In Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984, ZE Records co-founder Michael Zilkha explained that the quirky disco bands he championed like Was (Not Was) and Material didn’t make the commercial impact he wished because, “all my bands were too clever, and it took me forever to understand that ‘clever’ isn’t necessarily it…. Truly great rock music is not clever. Don’t get me wrong, I love all my records, but they’re not elemental like Joy Division or Neil Young.”
Heard, chef.
Like Zilkha, I also like ZE’s records, and the first volume of its Mutant Disco compilation series might make this column some day, but there’s a reason the label’s kitchen-sink approach to dance music didn’t exactly endear them to the public.
You can make dance music with metal guitar solos, spy movie synthesizers, exotica flutes, percussion interludes, doot-doot-doos, readings from a Black Panther’s prison letters, and lyrics about catching VD but…it’s a lot to swallow.
Is this dance music or is it a parody of dance music? Is it supposed to be funny or is it making fun of me?
You never wonder about that with Neil Young or Ian Curtis who always seem deadly serious about their heartbreak or depression. There’s something elemental about them that the eclectic mutant disco couldn’t fake.
This brings us to our album of the week, Gang of Four’s 1979 debut Entertainment! Like their peers on ZE, the English four piece sought to create dance music in the wake of punk rock. They even included a little humor, though very deadpan. There was no smiling in Gang of Four.
Entertainment! regularly appears on lists of the greatest albums of all times. It’s certainly one of the best debuts of all time. And if it doesn’t appear among the top five of your list of best post punk albums of all time, then your list is wack.
And that’s because Entertainment! is elemental as fuck. If it was a poem, it would be a haiku. If it was colors, it would be red, yellow, and blue. If it was elements, it would be hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen.
Gang of Four are drums, bass, guitar, and vocals – and really not all that much of them, at that.
Listening this week, I was surprised by how much space there is in Entertainment! Songs sustain themselves on simple drum patterns and basslines, instruments come and go as they please, every vocal or guitar strum makes an impact, and you could drive a party bus through the separation between the instruments.
As someone who writes to a rhythm guitar, I rarely consider how claustrophobic it can make the music feel. Chunky power chords and strummed barres do an excellent job propping up a melody, adding harmony, and defining a rhythm – that’s why guitar is such a wonderful tool for a composer – but they fill up all the empty space on a track.
As I’ve gotten older, I realize that often the best guitar part is no guitar at all. Gang of Four knew this all along.
That’s not to say that they lacked in the guitar department, though, for they had a Hall of Famer in Andy Gill. While the gang was certainly more than its pieces, Gill’s was their most special piece.
Gill played a Fender Stratocaster with its treble jacked through an unfashionably crystalline amp, creating a harsh, metallic tone.
At a time when most guitarists still played their electrics like amplified acoustics, Gill played his like a conduit for the electricity itself. Most famously, he created a 90-second cloud of feedback before the rest of the crew launched into the closer “Anthrax,” in which the band compared love to the potentially deadly bacterial infection.
Although I’m most interested in Gang of Four for their brilliantly stripped down funk, their proudly leftist lyrics, inspired by the Situationist International, provided the sharpest contrast between their music and a genre typically concerned with getting high, getting laid, and riding in an expensive car.
I imagine Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye’s artistic worldview came into focus when he heard Four’s singer Jon King conflate sex and consumerism over the jagged funk of “Natural’s Not in It.”
The band’s college-age leftism could’ve been a drag except for the excitement for the music and how (despite the fact that their cultural critiques are generally correct) they’re at least a little bit tongue-in-cheek.
In the wonderful first verse of “I Found that Essence Rare,” King chastises TV for censoring women wearing bikinis while nuking islands in the Bikini Atoll. “She doesn’t think so,” he sprechgesangs, “but she’s dressed for the H-bomb.”
Gil Scott-Heron, Funkadelic, and Curtis Mayfield slipped politics and social commentary in their funk (hell, the O’Jays even called money the root of all evil in their co-opted, Apprentice theme song “Money”), but none bid so as brazenly as Gang of Four, whose music could’ve come with a reading list featuring Marx, Lacan, and Foucault.
And none sounded as obviously white and British while doing so. The biggest tension on Entertainment! is the intrinsic funkiness of the music contrasted with how uptight its singers sound. Yes, David Byrnes bushwhacked this field a couple years earlier with Talking Heads, but he was also an untenable star, an artiste, a potential psycho killer, but a star. Gang of Four, meanwhile, could’ve been anybody.
But that’s what made them so gosh darn elemental. Drums, bass, guitar. Upright funk. Marxism. A couple laugh lines. That’s it. That’s Entertainment! It’s elemental.
Alas, nothing is eternal, and once the Gang allowed new elements into the mix – a tremolo pedal, a melodica, female backup vocals from their new bassist – the band stopped being elemental and became another group looking to expand their sound. Despite releasing good music, 1981’s Solid Gold is a very, ahem, solid follow-up to Entertainment!, Gang of Four never recaptured the simple brilliance of their debut.
But they didn’t need to, for they had inspired a whole world of players. Post-punk, post-hardcore, punk-funk, Flea, and Fugazi carry on their work. Anyone who has ever described their guitar sound as “angular,” anyone who wanted to write lyrics about their social studies homework, anyone who has ever wanted to create funk music without wearing multiple pairs of sunglasses…you worship at the elemental altar of Gang of Four.
