ENTERTAINMENT!
Praise for the series:
It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there
is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as
significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in
the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and
eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal
celebration — The New York Times Book Review
Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes
just aren’t enough — Rolling Stone
One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet — Bookslut
These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic
design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look
cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it
down in startling minutiae. We love these.
We are huge nerds — Vice
A brilliant series … each one a work of real love — NME (UK)
Passionate, obsessive, and smart — Nylon
Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful — Boldtype
[A] consistently excellent series — Uncut (UK)
We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only
source for reading about music (but if we had our way …
watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything
there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check
out Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books — Pitchfork
For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog
at
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and our website at
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For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book
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 …
Entertainment!
Kevin J. H. Dettmar
Track Listing
Side One
1.
“Ether”
—3:52
2.
“Natural’s Not in It”
—3:09
3.
“Not Great Men”
—3:08
4.
“Damaged Goods”
—3:29
5.
“Return the Gift”
—3:08
6.
“Guns Before Butter”
—3:49
Side Two
1.
“I Found That Essence Rare”
—3:09
2.
“Glass”
—2:32
3.
“Contract”
—2:42
4.
“At Home He’s a Tourist”
—3:33
5.
“5.45”
—3:48
6.
“Anthrax”
—4:23
To my gang of four: Emily, Audrey, Esther & Colin
•
ix
•
Contents
Acknowledgments x
Introduction 1
Keyword #1: Keywords 23
Keyword #2: Ideology 29
“Ether”/“Guns Before Butter”
34
Keyword #3: Nature 51
“Natural’s Not in It”/“Contract”
55
Keyword #4: Theory 69
“Not Great Men”/“Glass”
74
Keyword #5: Alienation 87
“At Home He’s a Tourist”/“5.45”
90
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
•
x
•
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.
•
1
•
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
E N T E R T A I N M E N T !
•
2
•
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
•
3
•
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.”
1
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
E N T E R T A I N M E N T !
•
4
•
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
•
5
•
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
E N T E R T A I N M E N T !
•
6
•
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.
2
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.”
3
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”
4
—would
have been indefensible. Instead, Pater nominally agreed
K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R
•
7
•
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
E N T E R T A I N M E N T !
•
8
•
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
•
9
•
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.”
5
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.
E N T E R T A I N M E N T !
•
10
•
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.”
6
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
•
11
•
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.”
7
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
E N T E R T A I N M E N T !
•
12
•
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’….”
8
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.”
9
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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13
•
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.
10
What I
heard at the end of
“Ether”
may not have been what
King and Gill meant, but having my interpretation
E N T E R T A I N M E N T !
•
14
•
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.
11
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.”
12
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
E N T E R T A I N M E N T !
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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.”
13
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
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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
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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
E N T E R T A I N M E N T !
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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
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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.”
14
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.
1
Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk
1978–1984 (New York: Penguin, 2005), ix.
2
Matthew Arnold, “On Translating Homer” (1862),
Lecture II, The Complete Prose Works of Matthew
E N T E R T A I N M E N T !
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•
Arnold, ed. Robert H. Super (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1960–77), I, 40.
3
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.
4
Pater, The Renaissance, 99.
5
Simon Reynolds and Joy Press, The Sex Revolts:
Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ’n’ Roll (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1995), 47.
6
Reynolds and Press, The Sex Revolts, 46; emphasis
added.
7
“The Death of Lady Mondegreen,” Harper’s
Magazine, 209 (1254) (November 1954), 48–51.
8
Dave Marsh, Louie Louie: The History and Mythology
of the World’s Most Famous Rock ’n’ Roll Song (New
York: Hyperion, 1993), 205.
9
Marsh,
Louie Louie, 206.
10
Wright, “The Death of Lady Mondegreen,” 49.
11
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.
12
John Lydon, with Keith and Kent Zimmerman,
Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs (New York:
Picador, 1994), 3.
13
Robin Murray, “Gang of Four Track by Track.”
http://www.clashmusic.com/feature/gang-of-four-
track-by-track (accessed June 5, 2013).
14
http://musicthoughts.com/t/79 (accessed August 22,
2013).
•
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•
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.”
1
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.”
2
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
K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R
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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.”
3
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
E N T E R T A I N M E N T !
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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
K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R
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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
1
Paul Lester, Gang of Four: Damaged Gods. A Biography
(London: Omnibus, 2008), 90. Subsequent refer-
ences cited parenthetically in the text.
2
Andy Gill, email to the author, June 14, 2013.
E N T E R T A I N M E N T !
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3
Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture
and Society, rev. edn (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1983), 12. Subsequent references cited paren-
thetically in the text.
•
29
•
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,
E N T E R T A I N M E N T !
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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”).
1
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?”
2
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.”
3
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
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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.”
4
“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.”
5
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.”
6
In
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
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•
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
1
Marx, quoted in Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of
Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 28.
2
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.
3
Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 131.
4
Engels, Letter to Mehring, 1893; quoted in Williams,
Keywords, 155.
5
Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 28.
6
Thomas Kinsella, “Nightwalker,” Poems 1956–1973
(Portlaoise, Ireland: Dolmen, 1980), 102.
•
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•
“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”;
on
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
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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
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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.”
1
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
.
2
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
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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
of
“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”
3
(“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
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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.
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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.”
4
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
1
Barry White, “In an Ulster Prison, Terrorists
Give Britain a Dirty Dilemma,” Los Angeles Times,
November 9, 1980, G2.
2
Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, “Rockall,” And
Then We Wrote.... EMI–EMCM 3088.
3
Wilfred Owen, “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” The
Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, ed. Jon Silkin,
2nd edn (London: Penguin, 1981), 183.
4
Robin Murray, “Gang of Four Track by Track.”
http://www.clashmusic.com/feature/gang-of-four-
track-by-track (accessed June 5, 2013).
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•
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
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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.
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“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.
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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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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.
In
“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
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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
44
⁄
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
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has no “verse, bridge, chorus or key change”—only “one
monster R&B riff, relentless, drop outs, everyone gets a
turn.”
1
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.…
2
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
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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
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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
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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
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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.]
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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.…”
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response to things, and you’re acting like a puppet.”
3
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).
4
“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:
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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”
).
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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.”
5
In
“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”;
in
“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
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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
1
Robin Murray, “Gang of Four Track by Track.”
http://www.clashmusic.com/feature/gang-of-four-
track-by-track (accessed June 5, 2013).
2
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
(1913), Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber,
1963), 13.
3
Liner notes, 2005 Rhino CD reissue, Entertainment!
4
http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/tips-moves/
sexy-kissing-techniques-0408 (accessed July 18,
2013).
5
Robin Murray, “Gang of Four Track by Track.”
http://www.clashmusic.com/feature/gang-of-four-
track-by-track (accessed June 5, 2013).
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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.
1
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
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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.”
2
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
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taste would have militated against them.”
3
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
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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
1
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).
2
Alfred Willener, The Action-Image of Society: On
Cultural Politicization, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith
(New York: Pantheon-Random House, 1970), 17.
3
Imaginary Landscapes, dir. Gabriella Cardazzo and
Duncan Ward (New York: Mystic Fire Video, 1989).
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“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
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what shaped the sound of the rookie Red Hot Chili
Peppers.”
1
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.
Like
“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.
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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”
2
:
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
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were a person apart; it is nothing but the activity of man
pursuing his ends.”
3
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.”
4
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
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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,
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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.
In
“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.
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In
“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”
as
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
1
Liner notes, 1995 Zero Infinite CD reissue of
Entertainment!
2
James Joyce, Ulysses (1922; New York: Random
House, 1986), 17.
3
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.
4
Laurie Anderson, “From the Air,” Big Science, Warner
Brothers B000002KNM.
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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.
1
In
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).
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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
1
Willener,
The Action-Image of Society, 139.
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“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
1
/
3
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?
1
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
1
E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910; New York:
Vintage-Random House, 1989), 42.
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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
on
“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.
1
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.
2
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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Notes
1
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar”
(1837), Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed.
Stephen W. Whicher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1957), 64–5.
2
On this see B. L. Packer, Emerson’s Fall: A New
Interpretation of the Major Essays (New York:
Continuum, 1982).
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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
of
“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!”
1
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.
2
“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.”
3
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?”
4
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.”
5
“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.”
6
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.”
7
Our working-class hero is looking at the world through
Polaroid glasses, yes: rose-colored ones. The song isn’t,
and won’t.
Notes
1
Robin Murray, “Gang of Four Track by Track.”
http://www.clashmusic.com/feature/gang-of-four-
track-by-track (accessed June 5, 2013).
2
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).
3
Gilles Ivain, “Formula for a New City,” l’Internationale
Situationniste no. 1, 1958, 16.
4
Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life
(1967), trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London:
Rebel Press/Left Bank Books, 1994), 18.
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5
Robin Murray, “Gang of Four Track by Track.”
http://www.clashmusic.com/feature/gang-of-four-
track-by-track (accessed June 5, 2013).
6
Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Penguin,
1985), 244.
7
Michael Azerrad, Liner notes, 2005 Rhino CD
reissue, Entertainment!
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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.
1
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.
2
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.”
3
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.
*
Like
“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.
4
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.”
5
Elsewhere, Marcus dubs Gill’s text a
“little dissertation on The Love Song as a Staple of Pop
Language.”
6
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.”
7
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
1
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1898; New York:
Penguin, 1983), 42, 44.
2
“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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3
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (New York:
Viking, 1949), 73.
4
See “‘Ask Any Girl’: Compulsory Heterosexuality
and Girl Group Culture,” in Dettmar and Richey,
eds, Reading Rock & Roll, 93–124.
5
Greil Marcus, “Gang of Four,” Ranters & Crowd
Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music 1977–92 (New York:
Doubleday, 1993), 52.
6
Marcus, “Suspicious Minds,” Ranters & Crowd
Pleasers, 152.
7
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.
1
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
1
/
3
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
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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.
2
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
1
See Jonathan Lethem, Talking Heads’ Fear of Music,
33 1/3 (New York: Continuum, 2012).
2
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
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First published 2014
© Kevin J. H. Dettmar, 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
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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