this is my first attempt at a cohesive album review, so bear with me

So about a week ago, I went to my local library just to browse, and I found Gang of Four's Entertainment!, which was a surprise. The last time I remember hearing anything about this band was in my junior year of high school, when this pretentious girl who was really into post-punk wouldn't shut up about them. Naturally, I decided to check it out and give it a listen.

Something that I’ve taken to recently is listening to music spatially, if that makes any sense. It’s an interesting feeling when I “hear” shapes in music, and that is definitely something I sense in Gang of Four. The guitar and percussion create a jarring, asymmetrical pentagram in my mind. It’s like an iTunes visualizer in my brain, man. I feel that relationship between rhythm and discord is key to the success of this album; too much of either would make it a lot more boring. On “Natural’s Not In It”, Hugo Burnham’s drums settle into a steady drone, but all of the snares, kicks, and cymbals sound separate from each other, as if different people were playing them. Andy Gill plays guitar with a sharp, mechanical intensity that fills the gaps in Burnham’s drums with just enough sound. The rest of the space is for Dave Allen’s bass, which completes this image I have of a wall of irregular spikes coming towards me when I hear a track like “Guns Before Butter.” Finally, Jon King’s powerfully callous lyrics slink through and around the tracks and kind of leave me feeling like a snake or a rodent or something has bitten me. Yes, this album is some Indiana Jones Temple of Doom shit, with the spiked walls and dangerous animals and whatnot.

Lyrically, I was pretty impressed. King draws a lot of influence from Situationist ideology, so the majority of the lyrics are about the subversion of popular culture. What makes this so good is that it predates all of the post-ironic facetious bullshit that modern independent music is perhaps most famous for. It’s fairly obvious on one of the singles, “Damaged Goods”: “Sometimes I’m thinking that I love you/But I know it’s only lust.” Or maybe on “I Found That Essence Rare”: “The worst thing in 1954 was the bikini/see the girl on TV dressed in a bikini/she doesn’t think so but she’s dressed for the H-Bomb.” Word. I have a pretty sweet mashup of “Damaged Goods” with “Just A Lil’ Bit” by 50 Cent, which is something I feel obligated to point out.

On a somewhat related note, my research for this article led to a really good session of the Wiki/Internet game: Gang of Four>Jon King>Situationist International>Watts Riots>1992 L.A. Riots>Reginald Denny incident.

So then I tried to find a video of the Reginald Denny incident on youtube, but it was difficult because they’ve already been sued for that. Instead I found this:




God bless the Internet (read the comments).

The copy I got was a 2005 re-issue, so there were a bunch of bonus tracks. One of those was a pretty good cover of “Sweet Jane.”

Yeah, good album.