was delighted, then, in the course of researching this

book to learn about a 1956 song from the British comedy

duo Flanders and Swann, parodying the annexation

of Rockall by playing impishly on precisely this double

entendre:

We sped across the planet,
To find this lump of granite,
One rather startled gannet;
In fact, we found … Rockall

I’ve confessed my “fuck all” mondegreen to Jon King and

Andy Gill, and both tell me in no uncertain terms I’m

wrong (although Rockall, both readily admit, really is fuck

all). But both were also delighted with the misreading: for

while getting the words wrong, I’d nevertheless entirely

caught the spirit of the line. (“That’s quite good,” Gill

laughed—“I quite like it!”) My mistake, trivial in itself,

does suggest something important, I think, about the

capacity of rock music (in which marginal intelligibility

is not just an accident, as I’ve suggested, but instead a

constitutive element) to do significant political work.

For my misreading, I’d suggest, wasn’t random free

association: in important if largely subconscious and

unconscious ways, what I did understand of the lyrics, and

the politics of the sound of the song itself, conditioned

me to fill in the blanks in my understanding from among

a fairly limited range of possibilities. “There may be

oil / under our soil”: that commonsense, if rather banal,

possibility never occurred to me, for instance (although

E N T E R T A I N M E N T !

•

it actually rhymes, as neither “Rockall,” “our coal,” nor

“fuck all” quite do). In music as powerful as this—and

for a listener as powerfully in its thrall as I was, as I

am—the mumbly bits actually provide moments where I

can become co-creator of this aggressive, political music

with King, Gill, Allen, and Burnham. And that, I would

submit—and it’s a point we’ll come back to—that’s a very

powerful political pedagogy. The songs on Entertainment!

don’t teach me what to think: they teach me how to think.

The proof is in my mondegreens.

“Ether”

opens Side One:

“Guns Before Butter”

closes

it. Compared to the rather sophisticated dialectical stew

“Ether,”

“Guns Before Butter”

is a straightforward

critique of the human cost of militarism, and the program-

matic false consciousness disseminated by propaganda.

The character brought to life by King refuses to be

conned by the militarist ideology of his “fatherland”:

All this talk of blood and iron
It’s the cause of all my shaking
The fatherland’s no place to die for
It makes me want to run out shaking

The song opens with our speaker resolutely rejecting

all the “talk,” confidently refusing what World War I

poet Wilfred Owen called “the old lie”—that “Dulce

et decorum est / Pro patria mori”

(“sweet and fitting

it is to die for one’s fatherland,” a line from the Odes of

the Roman satirist Horace [65–8 bce]). “I’ll tell you this

you can leave me out,” our protagonist sings in his more

confident moments; but … but then, too, there’s all that

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

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shaking. A whole lotta shakin’, Jerry Lee might have

said; although it’s technically called “perfect rhyme,” in

fact rhyming a word with itself (“shaking”/“shaking”) is

generally considered quite imperfect practice. All shook

up, he can hardly be bothered with poetry: there’s

something much more urgent at stake.

“Guns Before Butter”

is nearly a piece of ekphrasis—a

poem about a piece of visual art. In this case, the art is

the anti-propaganda of John Heartfield (whom King has

referred to as one of the “bastard grandchildren of the

Dadaists” [Lester, 9]) and his satirical photomontages of

Hitler in the 1930s such as “Hurrah, die Butter ist alle!”

[“Hurray, the Butter Is Finished”], upon which the song is

based. The poster’s subhead explains the family’s joy at

the scrap iron they’re eating. In a January 1936 speech,

German Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels

declared: “We can do without butter, but, despite all our

love of peace, not without arms. One cannot shoot with

butter, but with guns.” In a speech delivered that summer

at Hamburg, responding to wartime food shortages,

Hermann Goering had reassured the German people,

“Ore has always made an empire strong, butter and lard

have at most made a people fat.” We might imagine

the character King inhabits as having a seat at that

table, finding his meal of salvaged bicycle parts inedible,

hungering for some more substantial food.

If Heartfield’s anti-propaganda piece depends for its

bitter energy on willfully pulling speech out of context—

or rather, wrenching it from its original context into

a vertiginous new context—the anti-propaganda song

“Guns Before Butter”

picks up some steam through

a wicked pun: “I hear some talk of guns and butter /

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•

That’s something we can do without.” Hard to argue

the point, on one level: surely we can all agree that

propaganda qua propaganda is something we’re better

off without. (The problem, of course, comes in agreeing

on what constitutes propaganda.) But Goering’s speech

was precisely propaganda about “doing without” during

wartime food shortages, via a kind of “sour grapes” (or

“rancid butter”) logic: you didn’t really want it anyway.

Goering tells the people they can do without butter;

King’s character tells us he can do without such ration-

alizations, danke schön.

Jon King’s character responds to the sacrificial

demands of propaganda in an altogether embodied and

untheoretical manner: “If men are only blood and iron /

Oh doktor doktor what’s in my shirt?” But the voice of

ideology, like a Thatcherite Greek chorus tamping down

“dissent” in a time of national crisis, replies: “Just keep

quiet no room for doubt.” The elaborate drum pattern

that Burnham initiates on the toms at the 30-second

mark just might be the funkiest thing he does on the

album: in stark contrast to a track like

“Anthrax,”

where

he’s made to drum like a machine, here he produces an

ischemic heart-attack of beats—and this in a narrative

context that might call for a disciplined military beat, à la

“Armalite Rifle.” The faux-German spelling of “doctor”

is a bit heavy-handed, though of course only visible,

not audible—a liner-notes breadcrumb for the curious

pointing back to Heartfield and his anti-Nazi anti-

propaganda collage art.

There’s a violent noise underscoring all this, and in

a sense, the melody and rhythm sections restage the

conflict articulated in King’s vocals by other means.

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

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Hendrix taught rock players how a guitar might sound

like an entire battlefield, most famously in his early-

morning rendition of the “Star-Spangled Banner” at

Woodstock; and Gill knows his Hendrix (as will be

more than apparent on

“Anthrax,”

for instance). The

noisy bursts of guitar play the role of Goering’s military

rhetoric, aggressively pushing the song forward, all

“blood and iron”; but the loping, human rhythms of

Allen and Burnham are the song’s beating heart, the

irrepressible if scarcely recognizable pounding in

King’s shirt.

King describes the song’s narrative situation as “a little

guy … quaking in his boots at the lust for blood and iron

and order and control” who “wonders how he ever got

sucked up into this evil.”

The key word (not “keyword”)

here is “wonders”: this “little guy” has his suspicions, to

be sure, but his questioning is genuine, not rhetorical.

“Doktor Doktor what’s in my shirt?”: that’s not an empty

query. Under the regime of militarist rhetoric, he’s in

genuine danger of forgetting what that pounding thing

is. This is the quintessential Gang of Four protagonist,

then: if

“Guns Before Butter”

comes close to finger-

pointing certainty, it does retain the shadow of a doubt

despite the reiterated command attempting to tamp

down all unsettling questions.

“Damaged Goods”

warns

us off the sins of the flesh; this song insists on the signifi-

cance of the flesh, asserting instead the immateriality of

the “nation.”

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Notes

Barry White, “In an Ulster Prison, Terrorists

Give Britain a Dirty Dilemma,” Los Angeles Times,

November 9, 1980, G2.

Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, “Rockall,” And

Then We Wrote.... EMI–EMCM 3088.

Wilfred Owen, “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” The

Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, ed. Jon Silkin,

2nd edn (London: Penguin, 1981), 183.

Robin Murray, “Gang of Four Track by Track.”

http://www.clashmusic.com/feature/gang-of-four-

track-by-track (accessed June 5, 2013).

•

Keyword #3: Nature

In Keywords, Raymond Williams writes that culture “is

one of the two or three most complicated words in

the English language.” But culture’s antonym nature

is perhaps even more convoluted—“perhaps the most

complex word in the language,” Williams writes—in

part because its stealth assignment is precisely to mask

the work of culture (87). Gang of Four is at pains to

suggest, regarding a wide variety of social dynamics, that

“natural’s not in it”

: nature’s got nothing to do with it.

Although possibly a misattribution, Hermann Goering is

famous for having said, “When I hear the word ‘culture,’

I reach for my revolver”; for the cultural critic, it’s

culture’s other, nature, that raises suspicions.

One realm in which the word “nature” is made

to work overtime is the arena of sexual politics. It

was precisely during the early 1970s—when Gill, King,

and Burnham were at university—that feminism intro-

duced the distinction between “sex” and “gender” into

common parlance. It’s a distinction that centers on

what’s natural and what’s artificial. Sex, according to

the shorthand, is what’s “natural,” given one’s biological

inheritance, manifest visibly in genitalia, and invisibly in

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the chromosomes. Gender, on the other hand, refers to

the different roles a society assigns to the sexes: although

treated by common consensus as natural, even obvious,

these roles are in fact highly contingent, differing across

time and between different cultures, and never consistent

even within a given society. If sex is “natural” (leaving to

one side the more nuanced contemporary view of even

sex as to some degree contingent and fluid), gender is

cultural: and there is no ironclad logic that can help

us derive the one from the other (the notion that men

should be brave and serve as their families’ breadwinners,

for instance, or the belief that women are “naturally”

nurturing, etc.). The leap from sex to gender—mapping

roles and values onto biological hardwiring—is an

ideological move, justified only by power, not nature

(“Your relations are all power,”

“Natural’s Not in It”

insists). “Natural” is the disguise that culture and political

power use to mask their ideological work.

One way to critique this mystification of the machina-

tions of power is to pursue the cultural analysis of much or

all that we describe as “natural”: a process of denaturing

and unmasking the covert operations of culture. Andy

Gill affirms that some of this was learned at university:

“Jon and I certainly read things by post-Marxist people

like Walter Benjamin and [Louis] Althusser, partly as

a result of what we were doing in fine art, but really it

was just about challenging the idea of what’s natural”

(Lester, 76). Another way to critique the discourse of

nature is by facing in the other direction—by celebrating

the artificial as the glam movement did during the early

1970s (see, in this regard, Todd Haynes’s 1998 film Velvet

Goldmine), and as some sectors of punk and postpunk did

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after glam. The lead singer of X-Ray Spex, Marianne

Joan Elliott-Said, took the stage name Poly Styrene; in

that character, she sang songs like “Art-I-Ficial” (“My

existence is elusive / The kind that is supported / By

mechanical resources”) and “I Am a Cliché” (“I’m a

cliché, you’ve seen before / I’m a cliché, live next door”).

As Williams points out, since the eighteenth century,

nature has been “contrasted with what had been made

of man, or what man had made of himself ” (223); it’s

important to point out as well, however, that, since the

Romantic period, the contrast is a loaded one. “Artificial”

used to be a term of high praise—as a description of

someone’s appearance, speech, manners. Especially, not

surprisingly, for a work of art: almost by definition, the

goal of art is to be artificial, to demonstrate superior

artifice. (“Natural,” by contrast, would have suggested a

distinct lack of civilization—a proximity to the state of

nature described by Thomas Hobbes as “solitary, poor,

nasty, brutish, and short.”)

Entertainment!’s critique of nature was by no means

restricted to lyrical content, of course, even if the English

teacher in me sometimes makes it sound that way. For

there’s nothing “natural” sounding about the recording,

from the wail of the guitar and the ghostly howl of

the melodica to the way the record was produced and

engineered. “From the off,” Paul Lester writes, “Gang of

Four’s music was stark and severe: Gill shunned sound-

thickening effects like fuzz and distortion.… No valve

amps, either, because they were too warm; instead, they

used transistorised amps—for a more brittle, cleaner,

colder sound. Gang of Four were against warmth” (Lester

34). The quintessence of this musical “unnaturalness” is

E N T E R T A I N M E N T !

•

Andy Gill’s penchant for feedback: if not unnatural, at

least something like inhuman, for feedback is essen-

tially the sound of an electric guitar playing itself.

When combined with his often emotionless singing, and

Burnham’s unembellished and metronomically precise

drumming, the sound is as far from “natural” as one can

easily imagine.

Williams closes his Keywords entry on “nature” with

a warning:

The complexity of the word is hardly surprising, given
the fundamental importance of the processes to which
it refers. But since nature is a word which carries, over a
very long period, many of the major variations of human
thought—often, in any particular use, only implicitly yet
with powerful effects on the character of the argument—
it is necessary to be especially aware of its difficulty. (224)

Nature, then—along with its cognate “natural,” and

(especially in the discourse of sexuality) its evil twin,

“unnatural”—is the keyword of all keywords, the skeleton

key(word): no one term in contemporary political

discourse does as much unacknowledged ideological

work. One way to sum up the project of Entertainment!,

then, is as the critique of all the various cultural forms

that are fobbed off on us as “natural.” Today we’re

witnessing a resurgence of educated consumers inter-

ested in buying products across a wide spectrum that are

marketed as “natural”: Gang of Four only insists that

when we shop, we look carefully at the label.

•

“Natural’s Not in It”/“Contract”

It’s a delicious and insouciant move: Sophia Coppola’s

2006 film Marie Antoinette opens on a bored Marie,

conspicuous consumer of pâtisseries, la belle dame

recumbent upon her chaise longue, attended by her lady’s

maid. Cue Andy Gill’s clanging guitar, thin but very loud,

accompanied in short order by the rumbling of Hugo

Burnham’s drums and Dave Allen’s sinuous bass line.

“The problem of leisure / What to do for pleasure.…”

Ha! What indeed. It’s a brilliant conceit, and the scene’s

powerful visuals have the unexpected benefit of throwing

certain other lines in the song (such as “your relations are

all power”) into new and surprising relief. And given the

way that “nature” was bent to human will in the gardens

at the Trianon,

“Natural’s Not in It”

—though we’re

played a scant 1:45 medley—works to prepare certain

minor motifs occurring later in the film, as well.

The intelligence of the selection is undercut somewhat when

Coppola later uses the excuse of a masked ball in Paris to trot

out other late 1970s indie tracks like Siouxsie and the Banshees’

“Hong Kong Gardens.” It’s hard to see how this bit of New Wave

Chinoiserie, about a London takeaway restaurant, contributes to our

understanding of that scene.

E N T E R T A I N M E N T !

•

The Anglophile in me loved this track from the

get-go: since I’d narrowly survived the era of the leisure

(

ˈlē-zhər) suit, I found Jon King’s British accent, which

effortlessly rhymed “leisure” with “pleasure,” impos-

sibly suave and sophisticated. The best couplet available

to an American songwriter would be “leisure / please

her”—but it’s a clumsy rhyme, and that’s already a very

different song.

“Natural’s Not in It”

attacks one of the central, recurrent

concerns of the album. In “Anarchy in the U.K.,” Johnny

Rotten famously sang “I know what I want and I know

how to get it,” and terrified an empire; by contrast, the

characters who wander in and out of Entertainment! know

neither what nor how to want. A decade earlier the Stones

had scored the chorus of “You Can’t Always Get What

You Want” for a choir of angels to sing; the song’s title

rehearsed rock’s oldest complaint, of course, a vital part of

its inheritance from the blues. But the Stones’ song turns

out to be an ode to making do: “But if you try sometimes

you just might find / You get what you need.”

It was a

single off Let It Bleed (1969); the A-side, “Honky Tonk

Women,” really was the flip side: a three-minute object

lesson in getting what you need (with cowbell).

It’s a very different attitude than the one so perfectly

articulated in “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” a song

Though Peter Gabriel’s “Counting Out Time,” from The Lamb Lies

Down on Broadway (1974), made pretty good hay from that age-old

dilemma.

A year later, Stephen Stills made the point even more crudely: “And if

you can’t be with the one you love honey / Love the one you’re with.”

All this atop his swelling organ, no less.

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K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

•

that made a powerful impression on the young Andy

Gill. “I had it on permanent loop,” he told Paul Lester,

“and I would march to and from school to it” (2).

In “Satisfaction”—how unfortunate and misleading,

the way that title’s always abbreviated—a significant

dichotomy is established, as both real and ersatz desires

provoke the singer. The song famously (and far ahead

of its time) mounts a critique of the commodification of

the individual in modern culture. “I’m watchin’ my TV /

And that man comes on to tell me / How white my shirts

can be,” Mick sings—but he’s not seduced: “… he can’t

be a man ’cause he doesn’t smoke / The same cigarettes

as me.” He’s able, in other words, to resist the siren

song—but only through a kind of false consciousness. It’s

not that he resists branding—only that one brand loyalty

trumps another. This from Mick Jagger who had, by this

point, dropped out of the London School of Economics.

In the world of “Satisfaction,” an authentic and legit-

imate object of desire does exist, of course—and it’s

precisely that activity from which rock & roll took its

name. That’s a “natural” desire, apparently, unlike those

being foisted upon the singer by media hucksters—and

it admits of a “natural” satisfaction (even if he’s not

successful in the song, since the “girl” he’s “trying to

make” is suffering with Mother Nature’s gift). The song

countenances both artificial and natural desires, as well

as satisfactions.

“Natural’s Not in It,”

those very distinctions are

undermined, as the group presses hard on the question

of whether there’s any natural desire, anything but dirt

behind the daydream. In Gang of Four’s work and world,

the problem of desire is fundamental: we don’t even

E N T E R T A I N M E N T !

•

know what we want, literally can’t imagine an object of

desire that hasn’t been implanted in our imaginations

by someone who’ll then try to sell it to us. In the song’s

starkest example—presented telegraphically, as are all the

song’s claims and challenges—King sings, “Fornication

makes you happy / No escape from society / Natural is

not in it.” (And how oddly that word “fornication” sits

in a rock song, with its Biblical tone and implication of

moral opprobrium. Isn’t 99

⁄

100

percent of the sex in rock

“fornication”?) Sinead O’Connor’s breakthrough 1990

album was called I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got:

it’s

a claim that King and Gill would find touchingly naïve.

“Natural’s Not in It”

is the manifesto of a man who

has seen through mystification, and is wise to the various

ways in which “pleasure” is used to keep consumers

complacent. “The problem of leisure / What to do for

pleasure”: Gill calls this “the aching cry of someone

whose only outlet is consumerism” (Lester 73). But

pleasure there is, for the listener at least, with Allen

and Burnham laying down a thick funk bottom that

propels the song along, working strongly against Gill’s

angular,

almost ascetic guitar playing (as in “Guns Before

Butter”). Talking about the song, King points out that it

A riff, I’ve always thought, on Virginia Woolf’s description of Jane

Austen: “perhaps it was the nature of Jane Austen not to want what

she had not” (A Room of One’s Own. [1929.] New York: Harcourt,

Brace, 1957, 71).

In writing about Gill’s guitar playing, words like “angular” and

“jagged” are badly overused … and seemingly unavoidable. I feel

like William Miller, the Cameron Crowe character in Almost Famous

(2000), who when he meets Stillwater guitarist Russell Hammond and

wants to praise his playing can only manage “incendiary!” Words fail.

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

•

has no “verse, bridge, chorus or key change”—only “one

monster R&B riff, relentless, drop outs, everyone gets a

turn.”

The song’s prosody—the way it uses the linguistic

and sonic resources of poetry—presents some problems

for interpretation here. On the most fundamental level,

lines of poetry within a stanza can be either end-stopped

or enjambed: that is, they’re either meant to be read as

complete and self-contained at line’s end, or to transition

directly into the beginning of the next line. (Much of

the bad poetry reading we hear in classrooms and other

public settings is a result of enjambed lines being read

as if they were end-stopped—what we might call the

Emily Dickinson effect.) The first line of T. S. Eliot’s

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is end-stopped,

the second enjambed:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table.…

Are the lines of

“Natural’s Not in It”

enjambed or

end-stopped? What is the syntactic and logical

relationship of one line to another? Instinctively, for

instance, we’d want to read the second line as an appos-

itive for the first—that is, “What to do for pleasure” as a

clarifying restatement of “the problem of leisure.” Fine.

But then:

Ideal love a new purchase
A market of the senses
Dream of the perfect life

E N T E R T A I N M E N T !

•

Economic circumstances
The body is good business
Sell out, maintain the interest….

One can, in some cases, construct logical connections

between successive lines: “Ideal love [is] a new purchase

[that one might make at] a market of the senses”; or

less torturously, “the body is good business [so] sell

out,

maintain the interest”; and so on. Those middle

lines, though, feel recalcitrant: they seem to insist on

their autonomy and sit there, aloof, like bumper-sticker

slogans. As New York-based conceptual artist Barbara

Kruger taught us better than anyone—in work like

“I Shop Therefore I Am” that would begin to emerge

shortly after the release of Entertainment!—the slogan

is the minimal semantic unit of propaganda. The

intentionally choppy construction of the song makes

articulating its “message” something of a puzzle.

For me, though, this first verse was also peppered

with mondegreens—and all tending to push my reading

of the song in a particular direction. So while King sings

“Ideal love a new purchase,” I heard “I do love …”; “Sell

out” sounded, to me, like “So I.…” Both “errors” have

the effect of making the narrator somewhat unreliable:

Surely the term “sell out” would have had particular resonance for

the band, especially since signing with major label EMI predictably

provoked charges that they had sold out. It’s nothing they’ve ever

apologized for. King remarks that “artists need to get paid for

what they do, or the activity becomes a kind of hobby”; Burnham

adds, “What’s the point of preaching to the converted? If we have

something to say, why not say it to a million people instead of 400?”

(liner notes, Entertainment!, 2005 reissue, 5).

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

•

instead of simply warning of the dangers of consumer

culture, he confesses himself to be a sometime-victim of

its seductions. Rather than denouncing the notion that

ideal love might be purchased at the market of the senses,

he admits that he has something of a shopping addiction;

rather than sneering at the “sell-out” willing to sell her

body, he announces himself a savvy investor in the capital

of his corporeal self. Here I prefer my misreadings,

and do find that a seductive logic undergirds them; in

a song built upon slogans (even as it quietly critiques

sloganeering), my ears gave the narrator the benefit of

the doubt, and created some ambiguous aural spaces

in which he might admit, if only to me, that he was

sometimes guilty himself of precisely those behaviors he

condemned. And who was I to judge? All those tempta-

tions felt very real to me. I still love a new purchase.

One other verbal feature of the song intrigued me

when I first heard it; it’s not a mondegreen, strictly

speaking, since I understood precisely what Jon King

was singing. But British usage and pronunciation

suggested a pun which, if he didn’t intend, he should

have. An American would say, “This heaven gives me a

migraine”—article before the diagnosis, and the disease

pronounced with a long (/

ī/). But in swallowing that little

particle as a British speaker will—he’ll also speak of being

“in hospital,” or going “down the pub”—the word “me”

and the syllable “mi-” echo perfectly, suggesting that the

singer suffers from what we might call a “me-”graine: a

kind of headache of self-consciousness, the sort of thing

Billy Joe Armstrong must be referring to when he sings,

“Sometimes I give myself the creeps.” This “heaven”

gives me a headache by preventing me from getting

E N T E R T A I N M E N T !

•

outside of my own head. Sounds a bit like being “trapped

in heaven life style”?

As King points out, the song has none of those tradi-

tional resting spots in which a listener can let down his

guard for a minute: there’s no chorus (therefore, perforce,

effectively no verse), no bridge. There is repetition—not

just the incessant repetition of the melody’s simple hook,

but lyrical repetition, as well, and the repeated, chanted,

almost frantic “This heaven gives me migraine” with

which the song, abruptly, closes. If it’s a migraine of

my own making (a “me”-graine), then I won’t escape it

simply by getting out of the song. This is not an exit.

The song’s key line, of course—and I say “of course,”

but without the prominence given it by its quotation

in the title, it would risk being lost among the song’s

litany of one-liners—is “Natural is not in it.” The “it”

sort of hovers, untethered to anything particular in the

song—and, at the same time, attaching to everything

in the song. It’s what the grammar police would call a

dangling pronoun, lacking a precise referent. But in the

song it functions as something much more powerful—

what we might call, in the idiom of deconstruction, a

transcendental pronoun. Natural’s not in “it,” for any “it”

you’d care to name: my leisure activities, my relation-

ships with others, my desires, my pleasures. Natural,

rather, is the anodyne with which I dull my consciousness

to the socially constructed nature of all I find around

me. Andy Gill has said, “I liked to examine the artifice

within things—that was something we kept going back

to. ‘Natural’s Not in It’ is about what is natural and

what isn’t, what is learned and what’s invented. It’s about

looking at the structures behind the surface of everyday

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

•

life to see what makes everything tick” (Lester 75). In

“Green Shirt” (from Elvis Costello’s 1979 album Armed

Forces) the singer wonders, “Who put these fingerprints

on my imagination?” The answer in

“Natural’s Not in It”

is elementary: culture’s sticky little fingers.

For the Stones (to return to an easy target), the bedroom

is an uncomplicated, primal scene: it’s man’s nature, there

and elsewhere, to dominate woman—woman’s nature

and responsibility to please man. Naked and unashamed:

no pretenses, no fig leaf. Think of Charlie Rich’s 1973 hit

“Behind Closed Doors”:

’Cause when we get behind closed doors
Then she lets her hair hang down
And she makes me glad that I’m a man
Oh, no one knows what goes on behind closed doors.

No one, indeed: in the absence of any information to the

contrary—one imagines, in the Rich song, that the little

lady is either out of earshot or too polite to contradict

her man publicly—the alpha male can make whatever

claims he likes about the sexual Olympics staged nightly

in his bedroom.

I can’t resist: when discussing other politically engaged bands in the

punk and postpunk scene, Dave Allen referred to “Sticky Little Fingers,”

neatly conflating the Stones’ 1971 album and the Belfast punk band:

KD: Did you say “Sticky Little Fingers”?

DA: Yeah! Is that their name?

KD: Stiff Little Fingers.

DA: Oh them. I didn’t like them. That was a subconscious piss.

KD: Turning them into shoplifters. [Both laugh.]

E N T E R T A I N M E N T !

•

But Gang of Four begs to differ; the ninth track on

Entertainment!,

“Contract,”

instead analyzes the sexual

politics of the bedroom in steely, unsentimental terms.

One of the song’s insistent, withering questions is, “Is

this so private / Our struggle in the bedroom”; it’s a

question that, once asked, requires no explicit answer.

(And of course the word “struggle,” with its echo of the

Marxist notion of class struggle, to some degree begs

the question.) As Gill intones on a non-album version

of the song (included as a bonus track on the 2005

Rhino reissue of Entertainment!), “Pop songs normally

make out that love is private. We’re not so sure about

it.”

(This spoken commentary also serves to point out

the strong links between

“Contract”

and the album’s

other deconstruction of the pop love song,

“Anthrax.”

)

You’d think that people would have had enough of silly

love songs.

“Contract”

is a powerful (and powerfully dissonant)

song about the influence of social scripts and narra-

tives as they overlay the most intimate and spontaneous

of interactions. “Social dreams,” the song insists, are

“put in practice in the bedroom”: no sphere, no matter

how “private,” how intimate, is free from the influence

of ideology. “Sometimes you aren’t behaving as a free

agent,” Gill told Michael Azerrad; “you’re behaving as a

Listening to the alternative version confirms that the band made

the right choice for the album, despite some remarkably fluid bass

by Dave Allen, and an almost industrial-sounding wail from Andy

Gill during the refrain. The closing couplet of the verse in these

alternative lyrics allies the realm of the private not just to the

political, but the geopolitical: “The state we’re in / Makes you want

to defect.…”

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

•

response to things, and you’re acting like a puppet.”

It’s

a theme that comes up often in contemporary fiction: the

disappointing truth that, to quote Elvis Costello again,

“there’s no such thing as an original sin.” The realization

that the bedroom, the last bastion of naked spontaneity,

is in fact a theater: that our sex play is dictated by scripts

and roles every bit as predictable as those followed by the

sex worker on a hotline.

In the discourse of contemporary culture, sexual

pleasure is predicated on novelty: think of the monthly

cover of Cosmopolitan promising, for instance, “Bad

Girl Kissing Tricks That Will Drive Him Crazy” (no:

I didn’t make that up).

“Natural’s Not in It”

has

already postulated “a market of the senses,” suggesting

that the one thing that ought to elude the circuits of

capitalist exchange—sensual pleasure—has in fact been

commodified. Ideal love? It’s a new purchase. Against

this backdrop of sexual novelty,

“Contract”

perversely

insists on repetition. Starting the song with the phrase

“the same again”: it’s a stunning move. The opening

verse literally begins with a refrain, a repetition: dal segno,

𝄋, D.S. al coda. The Roman satirist Horace maintained

that the action of the epic should plunge the audience

in medias res, “into the middle of things”; the narrative

these modern satirists present is no epic, of course

(unless an epic of futility), but we’re thrust immedi-

ately into a seemingly unbroken cycle of repetition and

frustration.

“A new romance / Invented in the bedroom”: that’s a

tough standard to live up to, and the actors in

“Contract”

simply aren’t able:

E N T E R T A I N M E N T !

•

The same again
Another disappointment
We couldn’t perform
In the way the other wanted

“The way the other wanted”: what way was that, if one

might ask? If sexual pleasure depends on the novel,

the unpredictable … then where do these expecta-

tions come from? And shouldn’t pleasure arise from the

defiance of such expectations? “You dreamed of scenes /

Like you read of in magazines,” Jon sings; our social–

sexual conditioning amounts to a kind of brainwashing.

Fantastic (literally fantastic) imagery has been supplied

by the culture industry (think here of both the breathless

headlines and the airbrushed photography on that Cosmo

cover), whose profits depend not on the satisfaction of

desire, but instead on making sure that (We Can’t Get

No) Satisfaction. Satisfaction just beyond the horizon,

available for a price that’s always just a bit outside our

budget, Bryan Ferry’s “Mother of Pearl”:

I’ve been looking for something
I’ve always wanted
But was never mine
But now I’ve seen that something
Just out of reach, glowing
Very holy grail.…

Desire—which Laurie Anderson describes as “so random,

so rare”—becomes a marketing tool, and the hedonist a

shopper looking for “the things they sell / To help you

cob off” (

“At Home He’s a Tourist”

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

•

As we’ve noted, the song begins with a kind of

pseudo-refrain, but its formal refrain asks, “Is this really

the way it is / Or a contract in our mutual interest?” It’s

a pithy formulation of the stakes of what’s sometimes

called social construction, the notion that much of

what we take to be natural is at base cultural. “When

we recorded Entertainment!,” King recalls, “I was very

interested in Situationism and Andy & I were excited

by the ideas of Foucault & [Jacques] Lacan & behind all

this how much of what we do or think is a construct.”

“Natural’s Not in It,”

Jon had sung that “forni-

cation” provides “no escape from society”; in

“Contract,”

the corollary is presented—that the private … isn’t. In

“Everybody Knows” (1988), Leonard Cohen warns of a

dystopian future in which “there’s gonna be a meter on

your bed / That will disclose / What everybody knows”;

“Contract,”

the meter’s in your head.

Nothing about the opening verses and refrain,

however, can quite prepare a listener for the shock of

what’s effectively the song’s bridge. Take this quick

quiz—fill in the blank: Our bodies make us _______. Make

us what? Make us happy? No: Jon King’s repeated plaint,

before the closing repetitions of the refrain, is “Our

bodies make us worry.” His delivery is almost chanted,

with the minor-key sing-song of a schoolyard taunt;

Andy Gill’s echo of the line instead sounds hesitant,

uncertain—genuinely worried. The body understood as a

site of natural desire and its satisfaction has been replaced

by the culturally and politically constructed body—the

body in ideological bondage that was a favorite trope

of punk and postpunk, from the Sex Pistols’ piss-taking

“Submission,” to X-Ray Spex’s dissonant punk-pop “Oh

E N T E R T A I N M E N T !

•

Bondage Up Yours!,” to postpunk peers the Au Pairs’

many sophisticated explorations of gender dynamics and

sexual politics.

Gang of Four wasn’t postpunk’s greatest feminist

band—that title would have to go to the Slits, or the Au

Pairs. But no other band articulated a sharper critique

of the way that “the cultural logic of late capitalism”

(Fredric Jameson’s phrase) risked turning everything and

everyone into a commodity, with exchange value quickly

usurping human dignity. Our bodies, after all, don’t

make us worry: it’s our minds, those spaces between the

headphones, that do the worrying.

Notes

Robin Murray, “Gang of Four Track by Track.”

http://www.clashmusic.com/feature/gang-of-four-

track-by-track (accessed June 5, 2013).

T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

(1913), Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber,

1963), 13.

Liner notes, 2005 Rhino CD reissue, Entertainment!

http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/tips-moves/

sexy-kissing-techniques-0408 (accessed July 18,

2013).

Robin Murray, “Gang of Four Track by Track.”

http://www.clashmusic.com/feature/gang-of-four-

track-by-track (accessed June 5, 2013).

•

Keyword #4: Theory

Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1973) was

something of a bible for left-leaning students trying to

find a place for pleasure and desire in the wake of the

Paris student rebellion of May 1968, and punk’s subse-

quent nihilism. As Larry Law explains Debord’s key

concept,

We live in a spectacular society, that is, our whole life is
surrounded by an immense accumulation of spectacles.
Things that were once directly lived are now lived by
proxy. Once an experience is taken out of the real world
it becomes a commodity. As a commodity the spectacular
is developed to the detriment of the real. It becomes a
substitute for experience.

Even in bare outline, this should sound familiar to those

familiar with Entertainment!, suggesting at least one

source of Gang of Four’s fascination with role playing

as social malaise. In another book that was important to

the band, Alfred Willener’s study of the explosion of May

1968 called The Action-Image of Society, we read: “One

is conscious of a certain number of conditionings, and

E N T E R T A I N M E N T !

•

one tries to find forms of society in which those condi-

tionings are chosen.… It’s not a question of the essence

of man, but of seeking a new organization of society that

corresponds to a certain practice.”

Willener is a Swiss sociologist, and his approach is

ethnographic—his primary research methodologies are

the questionnaire and the interview. At its best—and

this is of course its goal—ethnography can assemble a

very comprehensive “thick description” of a culture or

subculture: in Willener’s case, the subculture of student

radicalism that flowered at the Sorbonne and other

French universities during those heady days in May

1968. But for certain purposes, this close focus becomes

a liability: located squarely within the system, ethno-

graphy provides no Archimedean point from which to

move the world. This was, in part, the critique leveled

by the student leaders of 1968: that the tools of the

social sciences consisted largely of careful watching and

listening, but without any rigorous position outside of

the phenomena observed to which one might anchor a

political proposal. Indeed, one infamous bit of graffiti

from the Sorbonne read: “When the last bureaucrat is

hanged with the guts of the last sociologist, will we still

have problems?”

The only way outside of or beyond such reaffirma-

tions of common sense and received wisdom, then, is

to take up critical and cultural theory: from an activ-

ist’s perspective, mere methodology is not theory. Brian

Eno makes the case for such uncommon sense: “The

important thing about theoretical positions is that they

lead you to decisions that you wouldn’t have taken

otherwise, or that you wouldn’t have permitted. Good

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

•

taste would have militated against them.”

The Solid

Gold track “Why Theory?” points us in this direction,

arguing that “what we think changes how we act,”

and that without access to a theoretical analysis, “each

day seems like a natural fact.” An inductive approach

(working closely from the data and listening to what

they tell us) provides empirical strength and rigor,

but risks myopia—risks simply confirming what we

think we already know, providing no opportunity for

ideological critique. A theoretical approach, on the other

hand—while promising to demystify “natural facts” and

providing an outside vantage point from which to mount

ideological critique—risks reproducing not the subject’s

own story, but the biases and assumptions of the theory

itself. It’s what Andy Gill referred to, in connection with

British historian Eric Hobsbawm, as “putting the cart

before the horse.”

What’s the solution? It’s easier said than done, but a

recursive, mutually informing and mutually correcting

hybrid of the two. Theory provides a preliminary

orientation for one’s explorations, and suggests lines

of inquiry that are likely to prove fruitful; but the

objects of study, especially when they’re humans and

their social interactions, have an integrity of their own

and are not reducible to examples of some abstract

hypothesis. Theory sharpens and gives a critical edge

to our examinations; the granular details of what we see

when we look and listen closely, in turn, feed back and

modify—humanize—our theories. This infinite feedback

loop—like Andy’s guitar in the opening of

“Anthrax,”

though more constructive—is captured in the figure

of the ouroboros, the snake biting its own tail. Thus the

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•

work of ideological critique is never finished. And that’s

precisely what keeps a record like Entertainment! so

fresh: the restless questioning that went into its creation,

the open-ended nature of its inquiry, is then reflected

in the shifting experiences of its listeners down through

the years.

For any band with serious political commitments, the

great balancing act is to create thoughtful music that,

rather than simply telling listeners what to think, creates

a space in which its listeners can themselves think. You

can lead a fan to the polling place, but you can’t make

her vote: surely this has been the bitter lesson of Rock

the Vote, which has had much greater success in regis-

tering voters than in turning them out on election day.

When rock & roll becomes too hectoringly political,

audiences fall away: the political rock artist always walks

a razor’s edge. No contemporary popular band has been

more overtly political—or perhaps, no recent political

band has been more popular—than U2. Especially in

the oversized persona of lead singer Bono, the band’s

political engagement extends far beyond the CD and

the concert stage, in widely publicized work on African

debt relief, work on behalf of Amnesty International and

Greenpeace, etc. Bono can trot the globe on behalf of

various and sundry Good Causes, and the average fan

can, if he prefers, simply ignore it.

But a song forces a confrontation. The concert film

Rattle and Hum (1988) shows U2 performing “Silver

and Gold” before a Denver, Colorado audience: a song

written to decry South Africa’s apartheid system. In the

catalog of a band not known for its subtlety, “Silver and

Gold” stands out as especially preachy—and if the lyrics

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

•

weren’t enough, after a couple of verses Bono starts

vamping about the injustices of apartheid, essentially

explaining the political message of the song to any for

whom it might have been too opaque. At the end of this

sermon, he apologizes self-consciously to the audience:

“Am I bugging you? I don’t mean to bug ya. OK, Edge:

play the blues.”

This is the difference between literature and propa-

ganda, maybe: valuing suggestive and provocative

ambiguity over efficient certainty. Gang of Four took the

risk of letting Entertainment! be a very “literary” record,

in this sense; in subsequent work, they less frequently

took that risk.

Notes

Larry Law, Spectacular Times: Images and Everyday

Life (n.d.), images 2, 4. http://nntk.net/main.

php?g2_itemId=255 (accessed July 23, 2013).

Alfred Willener, The Action-Image of Society: On

Cultural Politicization, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith

(New York: Pantheon-Random House, 1970), 17.

Imaginary Landscapes, dir. Gabriella Cardazzo and

Duncan Ward (New York: Mystic Fire Video, 1989).

•

“Not Great Men”/“Glass”

At least one member of Gang of Four believes “Not

Great Men” to be the strongest track on Entertainment!

Asked what he likes about the song, Andy Gill is

unembarrassed: “Everything. The lyrics, they’re so sort

of snapshot, the brevity is great, the staccato.…” The

drums he describes as “funky yet exciting and driving

… totally unusual,” and his guitar line, “an exercise in

minimalism.” So minimal, indeed, that “minimal” hardly

seems the word: for most of the song Gill bounces back

and forth between two notes a half-step apart, setting

off a kind of spastic siren that chimes through the

song, “the barbarous clangour of a gong” (Yeats). The

elements that Gill’s description omits are Dave Allen’s

booming, bouncing bass line—perhaps his funkiest on

the album—and the mysterious reappearance of Jon

King’s harmonium, last heard in a walk-on role as the

white room’s echoing white noise in “Ether.” Sonically,

“Not Great Men”

is a propulsive fine whine. And one

that’s been extraordinarily influential, too; bassist Flea

reports that “the groove laid down by the Burnham–

Gill–Allen–King connection on ‘Not Great Men’ is

the first thing I put on my turntable to show somebody

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

•

what shaped the sound of the rookie Red Hot Chili

Peppers.”

Had the album been recorded even a few weeks earlier,

however,

“Not Great Men”

wouldn’t have been there: the

song was written very late in the game, while the band

was rehearsing in Wales before heading into the studio.

As a result, in all likelihood, “Armalite Rifle”—which had

featured on the band’s first

(“Damaged Goods”

) single

and was to be reprised in a different recording on the

“Yellow” EP—was left off the album.

“Natural’s Not in It,”

“Not Great Men”

manages

to distil the essence of its argument into the title: in

response to what’s often called the “great man” theory

of history, Gang of Four replies, simply and bluntly,

“not great men.”

The song thus makes an ideal intro to

the theory of “people’s history,” and also a brief for the

proper scholarly study of history and historiography: it’s

a song with a concise and insistent message. Traditional

history, as the saying goes, is written by the winners, and

bears the visible and invisible marks of that prejudice.

To the victor belong the spoils, and final edit of the

official historical record is one of the most coveted. It’s

an idea encapsulated in the refrain of “The History of

the World,” from Songs of the Free (1982), in which the

well-behaved child of the ruling class is given his reward:

“Good, yes, you’ve done well / Here is a small prize /

The history of the world.” One might reference here the

other sense of “class,” too, since the history of the world

is being handed out as a school prize. We’re given just

two three-second blasts on the B-hole of the harmonium,

each in preparation for the entrance of vocals. The

sound seems almost to reference the blues-harp wail of

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•

a locomotive—but in this instance, I am reminded of an

elementary-school teacher’s pitch pipe, ensuring all the

students are singing from the same page. For the “great

man” theory lives on not only (perhaps not primarily) in

the front room, but in the schoolroom.

“Not Great Men”

instead articulates the “history

from below” perspective championed by British Marxist

historians like Eric Hobsbawm, author or editor of

more than 30 books, and E. P. Thompson, whose The

Making of the English Working Class (1963; rev. 1968)

was a standard university text during King, Gill, and

Burnham’s university days. It’s a concept to which the

band would return on their next album, 1981’s Solid Gold,

on the track “History’s Bunk”:

What I’d like to hear: tales of people’s history
Not the stars of strategic combat
The movers of events we hear about
They weren’t the ones to get it in the neck.…

“History’s Bunk” is a far less effective song for a number

of reasons—and its shortcomings help to underscore

what’s so powerful about

“Not Great Men.”

In part,

“History’s Bunk” founders on the juxtaposition of the

lyrics’ expression of narrative desire (“What I’d like to

hear”) with the bleak soundscape of the song itself—a

kind of aleatory, dissonant wash. It’s perhaps the least

melodic song the band ever recorded. Just as troubling

is the hectoring tone of the lyrics: they countenance

no debate, but simply put across a single, simple,

“politically correct” position: it’s a lecture rather than

a debate.

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

•

Typical of the tracks on Entertainment!, though,

“Not Great Men”

presents the struggle between these

two modes of historiography not as a lecture—how

hypocritical it is to argue against top-down history in

a top-down song, as “History’s Bunk” does—but as an

attempt to convey the confusion of the common man

caught up in the contest between the two. Greil Marcus

perfectly evokes the feeling of the album’s moments

like these: “They weren’t performing as themselves but

as versions of confused, ordinary, everyday people who

somehow stumbled onto a notion of the world out of

joint and not making sense,” he explains; “even if it was

a song about their lack of understanding, they’d want to

get it right” (Lester, 89, 87).

The first two verses capture the essence of the

speaker’s confusion (with the third and final stanza a

kind of mash-up of the first two):

No weak men in the books at home
The strong men who have made the world
History lives on the books at home
The books at home
The past lives on in your front room
The poor still weak the rich still rule
History lives in the books at home
The books at home

There’s something curious going on in the prepositions

here. What’s at stake, for instance, in the difference

between “history lives on” and “history lives in the

books at home”? A history that lives only in the books

is, paradoxically, dead history: a dead letter. Whereas

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•

the past that “lives on in your front room” has leapt

from the pages of history and into living practice: those

books don’t lie unthumbed in the front room, but instead

exert a ghostly influence over the present in the stories

they purport to tell us about timeless human nature.

It’s a perfect example of what Martin Heidegger called

the hermeneutic circle: we write history by the light

of contemporary events and prejudices (a fallacy called

“presentism”), and then use that version of history to

interpret … contemporary events and prejudices. When

Jon and Andy sing “There are no lessons in the past”

at the close of “History’s Bunk,” this is what they’re

talking about: history isn’t simply a collection of moral

aphorisms waiting for our discovery and wise application.

History is a field of contestation in which warring inter-

pretations struggle for supremacy. Like “nature,” history

isn’t given, but made.

Furthermore, we make a mistake in ascribing

agency—a force, an intelligence, an agenda—to history.

Much of Entertainment! is concerned with reification, the

process of turning people into things; but the opposite is

a problem, too—turning things, like history, into people.

In James Joyce’s Ulysses the Englishman Haines apolo-

gizes to Stephen Dedalus for Great Britain’s treatment

of the Irish by saying, “It seems history is to blame”

he’s shirking, rather than accepting, responsibility.

Engels makes the point forcefully in his little-known

treatise The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism:

“History does nothing, it ‘possesses no colossal riches,’ it

‘fights no battles’! Rather it is man, actual and living man,

who does all this, who possesses and fights; ‘history’ does

not use man as a means for its purposes as though it

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

•

were a person apart; it is nothing but the activity of man

pursuing his ends.”

I’ve suggested that the song’s title is a pithy distillation

of its “message,” but in one respect that’s a misleading

statement: for the title signifies not in just one way, but

three. The first, I’ve already tried to suggest: a rejection

of the “great man” theory of history. This puts the

accent on the title’s second word: it’s not great men, but

ordinary men, who make history. But one might as easily

emphasize the last word: one alternative to “great man”

history is, of course, “great woman” history, or perhaps

women’s history more generally. History’s not made by

great men, or not them alone; as Virginia Woolf argues

about specifically literary history in A Room of One’s

Own (1929), there’s an entire women’s tradition that

until very recently remained unwritten, unknown. Still

a third reading of the title would interpret it without

reference to the “history” to which, after all, it makes

no explicit reference. Those men in the books in your

front room—the men who have bent world history to

their own designs and desires? They’re not great men.

This interpretation points to a fundamental distrust

of heroism, of the kind found in The Stranglers’ “No

More Heroes” and Barbara Kruger’s “We Don’t Need

Another Hero.”

The struggle staged in

“Not Great Men”

is pitched

not just between history from above and history from

below. It’s also a contest between two very different

understandings of what history is: one in which history is

an inert fact to be recorded, and one that understands the

writing of history as the making of history, insisting that

there is no “unwritten history.” One understands history as

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•

“what really happened,” “the aggregate of past events; the

course of human affairs” (OED, seventeenth century); the

other, history as the record of “what really happened,” “a

written narrative constituting a continuous chronological

record of important or public events” (OED, fifteenth

century). Laurie Anderson might almost be invoking these

two different understandings in her song, “From the Air”:

“This is the time / And this is the record of the time.”

If history can be (and has been, and is) understood in

these two different ways, then there are at least two sites at

which the “great man” might intervene. One is the theater

of history: the political stage, the battlefield, the laboratory.

The other, of course, is at the scene of writing: it is, after

all, “the books at home, in your front room,” that dissem-

inate and perpetuate the distortions of “great man” history.

“Not Great Men”

is one of Entertainment!’s two or three

deathless tracks.

“Glass”

is arguably the album’s one real

failure: for perhaps the only time on the album, didac-

ticism overwhelms a song. My conversations with the

band suggest that opinion within the songwriting team is

split. Andy still loves the song—“great melody, great tune

… I love the banality of it”; Jon hears in it the residue

of a much earlier incarnation of the band. On this point,

Andy agrees, suggesting that “if we’d had another ten

days in Wales, I wouldn’t have been surprised if ‘Glass’

didn’t make that record.”

The song’s most prominent feature is its repetition,

on both the musical and lyrical levels. Indeed, in a sense

that the band may not have been aware of, the opening

bars repeat not only themselves (the same five-note

figure repeated four times) but the iconic opening of The

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

•

Byrds’ “So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star” (albeit

with a better bottom end). That may account in part for

why this song sounds like no other on the album—why

it flirts, in its instrumentation and arrangement, with

sounding nothing like a Gang of Four song. Where did

that big perky guitar come from?

But in its use of repetition,

“Glass”

forges a kind of

blues. For it is a blues, at least lyrically: the verse is a

quatrain of one short line repeated three times, capped

with a longer line that completes the verse sentence.

Muddy Waters’s “Baby Please Don’t Go,” for instance,

starts like this:

Baby, please don’t go
Baby, please don’t go
Baby, please don’t go
Down to New Orleans, you know I love you so.

And

“Glass”

Look through the window
Look through the window
Look through the window
I’m looking through a pane of glass.

While the song opens with this familiar blues structure,

it quickly starts to deviate from the formula. In the

second verse, the repeated line grows a parenthesis and

morphs into a question—“Look through the window

(and what do you see?)”—while the closing line remains

unchanged. This same pattern repeats between the third

and fourth, and the fifth and sixth, verses. The shorter,

E N T E R T A I N M E N T !

•

odd-numbered verses have a kind of punchy, telegraphic

urgency to them: the five syllables all land on the

same note (D) without resolution. Whereas the even-

numbered verses trace a comfortable descending scale

resolving on A: the urgency and tension of the odd verses

are subsumed and mellowed in what follows them.

One’s tempted to describe the song’s central metaphor

as “transparent”: glass = ideology. When it’s working well,

it’s invisible: you don’t even know it’s there. But it’s quietly

framing everything, even when not subtly distorting. For

looking through a window is almost imperceptibly different

from looking through glass: the difference between a

window and a pane of glass, of course, is the frame. We use

the expression “a window onto” to suggest an instrument

that provides hitherto unanticipated insight, but a window

onto reality, no matter how clean and clear the glass, always

represents and subtly reinscribes a point of view.

As a poetic metaphor, this really seems quite promising.

But it doesn’t develop: the song doesn’t go anywhere. It’s

hamstrung by a narrowly monotonous melody and chord

progression, mirroring the insistently repetitious lyrics.

“Return the Gift,”

the lyric repetition that closes

the song dramatically expresses a sense of urgency in

the protagonist; in

“Glass,”

to me at least, it feels like

desperate songwriting, rather than songwriting about

desperation.

“Glass”

is the shortest track on the album:

perhaps that’s for the best?

But it’s just possible that the song’s banality is in fact

ironic—which is to say,

“Glass”

might just be an intent-

ionally bad song. Certainly it’s got the most vertiginous

bridge in postpunk, where the bass moves from funk

to straight disco, and the lyrics border on self-parody.

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

•

“At Home He’s a Tourist,”

the disco floor is ground

zero for commodified false consciousness. In

“Glass,”

the

disco isn’t named, but it is unambiguously invoked by

the rhythm section, and the lyric passage of the bridge

adopts an entirely different form from the verses:

If you feel in a mess put your head on a head rest
Your back on a back rest, foot on a foot rest
Or your arm on an arm rest or your leg on a leg rest
Your back on a back rest.…

There’s an exhaustive inclusiveness in this catalog that

borders on grim comedy. In interviews, members of the

band often complain that critics have overlooked their

sense of humor. When I spoke with Andy Gill, this came

up: “There’s quite a lot of bits of humor tucked into some

of these things,” he was quick to agree. “You don’t have

to be totally po-faced all the time. A lot of the songs have

got humor built into them—and not just a little aside.…”

And the way the bridge closes: “When you’re feeling

all in take some aspirin / Or some paracetamol.” I feel

confident saying that few if any other rock songs have

name-checked “paracetamol.” Listening to the album

when I first bought it, I had no idea what it might be,

beyond what was suggested by the context—which, it

turns out, gets one pretty close. In the States, we call it

acetaminophen: not one whit more poetic.

I’ve always heard the attempt at humor in

“Glass”

a kind of embarrassed apology for the political stridency

in the rest of the song. I don’t mean to suggest that

King and Gill, in any conscious or premeditated way, set

out to write a bridge that would take a bit of the starch

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•

out of the song: only that the song itself—if we can

imagine songs as having not just logics of their own, but

something like wills of their own—insisted on evening

the score to some degree. Certainly this is the case with

“Armalite Rifle,” from their debut single: it’s a song that

now feels too strident, too obvious, but is beloved by

many fans precisely for the grin that peeks out from

behind the grim mask at random moments.

The rifle does harm, it shoots for miles
If a bullet gets you in the heart, destroys your insides
***

It’ll do you damage, it’ll do you harm
Blow your legs off, blow your guts out.…

On the Anthrax Marxists bootleg, the song is labeled

with the almost Freudian typo “Armatrite Rifle.” The

awkwardness of the song’s indictment begs to be read

as comedy: the understatement of “does harm,” the

hyperbole of “shoots for miles,”

the verbal clumsiness

of “if a bullet gets you in the heart”: this is either callow

sloganeering or a clever imitation of callow sloganeering.

If I lean toward the latter, more generous, interpretation,

it’s owing to the cartoonishly “military” drums that open

the song, the lifeless group chant of “damage, damage”

that closes the song, and the line that completes the

verse: “I disapprove of it, so does Jon.”

If this were

I’m told that technically, this is correct: the AR15 has an effective

range of 3,600 meters. Hitting a real-life target at that range, however,

is an altogether different matter.

This is the lyric of the

“Damaged Goods”

single version, and “Jon”

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•

The Clash, one might be forgiven for taking the song

seriously: but it’s not.

The reformed band had a chance to revisit

“Glass”

when they played the entire Entertainment! album at

London’s Barbican on September 24, 2005. The idea

was “to make ‘Glass’ more simple and punchy.” I have

an unreleased studio version from that time and it’s

entirely reimagined: not just rearranged, but fundamen-

tally reconceived. And I have to admit: I sort of love it.

It manages to be both more tuneful and more poignant,

at the same time; any suggestion of levity is erased from

the bridge, and Jon now makes even paracetamol sound

melacholy:

When I’m in a mess
I must confess
I can’t find a name
To describe my shame
I can’t think at all
Without paracetamol.…

rhymes decently well with “harm”; on the Yellow EP version Andy

calls out Dave, just for a change.

For some reason, Jonathan Demme uses it to open his 2004 remake

of The Manchurian Candidate; it’s unclear whether the music is heard

within the scene of US soldiers in Kuwait playing cards, or layered

over it. Within makes little sense: the movie opens in 1991, when

the song would have been 12 years old. It was never included on an

album; if we’re meant to be hearing it over the radio—well, that’s

a real stretch, unless military radio simply seeks out songs about

warfare and armaments. The other possibility, of course, is that this

is just Demme once again trotting out his rock insider credentials.

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•

The vocal harmonies, the guitar lines, the explosive

drums: the song sounds entirely different. The spirit of

the revision is captured in that one word, “confess”: the

aggression of the original has been turned inward, the

confrontational made confessional. And for some reason,

the word

“glass”

is now pronounced BBC proper—which

made me realize with a start that on the Entertainment!

track

“glass”

is sung as a Yank would sing it (/glas/). Yank

that I am, I’d never noticed: it was for me “natural,”

transparent—a pane of glass.

Notes

Liner notes, 1995 Zero Infinite CD reissue of

Entertainment!

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922; New York: Random

House, 1986), 17.

Friedrich Engels, “‘Criticism’ and ‘Feuerbach,’” The

Holy Family (1844), or Critique of Critical Criticism,

Against Bruno Bauer and Company, trans. and ed.

Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (New York:

Anchor-Doubleday, 1967), 385.

Laurie Anderson, “From the Air,” Big Science, Warner

Brothers B000002KNM.

•

Keyword #5: Alienation

The word alienation goes back about seven centuries

in English; in a formulation that might start to look

familiar by now, Raymond Williams calls it “one of the

most difficult words in the language” (33). (It seems that

the keywords for understanding Entertainment! are all

difficult and complex.) But as a characterization of the

human condition, by the twentieth century “alienation”

had taken on two predominant and related meanings.

The first, deriving from the writings of early-twentieth-

century sociologists and mid-century existentialist

philosophers, suggests that humans have been cut off

from any transcendental source of meaning and from

meaningful connection with one another. “An action

of estranging or state of estrangement” (33), Williams

writes describing this sense; it is sometimes subsumed

under the term anomie, introduced in 1893 by French

sociologist Émile Durkheim in his classic study Suicide.

And it’s a mood written across the face of modern

history—beginning, perhaps, in the eighteenth century,

with the utterance of Marie Antoinette: “Nothing tastes.”

The second primary sense of “alienation” belongs to

the Marxist tradition: the idea that capitalism’s means

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•

of production cut a worker off from the products of

her labor, creating “alienated labor.” The great Gang of

Four song marrying these two senses of the word, “We

Live as We Dream, Alone” (from Songs of the Free), lies

outside our purview, but its definition of alienation as

“the space between our work and its product” is both

pithy and precise. Under capitalism, the worker isn’t

able to make decisions for himself in keeping with his

fundamental human dignity: he is no longer able to

affirm with any certainty, as the late-nineteenth-century

poet William Ernest Henley did: “I am the master of

my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.” The familiar

icon of this dilemma is Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times

(1936), whose Little Tramp is run over roughshod by the

machinery he’s meant to master.

Nor, in large part, is the alienated laborer able to

profit from the profit he makes for his employer, or

earn any interest on the interest he invests in his labor.

As a result, his sense of himself as homo faber, “man the

creator,” withers away. “The fundamental alienation of

work is that man is dispossessed of the object that he

produces by his activity, whatever it may be, and … of

the ability to create or simply the mere fact of creating,”

Alfred Willener writes in The Action-Image of Society.

Williams’ words, “the worker loses both the product of

his labour and his sense of his own productive activity”;

“the world man has made confronts him as stranger

and enemy” (35). At home, one might say, he feels like

a tourist. Worse, rather than creating things, he risks

becoming a mere thing himself. This is the process of

reification, of “making a human process into an objective

thing” (35).

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

•

Alienation is also an artistic strategy, not just a subject:

and an especially apt strategy, one might argue, when

alienation is the artistic subject. The interplay between

word and sound in many Entertainment! tracks—

especially

“Anthrax,”

with which we’ll close the book,

and

“Not Great Men,”

which we’ve just examined—

use aggressively dissonant guitar to “make strange” the

conventional wisdom the songs interrogate. In this way

the music seeks to help a listener experience emotionally,

even viscerally, what the text presents intellectually. In

his epic theater, German playwright Bertold Brecht

referred to this kind of aesthetic and cognitive dissonance

as the “alienation effect”: rather than encouraging the

theatergoer to identify passively with the experiences of

characters on his stage, Brecht sought to foreground the

intellectual work of the theatergoer in making meaning

of what she saw there. French dramatist Antonin Artaud

had something similar in mind when he theorized the

“theatre of cruelty,” and the dramas that Gang of Four

presents on Entertainment! participate in this avant-garde

tradition—making the listener an active participant in

the album’s work, forcing her to remain conscious of the

act of consumption, which is everywhere mystified in

contemporary public life.

Note

Willener,

The Action-Image of Society, 139.

•

“At Home He’s a Tourist”/“5.45”

Unheimlich: usually translated as “uncanny,” the central

concept of Freud’s 1919 paper “Das Unheimliche” is built

upon the word heim, or home. It describes the sense of

something feeling familiar yet somehow foreign—as,

for instance, feeling like a tourist in one’s own home,

the home having been rendered unhomely. And that, of

course, is precisely the paradox at the heart of “At Home

He’s a Tourist.” As the lads from Boston (the 1970s band,

not the city) would say, though, “it’s more than a feeling.”

Notably, while the lyric reads “At home he feels like a

tourist,” the song’s title erases any equivocation. When I

had the chance to ask Jon about this—why the song’s not

called “At Home He Feels Like a Tourist”—his answer

was immediate, and only half joking: “Well, because he

is.”

His alienation is not just personal, but structural—

and not just apparent, but real.

On “Once in a Lifetime,” the first single from their 1980 album

Remain in Light, Talking Heads sing about this same phenomenon:

“You may find yourself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife / You

may ask yourself, well, how did I get here? // You may tell yourself,

this is not my beautiful house / You may tell yourself, this is not my

beautiful wife.”

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Feeling unhomed in one’s own home: it’s a perfect,

visceral picture of the alienation that characterizes late

consumer capitalism—what Debord memorably dubbed

“the society of the spectacle”—in which we passively

observe, rather than engage with or even take control

of, our own lives. Given that even the bedroom is

contaminated by the taint of class struggle (

“Contract”

this should come as no surprise. Robert Frost famously

remarked that “home is the place where, when you have

to go there, they have to take you in”; that’s about as

homey as home gets in the profoundly alienated cultural

milieu that Gang of Four explores. Rather than a refuge,

“home sweet home” is foreign territory upon which

one’s identity is constantly challenged, not affirmed.

Government-issued photo ID required.

In an album chock full of different song forms, “Tourist”

manages to do something different yet again. The song is

made up, in effect, of “A” and “B” verses. The A verses are

doggedly insistent, consisting of eight-syllable lines, each

syllable strongly stressed both in the vocal production

and the supporting instrumentation—even, quite strik-

ingly, both syllables of a two-syllable word like “tourist.”

The normal cadences of both English poetry and prose

alternate between stressed and unstressed syllables; it’s

said that the ordinary rhythm of spoken English is iambic

(“Be- cause I could not stop for death / He kind- ly

stopped for me”), and this is why the blank verse of

Shakespeare’s plays can feel like both poetry and prose to

us. Against such a backdrop, the A verses of “Tourist” feel

urgent: they announce a state of exception, a sense that

all is not right here, a mood accentuated by Gill’s slashing

guitar chords. Again (as in

“Natural’s Not in It”

), the

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paratactic (additive, that is, rather than subordinating)

construction of the verse leaves some work for the reader

to do—or some room for maneuver, as the case may be.

The syntactic relationship between the third and fourth

lines of the verse—“He fills his head with culture / He

gives himself an ulcer”—seems clear enough, even if

the physiological mechanism remains obscure. And the

movement from the first couplet (“At home he feels

like a tourist,” ×2) to the second suggests that home may

mean more than just the subject’s residence: he’s equally

ill at ease in his home town and homeland as in his semi-

detached bungalow or council flat, and experiences his

day and his world—his life—as a process of purchasing

cultural attainments, investing in cultural capital.

The protagonist of the song is what we might call a

“culture vulture”—that peculiar product of late capitalism

who seeks to improve his lot by acquiring cultural capital

on credit, culture he can neither afford nor turn to real

profit and which, as a result, ironically makes him feel

less at home and more impoverished than ever. The great

literary example of this uniquely postindustrial figure is

Leonard Bast in E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910):

Oh, to acquire culture! Oh, to pronounce foreign names
correctly! Oh, to be well informed, discoursing at ease

I’m assuming that the term “cultural capital,” which derives from the

work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, has a kind of common

currency by now. For a vivid explanation of the term and its stake in

cultural criticism, see Carl Wilson’s volume on Celine Dion, Let’s Talk
About Love, in the 33

series (New York and London: Continuum,

2007).

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on every subject that a lady started! But it would take
one years. With an hour at lunch and a few shattered
hours in the evening, how was it possible to catch up
with leisured women who had been reading steadily
from childhood?

Commodity capitalism is able both to reify every-

thing, including cultural attainments, turning them

into objects that one might acquire—and to articulate

cultural capital as a kind of compensatory economy

to placate those left behind by the class system, those

who will never marshal sufficient financial capital

to control their own destinies. The Victorian myth

of “self-culture” (cf. Samuel Smiles’ hugely popular

Self-Help, 1859) suggests that there is no excuse for the

man left behind by the juggernaut of capital: while not

everyone’s bank account can be bigger than average,

everyone is responsible for his or her own store of

cultural capital.

The B verse—there’s just the one, though repeated—

works quite differently. A new musical theme introduces

the new material and, it turns out, a new venue: an elastic

bass line magically transports us to “the disco floor” just

as it had, surreptitiously, in

“Glass.”

If home has become

a place of profound strangeness, neither is there any

respite to be found in “entertainment”—a term that

the album’s title has of course rendered deeply suspect.

The disco, at least, should provide the subject access to

diverse forms of pleasure. Rather than a place to escape

from it all, however, the club proves to be yet another

outpost of capital’s reign—it’s a market of the senses, and

everything has its price.

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A nameless, malevolent “they” hovers over the scene:

Down on the disco floor
They make their profit
From the things they sell
To help you cob off

My big American ears had always heard that last line as

“help you come off,” which I’d assumed was an English

hybrid of “come” and “get off” (and I was right): pleasure,

rather than representing an escape from the circuits of

capitalist circulation, has instead been colonized by the

logic of profit and loss, and we’re made to pay for our

pleasure. In a reprise of the themes from “Natural’s Not

in It,” “Tourist” critiques the notion that the problem of

pleasure can be solved by consumption.

The B verse concludes, “And the rubbers you hide / In

your top left pocket.” Ahem—those rubbers: they proved

a watershed for Gang of Four. When I first heard the

song, I was proud of knowing that what we Americans

call erasers, the British call rubbers—being asked to pass

the rubber in a British office isn’t necessarily a salacious

request. But in “Tourist,” rubbers means rubbers—

“Durex,” the leading British brand of prophylactic, is

substituted in the Peel Sessions version of the song. Those

aren’t erasers in his pocket. So the song’s “rubbers” are

a kind of faux ami for the Anglophile American listener:

sometimes a rubber is just a rubber.

And that thin latex sheath ultimately came between

Gang of Four and their one best shot at popular acclaim.

The band had been invited to perform “At Home He’s

a Tourist” on Top of the Pops, the United Kingdom’s

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popular-music tastemaker. The show had the power to

break a song and a band: perhaps equivalent to Dick

Clark’s American Bandstand in its heyday. Dave Allen points

to the success New Order enjoyed after performing “Blue

Monday” on Top of the Pops as an indicator of the show’s

ability to push an indie band into the limelight, a kind

of prominence that eluded Joy Division (New Order’s

precursor band)—and, as it turns out, Gang of Four.

In the week leading up to the performance, the BBC

got cold feet about those rubbers. One can appreciate

their reservations about the song, if not the specific

focus of their objection. The set for Top of the Pops

replicated a disco floor, upon which the studio audience

danced to the lip-synched performances of the week’s

hottest bands; having Gang of Four perform a song that

pointed out the corporate cooptation of teen rebellion,

on a program that profited from precisely that formula,

would have been inconceivable. Allen suspects there was

a darker motive behind their censorship, as well: because

of the band’s full-throated political commitments, “we

always felt there was some pressure somewhere not to

allow us to be given too much of a mouthpiece at that

period.” “We went to the studio to dub in ‘rubbish,’”

Allen says, “and during that period in the studio we

all began to realize that this is just ridiculous…. If

we were going to be pioneering, then we couldn’t be

hypocritical.” The single was subsequently banned by

BBC radio and television. (Perhaps the band’s very best

shot at a hit single, the borderline campy “I Love a Man

in a Uniform” from 1982’s Songs of the Free, was also

banned by the “Beeb” when the Falklands War broke

out.) Without the platform of Top of the Pops, and in the

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face of waning support from EMI (who instead began to

promote Duran Duran, surely a solid business decision),

“Tourist” stalled at #58 on the UK singles chart—the

Gang’s highest placement, but disappointing under the

circumstances.

Has melodica ever been the lead instrument in a rock

song?

“5.45”

: it’s the hour of twilight in northern climes in

early March or late October, signaled quite efficiently by

the strange timbre of Jon King’s blow organ. It’s something

of a lift from the dub reggae that Gang of Four so admired,

especially the pioneering work of Augustus Pablo—but

it’s also, as King has pointed out, a carryover from the

music instruction of British elementary school classrooms

(cf.

“Not Great Men”

). With this dual identity—exotic

Jamaican pedigree on the one hand, British primary-school

roots on the other—as well as its otherworldly sonority,

the melodica manages to instill every Entertainment! track

on which it appears with an aura of menace. But nowhere

is its influence so pronounced as on

“5.45,”

where it

functions as much as a sound effect as an instrument,

lending the song a kind of grim and desolate quality—

the West Yorkshire equivalent, perhaps, of Bill Monroe’s

high lonesome sound. Nothing says “urban anomie” like

the minor-key melodica. And somehow one hears the

plastic: it’s high lonesome, but it’s also industrial and mass

produced. It’s the cheaply made factory whistle blowing a

song not of release, but of bondage.

Although not everyone agrees with him, Andy Gill believes that their

spot was given to Dire Straits, who performed “Sultans of Swing”

(Lester, 67). That, alone, would be a lot to live down.

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“5.45”

is a twilight song in more senses than one, for

it also announces, we come to realize, the twilight of the

British Empire, upon which the sun was supposed never

to set. The last blow to the Empire had been the humili-

ating nationalization of the Suez Canal by Egypt on July

26, 1956; in British public consciousness this quickly

eclipsed the release of Elvis’s “That’s All Right Mama”

a week earlier. The pathetic annexation of Rockall on

September 18, 1955 did nothing to cushion that blow:

and by the time the album was written, Great Britain’s

military engagements had become an entirely internal

matter—the ongoing struggle against the Provisional

IRA in Ulster, which makes up part of the matter of

“Ether.” (The subsequent humiliating victory, if one can

call it that, of the United Kingdom over Argentina in the

Falkland Islands in 1982 was seen by much of the outside

world as an embarrassment rather than a triumph.)

“Glass”

talks about all the framing, visible and

invisible, that ideology imposes;

“5.45”

is about the

most obtrusive and influential framing in all of contem-

porary culture: that of the television screen. “How can

I sit and eat my tea / With all that blood flowing from

the television?” How, indeed? I willfully heard Gill

singing “drink my tea,” in part because the idea of eating

tea is incomprehensible to an American: for Britains

and Americans “separated,” as George Bernard Shaw

quipped, “by a mutual language,” foodstuffs remain

some of the most stubborn faux amis, because they sound

familiar. Given the band’s awareness of the writing of

Raymond Williams, it’s just possible that there’s a pun

embedded, as well, in that second line. In 1974 Williams

published Television: Technology and Cultural Form, in

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which he coined the term “television flow” to describe

the way that television programming attempts to create

a seamless fabric of programming and commercials

that keeps a viewer hooked. In

“5.45,”

the television’s

flowing, indeed—but it’s the flow of blood from the

nonstop carnage of worldwide military intervention. In

a culture in which television creates as much as reports

the news—and creates, as well, instant celebrities—the

violence of warfare is transformed, and “guerilla war

struggle is a new entertainment”:

Watch new blood on the 18-inch screen
The corpse is a new personality
Ionic charge gives immortality
The corpse is a new personality

The song’s narrow harmonic range is matched perfectly

by Gill’s narrow emotional range: in his robotic delivery

(like the Edge singing “Numb” on U2’s 1993 Zooropa),

alienation is registered in the flat affect of his singing.

And yet ennui rarely sounds this exciting, this urgent,

this explosive—this entertaining. What happens when

the state of exception becomes unexceptional—becomes

banal? The old saw is that television brought the Vietnam

War into the living room, making it intolerable to large

swathes of the American public; a decade after “the living

room war” we’ve become desensitized, and the violence,

rather than an obscenity, is merely an annoyance. Like

“Guns Before Butter,”

the song presents warfare as

spectacle to be passively consumed.

This is also the album’s surprise title track: “Guerilla

war struggle is a new entertainment.” With the phrase

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repeated eight times, over (and sometimes under)

insistent martial drums, by rights this should be the

album’s closing track, as well; and yet its closing feedback

is picked up and greatly amplified in the album’s tour-

de-force closer,

“Anthrax,”

into which—in the album’s

actual track sequence—

“5.45”

flows, sonically, without

interruption.

Note

E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910; New York:

Vintage-Random House, 1989), 42.

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100

•

Keyword #6: Consumer

According to Marxist theory, part of the hidden ideological

damage wrought by capitalism is that all relationships

eventually take on the character of financial exchange,

and everything can be bought and sold. Capitalism,

owing to an always looming crisis of overproduction,

encourages us to identify first and foremost not as

subjects, but as consumers; in some instances, we’re told

by our government that we have a patriotic duty to go

out and buy. Some of the most compelling tracks on

Entertainment! are fueled by the confusion experienced by

these consumers of advertising who strive to be subjects

of their own experience. Consumerism and commodity

culture present just the most dramatic example of the

kind of alienation central to Entertainment!: how can I

inhabit my own experience authentically? What possi-

bility is there for human freedom and agency in a world

where (to use the title of a track from 1991’s Mall )

money talks, and only money has real freedom of speech?

How can we utter any but the speech bequeathed us by

society’s power structure?

The fallacy involved in thinking of oneself first

and foremost as a consumer means that we give

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up our identities as producers. Whereas one of the

signal accomplishments of cultural studies has been

the destruction of the convenient binary opposition

between “consumer” and “producer”: consumption is

not an entirely passive process, we now realize, but

an activity involving real choices and creativity. And

if cultural “producers” don’t provide such options and

such agency, consumers are sure to hack out a spot for

themselves. One of the lessons of punk’s DIY aesthetic

was that fan culture could become an active creation,

as reflected in punk ’zines, clothing, and hair styles—

lifestyles writ large. Just think of Jamie Reid’s sleeve for

the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen”: an assemblage

of image and text, none of it original, is made to violate

the wishes of the original creators and détourned into a

ransom note from those the official political structure

had left behind.

As Raymond Williams points out, “it was really only in

[the mid-twentieth century] that the word [“consumer”]

passed from specialized use in political economy

to general and popular use” (79). We seem to have

forgotten, then, that (to paraphrase Morrissey) consumer

isn’t something you are, but something you do. All traces

of the human have been stripped away from the label;

“customer,” Williams reminds us, “had always implied

some degree of regular and continuing relationship to

a supplier, whereas consumer indicates the more abstract

figure in a more abstract market” (79). Or as Jon sings

“Return the Gift”:

“It’s on the market / You’re on

the price list.” It’s an example of the larger logical fallacy

that Ralph Waldo Emerson critiqued in his essay “The

American Scholar”—the reification that occurs when

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the activity that a person habitually (or professionally)

performs comes to stand in for the person.

Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but
he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and
producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state these
functions are parceled out to individuals, each of whom
aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other
performs his.… Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing,
into many things. The planter, who is Man sent out into
the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any idea of
the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and
his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer,
instead of Man on the farm.

In Emerson’s thought, the lapse from “Man on the farm”

to “farmer” is a version of the biblical fall: humankind

has lost the potential that was its birthright.

How much

more is lost, in the mid-twentieth century, in the fall

from “farmer” to “tractor”?

Throughout the album, this critique of consumerism

is intimately tied to a critique of advertising. “The devel-

opment of modern commercial advertising,” Williams

writes, “… is related to the same stage of capitalism: the

creation of needs and wants and of particular ways of

satisfying them, as distinct from and in addition to the

notification of available supply which had been the main

earlier function of advertising” (79). This helps to explain

Gang of Four’s fascination with the Situationists—who

discovered, in the détournement of advertising images

and slogans, a way to turn the world of consumption-as-

lifestyle on its head.

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“Return the Gift”/“I Found That

Essence Rare”

Return the gift? The very notion is repugnant to most

young college students. They make up a very desirable

target market, and colleges and universities choose

their corporate partners carefully, deciding which

financial institutions, for instance, will be allowed to

hawk credit cards on campus. A free gift—something

as cheap as a t-shirt—is typically the reward for

completing an application. Of course a gift is, on the

face of it, something to be sought after, not rejected.

And for an American student, at least, the lyrics

“Return the Gift”

also present some significant

linguistic obstacles to understanding. Not because of

mondegreens, exactly: I can’t say that in any instance

I was twisting Jon King’s words to fit my preconcep-

tions. But in some cases I couldn’t make sense of what

I thought I was hearing, and so was forced to question

whether I was hearing correctly.

It’s there in the very first line: “Head away from

the years / You’re on the price list.” That second line

I got, I get, as disturbing as it is: human beings have

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become objects of exchange in a generalized economic

system. It’s a bold observation for a new band that’s just

signed with EMI—but then, few are as aware of being

made into consumer goods as stars of the concert stage

and the television and movie screen. But the opening

line I couldn’t believe I was hearing correctly, because

I couldn’t make it make sense. The song’s opening

couplet is repeated three times, but that’s no help: the

words are individually clear enough … and yet, collec-

tively, hopelessly unclear. My understanding of the song’s

opening line remained, and perforce remains, uncertain,

unstable. How does one “head away” from the years?

Are we in the territory of Andrew Marvell’s “To His

Coy Mistress”—“But at my back I always hear / Time’s

wingèd chariot hurrying near”? Given the song’s larger

narrative, a sound-alike suggests itself, for both of the

opening lines: “Head away from your cares / You’re on

the guest list.” Suddenly we’re in an advertisement for

a cruise line. “Years,” along with its near-rhyme “cares,”

triggers an emotional response that’s at least on the right

track: the song is about the (false) promise of a new start,

a new life unburdened by the disappointments of the past

and the boredom of the present.

Certainly the song, both lyrically and musically,

establishes an atmosphere of monotony in its first 30

seconds, such as to make escape seem quite desirable.

I’ve suggested that Andy Gill sets up a guitar siren

that runs through

“Not Great Men”

; this is even more

obviously the case in

“Return the Gift,”

which opens

with a series of pairs of descending plucked notes—the

sequence A–G played 16 times before the drums, bass,

and vocal line join in. (And those 16 siren squalls, it

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turns out, are symmetrical with the 16-times repeated

“Please send me evenings and weekends” that closes the

song.) Of course the second line says not that you’re on

the guest list, or even the prize list, but the price list: big

difference. In fact, much about the song is captured in

the difference between a prize list and a price list. Think

of the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes: “You

may have already won!” means, nominally, that you’re

on the prize list—but, in point of fact, you really ought

make a purchase in order to have a chance of winning.

You’ve won nothing … other than the dubious freedom

to sell yourself to the highest bidder. Your prize comes

at a price.

Discussing the song, Jon explains: “You know, you

get these offers that promise so much and, to make sure

you know they’re value, you can even send them back.

The advice here, just do it. But not like Nike!”

His

détournement of the Nike slogan is a classic Situationist

move: for the song counsels not the mindless consumption

held out by multinational corporations as the path to

happiness, but rather that one return that “gift.” It’s the

one song title on Entertainment! that’s not lifted from

the lyric:

instead, it’s a command that stands outside

the confusion of the song’s narrator and narration.

Technically, the phrase

“return the gift”

is ambiguous—it

might mean to send the gift back, or it might mean to

Note for the fastidious: the title

“Guns Before Butter”

riffs on, rather

than quoting, “guns and butter” from the lyrics; “At Home He’s a

Tourist,” as we’ve discussed, asserts as fact what’s just an impression

in the lyrics;

“5.45”

renders in numbers the song’s “a quarter to six.”

“Natural’s Not in It”

opts for a colloquial contraction.

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reciprocate it. But the song itself makes the meaning

clear: this “gift” is to be returned, without prejudice and

without remorse, the same way the

“damaged goods”

are

to be sent back in that later track.

For a gift from the captains of industry is the gift that

keeps on taking. In our current era of e-marketing, these

temptations have greatly multiplied: we trade personal

data for small gifts, such as discounts or contest entries

or various kinds of “points,” everywhere from travel

loyalty programs to grocery store club cards to “free

trials” for subscription web services. Such a gift is a

Trojan horse which, once it has breached the consumer’s

defenses, proceeds to reorganize his intimate geography

after its own demands. The song’s example of the free

stay at a timeshare resort—“Come to Scotland / No

obligation”—is a brilliant, local illustration of this larger

cultural con: it’s easy to imagine a brochure having

landed in Jon’s or Andy’s mailbox and resulting in the

song (just as a perfume ad was responsible for triggering

“I Found That Essence Rare,”

and a feminist pamphlet

called “Why Theory?” spawned a song of the same

title). As anyone who has attended a timeshare infor-

mation session knows well, the “gift” is not free: not

hardly. These folks aren’t in business to lose money, and

they keep “giving away” weekend stays at resort spots

because they know that sufficient numbers of people

will keep buying in. As its “final word” about attending

a timeshare presentation, an article on the Money

Crashers website counsels:

Of course, not every single timeshare company is going
to entrap you in long sales pitches or put you in sub-par

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accommodations. It may be possible to find legitimate
timeshare deals, and have a fine experience on your
vacation. However, the bottom line is that you take a risk
when you accept free gifts from timeshare presenters,
and you need to remember that the gift does not come
without strings attached.

“But always strings attached,” we’re warned in “Natural’s

Not in It” (though the song’s artless suggestion that “we

all have good intentions” surely isn’t relevant here). If you

accept the gift, you’ll be cooped by the system that gave

it in the first place, and become obligated to it—or you

might even find, as with a virus, that you’re unknowingly

harboring and reproducing its genetic material. For the

gift in such situations always encodes the values belonging

to the corporation that bestows it; McDonald’s isn’t

giving away free Lipitor, after all, but plastic likenesses

of their cartoon corporate spokespeople. These “gifts,”

that is to say, perpetuate a cultural logic, and one that

perpetuates the recipient’s bondage. Would you sell your

immortal soul for a toaster? As Gilles Ivain wrote in the

first number of l’Internationale Situationniste in 1958,

“Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose

between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere

they have chosen the garbage disposal unit.”

Or in the

memorable words of Situationist Raoul Vaneigem that

Jon King mentioned to me in connection with “Return

the Gift”: “Who wants a world in which the guarantee

that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying

of boredom?”

I’ve been to a timeshare presentation: just once, and

it won’t happen again. But owing to that experience, I do

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love the line that sets up the song’s conclusion: “In the

spring who can say?” It’s perfectly ambiguous, depending

on whom one imagines to be speaking it. If it’s the

customer, he’s trying to put off the aggressive salesman:

I’m not in a position to do anything just now, but maybe in the

spring. If it’s the salesman, he’s trying to fabricate a sense

of urgency: If you wait until the spring, who knows if this

will still be available? But whoever speaks that first line,

the next belongs to the customer—and he’s desperate.

For what’s being marketed in the timeshare scheme

is leisure activity (entertainment!); what the market

seemingly cannot provide, and what the song’s subject

desperately wants, is leisure time—leisure, pure and

simple. The repeated “please send me evenings and

weekends” that closes the song: it’s all we hear for the last

full minute, and while Jon and Andy sing it together—

Jon assertive, Andy, as usual, desultory, halting—they

manage, collectively, to sound desolate. The anguish, if

not the manifest content, of those lines communicated to

me quite viscerally, but, for the longest time, I couldn’t

quite get my head around that phrase. Earlier in the song

the salesmen had beckoned, “come to Scotland”; given

that context, I’d wanted to hear “please send me evenings

and weekends” as an off-kilter response to that offer—I

can’t really get the time off work, but maybe if you could send

me for evenings and weekends? That would be a pretty

whimsical response, to be sure, but what I now think

the customer means is even more surreal: Don’t send me

For an eye-opening examination of the timeshare industry, see the

2012 documentary The Queen of Versailles (another entry, seemingly,

in our unplanned Marie Antoinette thread).

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leisure activities—send me leisure time. It might just be

that, contra

“Natural’s Not in It,”

the problem of leisure

is not what to do for pleasure—it’s that there’s simply no

time for leisure, given the pace of modern life and the

laboring conditions of the worker under late capitalism.

Hence the huge secondary market in timeshare

re-sales and sublets: the owner of two weeks in May at

the Hilton Craigendarroch Timeshare can’t afford the

time off work to visit—she’s scrambling just to make the

payment. The sales pitch has already offered to send her

“an inside shower,” an image that sounds peculiar in an

American’s ear: an “inside” shower is luxurious only by

contrast with one out of doors, and in this country we call

“indoor plumbing” simply “plumbing.” (For this reason,

American travelers are mystified by British hotels that

boast en suite rooms: first the French—we’re not much

for foreign languages—then the idea that a bathroom

within one’s hotel room is a boast-worthy feature.)

According to Jon,

“I Found That Essence Rare”

was

EMI’s choice for the lead single from Entertainment!; the

band, however, nixed this suggestion: “never missing a

chance to miss a chance, we said no way, the song was too

commercial (duh!) and wasn’t representative.”

“Essence

Rare” starts Side Two with big power chords and a burst

of pure pop power—if pop were permitted to decon-

struct the mystique of contemporary advertising. In fact, it

starts out in rather unpromising false-start fashion: various

band members trying unsuccessfully to count the song in,

followed by a chiming, circular four-note figure on Andy’s

guitar played—yes, that’s right—16 times. This might

sound unremarkable; this might in fact be unremarkable.

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On the live-in-studio Peel Sessions version of the song,

however, the band come in after eight; when they do so,

the whole thing feels much more like a pop song. Sixteen

reps of that figure, like the 16 at the start of “Return the

Gift” (and the 16 choruses at its close), are just too many.

As such, they begin to call attention to themselves … and

to the structure of the song … and, by implication, to the

structure of pop songs writ large. It’s another example of

Brecht’s “alienation effect”: when the opening phrase is

played eight times, it’s invisible; when it’s held for twice as

long, the listener is forced really to listen. It’s just one of the

ways that Gang of Four messed with pop song conventions.

Arguably,

“I Found That Essence Rare”

is Gang of

Four’s most Situationist track: a hapless first-person

narrator spouts uncritically the kind of advertising truisms

that the character in

“Return the Gift”

was committed to

questioning, and they’re almost persuasive enough to

convince him he’s happy. The biggest American “alter-

native” song of the 1990s, Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen

Spirit,” paid homage in its title to a women’s deodorant;

“Essence Rare” shows how seeing the world through the

lens of a perfume ad campaign creates a subject alienated

from his own lived experience. No one has captured this

form of alienation more vividly than Don DeLillo: in his

1985 novel White Noise the protagonist Jack Gladney,

convinced of his imminent death, goes to his children’s

bedrooms for a last glimpse of them: “First I would look

in on the smaller children. I moved quietly through the

rooms on bare white feet. I looked for a blanket to adjust,

a toy to remove from a child’s warm grasp, feeling I’d

wandered into a TV moment.”

In its jerky, propulsive

rhythm, this bright track is strangely reminiscent of

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Blondie’s song-about-a-stalker “One Way or Another,”

released the previous year—a similarity which, if recog-

nized, only serves to undermine the protagonist’s ersatz

sense of well-being.

After a bit of digging, I too found that Essence

Rare (it’s what I looked for). Such is the amnesia of

contemporary culture that it can be difficult to locate

in an Internet search, because references to the Gang of

Four song it inspired now far eclipse the perfume itself.

Essence Rare was launched by the French perfumer

Houbigant in 1928 in an attempt to capitalize on the

cachet and popularity of Chanel No. 5. An ad from April

1930, in the midst of the Great Depression, indicates a

price “from twenty-five to one hundred and twenty-five

dollars the flacon”; that translates, at current values, to

$350–$1,750. This is not Just Me™ by Paris Hilton. The

fragrance would have been familiar to the band owing

to its reintroduction in the 1970s. A 1977 ad from Vogue

magazine gets us even closer to the language of the song:

we searched until we found the Essence Rare. We
searched. Until we found a fragrance that starts softly,
develops beautifully and never seems to end. And then we
made it in perfume. In cologne spray. And in powdering.
Essence Rare by Houbigant.

Reckless Etymological Aside. In classical thought, the rarest

of all elements, or essences, was the “fifth element,”

beyond the common elements of earth, fire, water,

and air: the quintessence, as it was known. Aristotle had

another name for this substance, this essence rare:

αίθηρ,

or ether. Track One, Side One and Track One, Side Two

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kiss: “The happy ever after / It’s corked up with the

ether.”

In flipping the LP over, we’ve move from

“Ether”

’s

H-block to “Essence”’s H-bomb:

Aim for the body rare, you’ll see it on TV
The worst thing in 1954 was the Bikini
See the girl on the TV dressed in a Bikini
She doesn’t think so but she’s dressed for the H-Bomb

Sometimes chance throws a writer material he just

couldn’t make up. The bikini (swimsuit) was introduced

in 1946 by designer Jacques Heim and Louis Réard (a

mechanical engineer!; see Midge’s structural analysis

of the brassiere in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 Vertigo). It

was first marketed as the “Atome”; but after the nuclear

tests on the Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific—the most

infamous explosion being the hydrogen bomb test on

March 1, 1954—the suit was renamed the “bikini,”

perhaps because it was expected to send out shock waves

of its own. (And “blonde bombshell” Brigitte Bardot had

put the bikini on the international fashion map with her

1952 film Manina, la fille sans voiles—titled, in its UK

release, The Lighthouse-Keeper’s Daughter, and in its US

release, The Girl in the Bikini.) We rock historians like

to think that Elvis’s hips were the most disruptive force

unleashed in 1954; Gang of Four says we’re wrong.

I was surprised to discover, in talking with the band,

that

“I Found That Essence Rare”

is a track they’re now

slightly suspicious of—which would explain, perhaps,

their resistance to releasing it as a single. But back

in the days when the LP reigned, Side Two, Track

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One was a key position—the second most important

track on the album. According to Andy, “Essence Rare”

claimed that spot because, no matter that the band had

“always been suspicious and wary of it,” “it was a firm

favorite with the fans.” Despite the song’s relative acces-

sibility, however, both lyrically and musically, there’s

more than enough difficulty here to disqualify the song

as pop. We’ve already discussed how its opening defies

pop-song conventions; and those soaring chords of the

chorus are stitched together, during the middle eight,

with a perfectly titrated dose of Andy Gill’s screeching

feedback. Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” a clever bit of

nearly tongue-in-cheek pop, was 1979’s biggest hit. “I

Found That Essence Rare” is in no danger of being

confused with pop.

Lyrically, I stumbled in a few spots. “It’s what I looked

for” always sounded to me like “what I lived for”: same

thing con brio, I suppose. Then there’s the last verse, which

begins with this line: “Aim for politicians fair who’ll treat

your vote hope well.” Can we just admit it’s a bad line?

There’s a clever parallel set up with the opening lines of

the first two verses: “Aim for the body rare … Aim for the

country fair … Aim for politicians fair….” And that second

verse is a tricky one: one doesn’t ordinarily see the phrase

“country fair” and think “just and reasonable nation”;

having made that adjustment, though, “politicians fair” falls

right into line. But “treat your vote hope well”? I’d helpfully

substituted “treat your photo well,” allying it, I suppose,

with the notion of the photo opp. Is my mondegreen better

than the original? No, it’s not better—though the original is

pretty clumsy. But does it work? Yeah, it works.

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“I knew I’d get what I asked for”: this is the most

terrifying line in the song—perhaps on the album—and

yet the character who declares it does so as a victory

cry. He believes he’s beat the system, wrestled it to

the ground, forced it to surrender to him its treasures

and pleasures: this, my friends, is a man who has raged

against the machine. Sure, he got what he asked for. But

what did he ask for? He’s asked for precisely what the

machine wanted to give him from the start: an inside

shower, an 18-inch screen, rubbers in his top left pocket.

This is, as Michael Azerrad writes, “a world where people

want what they get and not the other way around.”

Our working-class hero is looking at the world through

Polaroid glasses, yes: rose-colored ones. The song isn’t,

and won’t.

Notes

Robin Murray, “Gang of Four Track by Track.”

http://www.clashmusic.com/feature/gang-of-four-

track-by-track (accessed June 5, 2013).

Christy Rakoczy, “Attending a Timeshare

Presentation for a Free Vacation–Good Idea?” http://

www.moneycrashers.com/attending-timeshare-

presentation-free-vacation/ (accessed July 25, 2013).

Gilles Ivain, “Formula for a New City,” l’Internationale

Situationniste no. 1, 1958, 16.

Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

(1967), trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London:

Rebel Press/Left Bank Books, 1994), 18.

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Keyword #7: Sex

In May 1979, Gang of Four returned to Workhouse

Studios on the Old Kent Road in South London to

record Entertainment! They’d been there previously to

record their first single for EMI, “At Home He’s a

Tourist” / “It’s Her Factory” (with the B-side having to

wait until Solid Gold for its album release); they returned

because they’d enjoyed making the single there and

because, according to Hugo Burnham, they liked the

fact that Ian Dury’s 1977 album New Boots and Panties!!

had been recorded there (and the band’s drum kit was

still in the studio when Gang of Four arrived). It’s that

rare album that makes Entertainment!’s punctuation seem

understated. During the New Boots sessions Dury also

recorded his best-known single, “Sex & Drugs & Rock &

Roll”—the title alone has become iconic, though because

Dury believed that singles shouldn’t be repackaged on

LPs, it doesn’t appear on the initial pressings of the

album itself.

I’d like to think that sex was in the air at the

Workhouse when Gang of Four arrived (and rock &

roll, obviously; as for the drugs, none make it onto the

record except for “some aspirin / Or some paracetamol”).

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Johnny Rotten had memorably dismissed sex on behalf

of punks everywhere as “two minutes of squelching

noises”; there is, apparently, no anarchist Kama Sutra.

The punks rejected sex as trivial, humiliating, beneath

notice: it always seemed like a pretty transparent pose

to me, like the homemade “Sex Is Stupid” t-shirt I

remember seeing on Sunset Boulevard in the mid-1970s.

For Gang of Four, on the other hand, sex more signifi-

cantly resembled “a struggle in the bedroom”: not class

struggle, of course, but sex struggle … which in Gang of

Four’s work we come to realize is in fact a version of the

class struggle, with women as a class subservient to men.

(This is made most explicit on “It’s Her Factory.”) The

problem wasn’t that sex under-delivered, then, but that it

was under-theorized.

In Gang of Four’s work, sex the activity (“sexual inter-

course,” as we quaintly used to say) is never divorced from

the politics of sexual difference: songs about sex were

always, as well, songs about the sexes. Gang of Four was

one of the postpunk bands most committed to revealing

the hidden costs of misogyny as part of a more general-

ized false consciousness that characterized modern life.

But as a group of four men in 1979 (although when Dave

Allen left the group, he was replaced on bass by Sarah

Lee, and Gail Ann Dorsey’s backing vocals are crucial

on a track like 1982’s “I Love a Man in a Uniform”),

sexual politics could only be productively explored from

the male point of view—so that in songs like “Damaged

Goods” and “Anthrax,” we’re presented with the ironized,

unreliable utterances of men entirely deluded by the

romantic myths that license systematic misogyny. It’s a

dilemma for a male songwriter, even if he’s a feminist:

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in order to write songs about sexual politics that are

descriptive and diagnostic—first-person documentary,

really, Gang of Four’s preferred approach—rather than

just hortatory, he’s got to pose either as an abused woman

or as a misogynist asshole.

The men in these songs are taking full advantage of

the sexual revolution of the 1960s without, apparently,

having learned any of its most important lessons. Sex

seems simply available in the songs on Entertainment!:

no man is begging any woman for his propers when he

gets home. These are not songs that could have been

written a decade earlier: they focus on the disappoint-

ments of sex, rather than the scarce supply. To put it

another way: these songs, too, complain about the lack

of “satisfaction”—but it’s a grievance based in quality

rather than quantity. The Beatles’ playful “Please Please

Me” (1963) and the Raspberries’ plaintive “Go All the

Way” (1972) seem equally quaint relics of a benighted

time. Precisely because sex is viewed exclusively from

a male point of view on Entertainment!, though—not as

There is a third way, of course—a third-person narrative about the

woman’s experience; Pearl Jam’s “Better Man” is a good example.

But here, the danger is that the male songwriter is presuming to

understand an experience that he, by virtue of his different place

in the sexual hierarchy, can never have undergone himself. “Better

Man” seems to me a thoughtful and sensitive song about domestic

violence; Eddie Vedder has suggested that the relationship depicted

is that of his mother and stepfather. Nevertheless some will criticize

the presumption involved in a male writing from the woman’s point of

view; at the same time, a look at the Internet message boards suggests

that a surprising number of fans think the song is about a “cheating

wife.” The dangers of unreliable narration….

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on “It’s Her Factory,” a third-person narrative of sexual

oppression also recorded in 1979—the songs function

as a vernacular record of how the promise of sexual

liberation had been betrayed by the residual forces

of patriarchy. It’s the logic we hear writ large in Bob

Seeger’s 1976 top-ten hit “Night Moves”: “I used her she

used me / But neither one cared / We were getting our

share.” But it’s the dude who assures us that “neither one

cared”; certainly he’s getting his share—whether she got

hers, we’ll perhaps never know, for the historical record

doesn’t preserve her voice.

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“Damaged Goods”/“Anthrax”

It makes perfect sense: if human relationships have been

reduced to commercial exchanges under capitalism, and

human beings are relegated to the status of commodities,

then we’re all at risk of being judged as merchandise.

According to that logic, we’re mass produced, inter-

changeable, and disposable; like household appliances,

it’s cheaper to toss us out when we become broken or

inefficient than to fix us. Joseph Conrad saw this clearly

more than a century ago, under the extreme condi-

tions of imperial slavery. In one of those jump-cuts that

give Heart of Darkness such an ethical charge, Conrad’s

narrator Marlow implicitly analogizes broken-down

African slaves to dilapidated industrial machinery:

I came upon a boiler wallowing in the grass, then found a
path leading up the hill. It turned aside for the boulders,
and also for an undersized railway-truck lying there on
its back with its wheels in the air. One was off. The thing
looked as dead as the carcass of some animal. I came upon
more pieces of decaying machinery, a stack of rusty rails.
To the left a clump of trees made a shady spot, where
dark things seemed to stir feebly….

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This was the place where some of the helpers had
withdrawn to die.
They were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were
not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing
earthly now,—nothing but black shadows of disease and
starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom.

Marx and Engels famously described the plight of the

worker under capitalism as a kind of slavery, a condition

that has been called by others “wage slavery”—a term that

serves to suggest that the conditions between Conrad’s

Africans and turn-of-the-century British factory workers

were different only in degree, not in kind. As Engels

wrote in his “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith,”

The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian
must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave,
property of one master, is assured an existence, however
miserable it may be, because of the master’s interest. The
individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire
bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone
has need of it, has no secure existence.

Follow the syllogism, then: if an industrial worker is

no more than a slave, and a slave is no more than a

“thing”…. The mid-century American notion of planned

obsolescence comes into play here, too: a few years

before the concept was articulated by Brooks Stevens

in 1953, playwright Arthur Miller’s archetypal salesman,

Willie Loman, intuitively understood that both the

things he bought and sold and his own productive years

as a worker carried an explicit sell-by date: “Once in my

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life I would like to own something outright before it’s

broken! I’m always in a race with the junkyard! I just

finished paying for the car and it’s on its last legs. The

refrigerator consumes belts like a goddam maniac.”

Damaged goods, then: that’s you and me. Or better,

in the song’s terms, that’s you, or that’s her: the song’s

myopic narrator seems able to deploy the language

of reification and planned obsolescence to dismiss his

lover, but betrays no awareness that he, too, is just a cog

in the machine. We’re shown the dark gothic version

of commodification here, with the lover rejected as

“damaged goods”

and the protagonist feeling he’s been

cheated. This is the album’s first “unreliable narrator”

track, a strategy central to its success. Meanwhile the

interplay between Gill’s harsh guitar and Allen’s fulsome

and melodic bass provides a dialogue as rich as that

between King’s and Gill’s vocals on other tracks. But the

bottom line is inescapable. We’re not just consumers:

we’re consumer goods.

“I Found That Essence Rare,”

the song’s lyric

is built on an advertising slogan—this time, an ad for

the American supermarket chain Albertsons. “Switch to

Albertsons. The change will do you good,” the newspaper

ads read; in the rhetoric of the grocery wars, this is what

counts as a clever pun. In the context of the song, the

slogan does work as a pun, but also as something more,

something darker: it becomes a euphemism for the man

This is, effectively, the converse of Jay-Z’s great couplet from his

verse on Kanye West’s “Diamonds (From Sierra Leone)”: “I’m not

a businessman, I’m a business, man / Let me handle my business,

damn!”

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dumping a lover he’s grown tired of. The change will do

you good, sweetheart: it’s that smug patriarchal assumption

that the man knows what’s best for his woman. It’s not

you, it’s me, he consoles her. And probably you’re better

off without me: “Sometimes I’m thinking

that I love

you / But I know it’s only lust.” Our protagonist no

doubt thinks this bare confession makes him a giant of

ideological demystification: Though I’m tempted to disguise

it in the delusional language of romantic love, all I feel toward

you is lust, animal lust. From another perspective, though,

he seems just another predatory cad: for all its mystifi-

cation, “love” at least suggests something like reciprocity

and obligation to the other. Lust, of course, carries no

such burden.

Part of the song’s drama is carried by the strategic

use of instrumental dropouts, a technique the band

brought over from dub reggae and refashioned to their

own purposes. “It was kind of just happening then,” Gill

says of the rise of dub reggae in the United Kingdom

in 1976–7—“which is interesting. And listening to dub

stuff and hearing things drop out—the drums carry

on or you hear the drums drop out and the bass

carries on.” Entertainment! has occasional instrumental

solos—the sustained guitar feedback that opens the

album’s closing track,

“Anthrax,”

comes to mind—but

more commonly, an instrument disappears from the

mix for a time. Indeed the majority of tracks on the

album—including every song on Side One—feature at

least one dropout moment, where the listener becomes

This is a verb form typically only found in the lingo of waiters and

waitresses: “How is everything tasting?”

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aware of the texture of instrumentation because part of

it suddenly, briefly, disappears. For the first 11 seconds of

“Damaged Goods,”

bass and drums play in syncopation;

then the guitar comes in and all play together for the

next 30 seconds, until the bass suddenly drops out for 5

or 6 seconds. Twenty seconds later, the guitar disappears

for a bit; then, from 1:43 until 2:14, it’s drums alone, with

the bass dropping out, again, for 12 seconds near the

song’s end. The effect—besides pushing and pulling the

song’s dynamic range in different directions—is largely

to provide different kinds of framing for the vocals,

throwing them into different kinds of sonic relief.

The song begins with the ad jingle, “The change will

do you good”; but its controlling metaphor, of course, is

that of defective merchandise—

“damaged goods”

—and

that figure is expounded upon in a nearly spoken-word

section sung by Andy Gill, with Jon King’s descant

floating above and echoing the melody line. King doesn’t

play melodica on this track, but his voice takes that

role: a lonesome, longing lament. I claimed earlier

that the song’s protagonist shows no self-awareness, his

keen analysis of others’ shortcomings notwithstanding;

the lyrics in this B section of the song might seem to

contradict that reading, as “Damaged goods / Send them

back” becomes “Send me back” just a couple of lines

later. But this is not, as it might appear at first glance, the

speaker suggesting that he too belongs on the rubbish

heap. The syntax is quite insidious here:

Damaged goods
Send them back
I can’t work

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I can’t achieve
Send me back
Open the till
Give me the change
You said would do me good
Refund the cost
You said you’re cheap but you’re too much

The damaged goods—the one with whom he’s exchanged

kisses so sweet, sweat so sour—needs to be sent back.

But the next demand, though similar looking, couldn’t

be more different—“send me … the change you said

would do me good,” he insists. I’m returning these

damaged goods—this partner who, as

“Contract”

puts

it, “couldn’t perform in the way the other wanted”—and

I want my money back. That was the sales contract,

after all.

And then the song’s finale—what one would be

tempted to call “the long goodbye,” in which Jon and

Andy sing, antiphonally, “I’m kissing you goodbye /

Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.” They’re singing, osten-

sibly, to an absent third party, those damaged goods that

have been packed up and shipped back. To be stubbornly

literal about what’s happening in the aural space of the

record, though, they’re singing farewell to one another:

this is a version of the homoeroticism that Patricia

Juliana Smith detects in the call-and-response of the girl

groups.

The lyrics play, obviously, on both the tender

and the flippant senses of kissing someone (or something)

goodbye. But whichever sense prevails, there’s something

profoundly dishonest about the gesture: a goodbye kiss

that lasts a full 37 seconds arguably demonstrates at least

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some ambivalence, some connection to the object one’s

meant to be casting off.

“Damaged Goods”

was the title track of the band’s

first record—the three-song single that also included

“Armalite Rifle” and the track that would ultimately

close Entertainment!,

“Anthrax.”

At the time, the song

was called “Love Like Anthrax.” It also found Andy Gill

throwing a very different speech into the teeth of Jon

King’s anti-love song: more about that shortly. And it

just might be one of the most definitive and powerful

album-closing tracks in all of rock & roll. No one ever

listened to Entertainment!, I’d venture to guess, and,

after hearing

“Anthrax,”

thought there was anything

left.

Gang of Four played a dangerous game by writing

first-person songs and placing them in the mouths

of unreliable narrators. It’s a risk taken by any band,

musician, or song whose mode of operation is theatrical

rather than confessional; narrative rather than lyric;

ironic rather than sincere. By this point, my sympathies

must be clear: as one who misspent a good part of his

second senior year in college immersed in this music,

it seems to me a risk entirely worth taking. Let me

suggest a way of reading

“Anthrax,”

then, that recognizes

and respects the song’s irony, the theatrical rather than

confessional mode that the song employs. Reading irony

is, first and foremost, a matter of restoring the multiple

contexts into which cultural texts are always born. Let’s

The closing line of a Waylon Jennings song is apposite here: “Get

your tongue out of my mouth I’m kissing you goodbye.”

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try then to imagine the experience of hearing

“Anthrax”

for the first time: the steps that an ideal (or idealized)

listener might go through in hearing and making sense

of the song.

Focusing on the process, the whole listening

experience, our point of entry has to be the packaging—

the very materiality of the record album itself. Even as

punk and postpunk records go, it’s a pretty remarkable

album cover. Thus before the shrink-wrap has been

removed, a would-be listener has been put on notice

that she’ll get not comfort but critique—neo-Hegelian

dialectic, as a matter of fact. And irony: just as Bowie’s

“Heroes” insists on its quotation marks, the exclamation

point on Entertainment! functions like a pair of scare

quotes, directing our attention to the faux-fabulousness

built into its title. Entertainment is simultaneously

promised us and mocked. (This gesture is turned up a

couple of notches on the band’s next release, Solid Gold—

ironic enough, apparently, not to require any kind of

diacritical marker.)

This much would be obvious to a mere viewer of

Entertainment! As soon as the stylus is dropped on the

vinyl, another entire set of clues comes fast and furious.

To stumble upon

“Anthrax,”

our hypothetical listener

would have first to listen to every other track on the

album;

“Anthrax”

is Side Two, Track Six—the album’s

finale. (Well, all right, true enough: technically, one

could skip the first side, and start with “I Found That

Essence Rare.” But what kind of a pervert listens to an

LP that way?) Along the (long and winding) black vinyl

road to

“Anthrax,”

a listener would have taken in the

song

“Damaged Goods,”

in which (as we’ve seen) the

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singer explicitly likens his lover to a piece of defective

merchandise; the cut

“Natural’s Not in It,”

in which a

funk bass line undergirds lyrics that conduct an analysis

of the hegemonic power at the base of all relation-

ships; and the song

“Contract,”

which exposes romantic

relationships as business contracts no different from any

other. Thus a listener who has been paying any attention

at all to the album would be more shocked at this point

by a McCartney-style “silly love song” than by anything

Gang of Four has to offer. If we take as our text not just

the single track

“Anthrax,”

but instead the larger context

that the entire album constructs, we would expect to

find a song not necessarily cynical about the possibility

of love, but disgusted with its cynical manipulation

by the organized desiring machines of multinational

corporate capitalism.

But what happens if we ignore the context the album

creates and pay attention only to the small text of the

song itself? Even under these straitened conditions, it’s

hard to come away from

“Anthrax”

believing that its “key

image” is that of a “lovesick victim,” or that the song

suggests that love is “a disabling, paralysing force that

diverted energy from the righteous business of political

analysis and activism.” Such an interpretation—and it

is, of course, Reynolds and Press’s—cynically uses a

knowledge of the band’s political sympathies to belittle

their music; this same condescending tone is apparent

in their passing reference to the band as a “bunch of

neo-Marxists.” The song’s protagonist does find himself

stuck in a rut, “like a beetle on its back”; what has

paralyzed him, however, is not some femme fatal, nor

even love itself, but specifically a romantic ideology of

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love that serves the interests of and is maintained by

the power structures of Western culture—and bears no

necessary relation to “reality,” as problematic as that

notion is. The unnaturalness of it all is emphasized from

the very start, in Andy Gill’s self-absorbed, even mastur-

batory feedback guitar solo; if this is to be a love song,

it’s like none we’ve ever heard before. It sounds, instead,

like a Beatle on its back.

And are there any love songs that are not “escapist and

sentimental”? Think for a minute about the love songs

that would have been getting British airplay in the mid-

to-late-1970s. The Sweet’s Top Ten hit “Love Is Like

Oxygen” (1978) comes to mind: “Love is like oxygen /

You get too much you get too high / Not enough and

you’re gonna die / Love gets you high.” It sounds like

these lads are ripping off Roxy Music’s “Love Is the

Drug” (1975) without, however, having quite understood

it—that is, having completely missed its irony. There’s

only one response to a sentiment like this: to say, as Jon

King in effect does, “Love isn’t like oxygen—it’s like

fucking anthrax”—the symptoms of which are, according

to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “excitement and a rise in

body temperature”—sounds like love so far!—“followed

by depression, spasms, respiratory or cardiac distress,

trembling, staggering, convulsions, and death.” Thus

Gang of Four’s love song might also be the punchline to

a joke for which Nazareth’s big 1976 hit, “Love Hurts,”

is the setup—“How much does love hurt?”

This much is apparent in Jon King’s bewildered lead

vocal: this young man doesn’t know what’s happening

to him or around him. It’s what, for my money, makes

Gang of Four finally more interesting and important

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than a band like Rage Against the Machine: rather than

deploying the usual Marxist blunt instrument, Gang

of Four respected their audience enough to tell them

stories—to use irony and narrative, rather than just

propaganda. And it’s probably worth pointing out that

even the didactic texts of the album cover are presented

in an undependable faux-naïve nursery-tale voice: “Those

who decide what everyone will do grow rich because the

decisions are made in their interest.” Even the Marxist

dogma for which the band was famous (and often vilified)

is subject to their wide-ranging ironic critique.

But we’re given more than just King’s lyrics to go

on—though, to be honest, the song’s second vocal text

is awfully tough to decipher. Not surprisingly, perhaps,

Greil Marcus has done a superb job of recreating the

experience of the song’s simultaneous tracks of lyrics

gradually becoming clear to a listener: “The effect is

disorienting and hilarious: Gill speaks in the deadpan

voice of a student called up to read his essay in front

of the class.”

Elsewhere, Marcus dubs Gill’s text a

“little dissertation on The Love Song as a Staple of Pop

Language.”

Once deciphered, it goes like this:

Love crops up quite a lot as something to sing about,
most groups make most of their songs about falling in
love or how happy they are to be in love, you occasionally
wonder why these groups do sing about it all the time—
it’s because these groups think there’s something very
special about it either that or else it’s because everybody
else sings about it and always has, you know to burst into
song you have to be inspired and nothing inspires quite
like love. These groups and singers think they appeal

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to everyone by singing about love because apparently
everyone has or can love or so they would have you
believe anyway but these groups go along with the belief
that love is deep in everyone’s personality and I don’t
think we’re saying there’s anything wrong with love we
just don’t think that what goes on between two people
should be shrouded in mystery.

Taking the mondegreen seriously has been one of my

projects in this book: but the confusion that results from

Jon King singing in one stereo channel while Andy Gill

mumbles in the other is so extreme that mondegreen

hardly seems adequate to the situation. Listening to a

handful of live recordings makes it evident, as well, that

Gill’s narrative never turned out precisely the same way

twice—it was, to some degree, improvised each time

around a core set of ideas, words, and phrases.

More confusing still: in the version of the song recorded

for the

“Damaged Goods”

single, which preceded the

Entertainment! LP by nearly a year, Gill’s text performs an

altogether different kind of ideological work. Rather than

critiquing King’s thralldom to love, he instead demys-

tifies the technologies of record production: “[Cough]

We’re using a Soundcraft with a 24-into-16 track, with

a parametric EQ on every channel, it’s a 16-track Cadey

machine, a JBL Quad monitor, and AKG, flanging,

reverb, with echo, taped echo, chorus echo….” Love

here sounds more like Ampex than anthrax. A die-hard,

dyed-in-the-wool Gang of Four fan would, I suppose,

have heard and known “Love Like Anthrax” before ever

hearing the album cut

“Anthrax”

—and hearing Andy’s

very different speech on the later recording would no

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doubt have thrown him for a loop. I’m not that guy: I

heard the single only long after having memorized every

note of the album … and I just couldn’t get my head

around this earlier version. The lecture on the ideology

of the love song that Andy gives on Entertainment! is

so perfect, seemingly so inevitable—it’s impossible to

imagine the song ever having been different. That the

speech Andy gives might have started as a slight, slightly

art-school experiment in Brecht’s “alienation effect,”

foregrounding the recording’s devices … and end up in

this sublime deconstruction of the pop love song? Suffice

it to say that lightning struck. According to Andy, “The

point about Anthrax (as we intended it anyway) is that

it’s anti-music. And anti-technique although it’s funky

as fuck.”

In the light of Gill’s running commentary in the

album version, it should have been impossible to miss

the fictional nature of King’s character, the ironic nature

of his comments on love; this is, after all, a text that

offers consumers the convenience of built-in interpre-

tation, almost like the commentary track on a film DVD.

But miss it, smart listeners sometimes have: perhaps

Rage’s opting for in-your-face agitprop, in a song like

“Wake Up”—“Wake up and stop fuckin’ sleeping. Wake

up”—is just a sound pragmatic decision.

Irony’s a pretty

I’m cheating just a little bit here: the studio recording of “Wake

Up” closes with Zack de la Rocha repeating the title warning eight

times, but without dropping the F-bomb. I’m referring, rather, to his

infamous stage chatter from a February 2, 1993, Stockholm show:

“We’ve been all put to sleep. Put to sleep to a system. A system that

continues to perpetrate ignorance amongst our spirit and amongst

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unreliable messenger, apparently even with an intel-

ligent audience. Sometimes decried as unreconstructed

misogyny (and by critics who ought to know better),

“Anthrax”

instead stages a dramatic dialogue between

authentic and false consciousness, with Jon King the

deluded lover in the throes of false consciousness, while

Andy Gill (in the right channel) gives a kind of Marxist

critique-cum-sermon about the ideology of romantic

love. But Gill’s contribution is nearly unintelligible: how

can it work effectively as a rebuttal of King’s misogynistic

Romanticism? Having to steer between the Scylla of

didacticism and the Charybdis of irony and unreliable

narration, how can political rock hope to make its way?

Notes

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1898; New York:

Penguin, 1983), 42, 44.

“Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith,”

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist

Manifesto, ed. L. M. Findlay (Peterborough, Canada:

Broadview, 2004), 107.

our minds. One that wants you not to act. A system that would rather

see all of you at that bar drinking beer filling your minds being put

to sleep with beer or with drugs rather than acting against it and

fighting a system which has been perpetrating imperialist lies and

other fucking bullshit for five hundred years. So fuckin’ drink up

or fuckin’ wake up. You’re part of the solution or you’re part of the

fuckin’ problem. I am sick and tired of my own complacence in my

life and I know I’m fuckin’ sick of yours. So wake up and stop fuckin’

sleeping. Wake up.”

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Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (New York:

Viking, 1949), 73.

See “‘Ask Any Girl’: Compulsory Heterosexuality

and Girl Group Culture,” in Dettmar and Richey,

eds, Reading Rock & Roll, 93–124.

Greil Marcus, “Gang of Four,” Ranters & Crowd

Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music 1977–92 (New York:

Doubleday, 1993), 52.

Marcus, “Suspicious Minds,” Ranters & Crowd

Pleasers, 152.

Andy Gill, email to the author, July 17, 2013.

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•

Conclusion: An Apology;

an Epiphany

The Apology

I’ve structured this book in a way that gives primacy to

the integrity of individual songs, and then attempts to

highlight common themes and through-lines between

songs: in so doing, I’ve disrupted the Side A/Side B,

six-songs-a-side structure of the material artifact itself,

the Entertainment! LP issued by EMI and Warner

Brothers in the fall of 1979. I’ve re-sequenced the album

for my own purposes, but the actual running order was

quite different, and the experience of listening to the

record in the way Gang of Four had programmed it was

somewhat different, too. In conversation, Andy Gill has

suggested that the logic behind the running order was

just to insure that the best songs turned up early on the

album; John King, on the other hand, spoke of taking the

listener on a journey. If the running order of the songs

was meant to describe the itinerary of a journey, then I’ve

got the slides all out of order.

So what was it like to experience the album as an

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album, as it was sequenced by the band in a continuous,

40-minute listening experience?

To understand this, we’ll

have to take seriously what Jonathan Lethem, adopting

a term from the world of comix, calls the “gutters”: the

bands of silence between the tracks, silences which, on

Entertainment!, vary in length and function in important

ways to stitch some songs together, and to isolate others,

in a listener’s consciousness.

We’ve got a word, segue,

to talk about the overlapping of one track with another:

but that’s only one kind of work the gutters on an LP

can do. In our contemporary audio ecology, in which

songs exist primarily as discrete digital files of one kind

or another, these bands of no data have lost much of

their value: one’s CD player, or iPod, or iTunes software

will put one track after another, according to an album’s

running order, or a listener’s whim, or the software’s

random “shuffle” generator. But the manner in which

those tracks are placed side by side, the grout between

those tiles, no longer conveys any meaning.

That wasn’t true of the vinyl LP Entertainment!

Whether there was cunning planning behind those

gutters or whether, instead, I simply imbued them retro-

actively with meaning, filled with meaning they were.

“Ether”

ends, after Jon’s and Andy’s shouting about

Rockall, with three quick, definitive chords, guitar, bass,

and drums all together: Bu-Bu-BUM. Then, without

letting me catch my breath, I’m sprung into “Natural’s

Not in It” and its very different, syncopated rhythm,

slashed on Andy’s tinny-sounding guitar: Bu-bu-BUM,

Or, in fact, two 20-minute listening sessions, since Side One and Side

Two were imagined as integral units.

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Bu-bu-BUM, Bu-bu-BUM, Bu-bu-BUM …. “Natural’s

Not in It” ends on one loud, tense, crashing chord, the

very sound of Jon’s migraine; then after a 1.8-second

silence that seems to last forever, Hugo’s toms start

“Not Great Men”

with a beat that sounds for all the

world like the beat of a heart, seeming to pick up and

quicken the beat of my own. In one spot in particular on

Entertainment!—the segue between

“5.45”

and

“Anthrax,”

the album’s penultimate and ultimate tracks—the gutter

is actually flooded with the sustained high-pitch guitar

tone that closes the 11th track and which, sustained,

haunts the 12th and final.

And so on: the songs each rely on an exceptionally

dramatic structure, both lyrically and sonically—but

there’s drama too in the way those songs are spliced

together. It’s a record that seems to give no quarter as

the listener is ricocheted from one crisis to another, kept

continually off balance.

The Epiphany

I saw Gang of Four on November 9, 1980. Just two

weeks earlier, I’d gone on a first date with a girl named

Robyn. I thought it had gone pretty well; she didn’t come

to the Gang of Four show with me, but nine months

later, we were married. So, for over three decades now,

she’s been living with me and my record collection; she

must have known too, on that fall night in 1980, that I’d

chosen to see a band over seeing her. Which is just to say,

on some level, she knew what she was in for.

As I was finishing up work on this book, I felt the

need, in email correspondence with an acquaintance, to

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•

establish my credentials for having undertaken it. I was

writing to someone who cares deeply about the album—

and who, I sensed, worried that I didn’t care as much. I

wrote: “Two texts are the lodestars of my intellectual life:

James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Entertainment!” I mentioned

this exchange to Robyn, and she was surprised: indeed,

she basically thought I was lying. And I take her point: in

the spirit of full disclosure, I should say that my proposals

for 33

volumes on Brian Eno’s Here Come the Warm Jets

and David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and

the Spiders from Mars were unceremoniously rejected

in earlier rounds. When it came time to run another

proposal up the flagpole and watch no one salute, for

some reason this time Entertainment! was the obvious

choice—and not just because volumes on other Eno and

Bowie albums have already appeared in the series. I’m

not sure, at the time I made the proposal for this book,

that I could have explained why it was the right choice;

somehow, in the proposal, I managed to convince former

series editor David Barker and his crew that it was. But

now that I’ve spent the past year living intimately again

with the album, and letting it infiltrate the deepest and

darkest recesses of both my 21- and 54-year-old brain, I

think I understand.

Because there’s something that Ulysses and

Entertainment! have in common: both are concerned with

the importance of narrative, of storytelling, as a mode

of understanding and experiencing the world. Another

way to say this is that the stories that we tell ourselves

about “the way things are”—a body of stories that,

in another context, we might call ideology—profoundly

shape our experiences of the world. Stories (or ideology,

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or paradigms) don’t just help us to communicate our

experience—they constrain and shape and condition

our experience. The point is put more plainly in “Why

Theory,” from Solid Gold (1982): “Each day seems like a

natural fact / And what we think changes how we act.”

That insight, which I gleaned from Entertainment! before

I’d heard Solid Gold and long before I’d been able to tease

it out of Ulysses, has proved one of the most powerful

theoretical guiding lights for my professional work. I got

it from a postpunk record.

But as I’ve been at pains to insist throughout this

book, the album points toward, without ever preaching

or insisting on, this profound human truth. The album’s

made up of debate and dialogue: it’s not concerned with

figuring out (never mind presenting) answers, but in

opening up interesting questions, engendering productive

confusion. Part of this comes through the staccato syntax

of the lyrics (

“Ether”

); part, through the staging of

different voices and positions in the song (

“Ether”

this is what makes

“Ether”

the obvious album opener.

In part, too, through mondegreens: this isn’t something

a band can program or plan, but when it happens, it’s

another way of making the listener an active producer of

meaning, and co-owner of the politics of the songs.

Entertainment! is a political record: as pitilessly political

as they come. But politics isn’t, or isn’t primarily, the

content: politics is its medium, its very form. The

album doesn’t preach political lessons: it models political

analysis, teaches, by example, a supple and subtle form of

political theory. And that shit is powerful.

Let me close, then, with a story. Though it’s not one

of my own, it feels like it is; it was read to me in the

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

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early grades of elementary school, and my brain, as it

has with Ulysses and Entertainment!, has taken on some

of its contours and lines. It’s a children’s book, a “picture

book,” by Benjamin Elkin, with illustrations by James

Daugherty, called Gillespie and the Guards.

The plot’s

pretty simple: the king of “a country far away from here”

hires three brothers with preternatural sight to act as

his guards, and offers a lavish reward to anyone who

can smuggle anything past them. Many try, but fail: the

brothers’ vision is simply too powerful, and any attempt

at subterfuge is quickly discovered. Then a young boy

named Gillespie decides to try his hand. He carts past

them a wagonful of leaves, with nothing hidden under-

neath them; a pile of sand; a pile of stones. Day after

day he pulls big piles of various materials past them, but

never do they discover anything beneath.

After a few weeks of this, Gillespie announces to

the king that he has fooled the guards, and would like

to collect his prize. But it’s not, as we might suspect,

because the guards had missed items hidden beneath

the leaves, the sand, the stones. Rather, Gillespie has,

over the course of days and weeks, snuck past the

guards “dozens and dozens and dozens of LITTLE RED

WAGONS!” They were hidden in plain view all along—

mere container, mere vehicle. Beneath the guards’ notice,

they hadn’t been noted.

And so it is with important cultural stories, or

paradigms, or ideology. It’s not the content, but the

structure, that seeps deep down into our psyches, and

profoundly shapes our worldview. Over the course of the

album, Entertainment! brought me stories of domestic

strife, political violence, false consumer consciousness,

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militarism, bad sex, historical amnesia, bourgeois

boredom, and futility. But it’s the deep structure of those

songs—the little red wagons, their seductive cocktail of a

sinuous rhythm section, abrasive, confrontational guitar,

and lyrical ideological critique—that went down deep,

and stuck.

Entertainment! isn’t an album to think about: in this

sense Robyn was right. There are probably a dozen

albums I think about more. Entertainment!, rather, is an

album to think with. And that’s way better.

Notes

See Jonathan Lethem, Talking Heads’ Fear of Music,

33 1/3 (New York: Continuum, 2012).

Benjamin Elkin, Gillespie and the Guards, illus. James

Daugherty (New York: Viking, 1956).

•

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•

Also available in the series

1. Dusty in Memphis by Warren

Zanes

2. Forever Changes by Andrew

Hultkrans

3. Harvest by Sam Inglis
4. The Kinks Are the Village Green

Preservation Society by Andy
Miller

5. Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice
6. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

by John Cavanagh

7. Abba Gold by Elisabeth

Vincentelli

8.  Electric Ladyland by John Perry
9.  Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott
10.  Sign ‘O’ the Times by

Michaelangelo Matos

11. The Velvet Underground and Nico

by Joe Harvard

12. Let It Be by Steve Matteo
13. Live at the Apollo by Douglas

Wolk

14.  Aqualung by Allan Moore
15.  OK Computer by Dai Griffiths
16.  Let It Be by Colin Meloy
17.  Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis
18.  Exile on Main Street by Bill

Janovitz

19.  Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli
20.  Ramones by Nicholas Rombes
21.  Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno
22.  Murmur by J. Niimi
23.  Grace by Daphne Brooks
24.  Endtroducing ... by Eliot Wilder
25.  Kick Out the Jams by Don

McLeese

26. Low by Hugo Wilcken
27. Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey

Himes

28. Music from Big Pink by John

Niven

29. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by

Kim Cooper

30.  Paul’s Boutique by Dan LeRoy
31.  Doolittle by Ben Sisario
32.  There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles

Marshall Lewis

33.  The Stone Roses by Alex Green
34.  In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar
35.  Highway 61 Revisited by Mark

Polizzotti

36. Loveless by Mike McGonigal
37. The Who Sell Out by John

Dougan

38. Bee Thousand by Marc

Woodworth

E N T E R T A I N M E N T !

•

144

•

39. Daydream Nation by Matthew

Stearns

40. Court and Spark by Sean Nelson
41. Use Your Illusion Vols. 1 and 2 by

Eric Weisbard

42. Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth

Lundy

43. The Notorious Byrd Brothers by

Ric Menck

44. Trout Mask Replica by Kevin

Courrier

45. Double Nickels on the Dime by

Michael T. Fournier

46. Aja by Don Breithaupt
47. People’s Instinctive Travels and the

Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor

48. Rid of Me by Kate Schatz
49. Achtung Baby by Stephen

Catanzarite

50. If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott

Plagenhoef

51. Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich
52. Let’s Talk About Love by Carl

Wilson

53. Swordfishtrombones by David

Smay

54. 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew

Daniel

55. Horses by Philip Shaw
56. Master of Reality by John

Darnielle

57. Reign in Blood by D. X. Ferris
58. Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden

Childs

59. Gentlemen by Bob Gendron
60. Rum, Sodomy & the Lash by

Jeffery T. Roesgen

61. The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob

Proehl

62. Pink Flag by Wilson Neate
63. XO by Matthew LeMay

64.  Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier
65.  Radio City by Bruce Eaton
66.  One Step Beyond ... by Terry

Edwards

67. Another Green World by Geeta

Dayal

68.  Zaireeka by Mark Richardson
69.  69 Love Songs by L. D. Beghtol
70.  Facing Future by Dan Kois
71.  It Takes a Nation of Millions to

Hold Us Back by Christopher R.
Weingarten

72.  Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles
73.  Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo
74.  Song Cycle by Richard

Henderson

75.  Kid A by Marvin Lin
76.  Spiderland by Scott Tennent
77.  Tusk by Rob Trucks
78.  Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne

Carr

79. Chocolate and Cheese by Hank

Shteamer

80. American Recordings by Tony

Tost

81. Some Girls by Cyrus Patell
82. You’re Living All Over Me by

Nick Attfield

83. Marquee Moon by Bryan

Waterman

84.  Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen
85.  Dummy by R. J. Wheaton
86.  Fear of Music by Jonathan

Lethem

87. Histoire de Melody Nelson by

Darran Anderson

88. Flood by S. Alexander Reed and

Philip Sandifer

89. I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall
90. Selected Ambient Works Volume II

by Marc Weidenbaum

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc.

1385 Broadway

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www.bloomsbury.com

Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury

Publishing Plc

First published 2014

or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or

mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information

storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from

the publishers.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization

acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this

publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dettmar, Kevin J. H., 1958-

Gang of Four’s Entertainment! / Kevin J. H. Dettmar.

pages ; cm -- (33 1/3)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-62356-065-2 (pbk.)

1. New wave music--History and criticism. 2. Gang of Four (Musical

group) I. Title.

ML3534.D484 2014

782.42166092’2--dc23

2013041816

ISBN: 978-1-62356-285-4

Typeset by Fakenham Prepress, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Document Outline