Gang Of Four

“Entertainment!” by Gang Of Four is part of the trio of records that in 1979 helped define the genre later known as funk-punk, born out of that kaleidoscope of styles and sounds that was new wave. The other two titles in that trio are: “Fear Of Music” by New Yorkers Talking Heads and “Y” by Bristol's own Pop Group.

Each of these three records took certain characteristics of punk, both musical and otherwise (sonic impetuosity and anarchy, extreme creativity, rebellion with or without a cause), and grafted them onto rhythmic frameworks borrowed from early-Seventies black music (Sly Stone, Funkadelic, Last Poets, James Brown). Starting from similar premises, though, these three albums diverge in their outcomes depending on how these shared elements were dosed out, and on the additional stylistic traits unique to each band.

Thus Talking Heads coined a nervous, anaemic strain of funk-punk (born of the art-rock of Roxy Music with Brian Eno), where the funk element restrains punk's furious outbursts rather than igniting them, giving “Fear Of Music”'s sound an exasperated circularity that manifests in sci-fi, anxiety-ridden atmospheres. The Pop Group, for their part, forged a terrifying stylistic language in which punk and funk were merely a pretext for reaching results closer to avant-garde music: “Y” is in fact an apocalyptic crucible of tribal rhythms, musique concrète and free jazz, delivered not with sterile intellectualism but with the informal incisiveness of punk.

Compared to the two records mentioned above, “Entertainment!” may wrongly seem less daring, at least judging by the geometric dryness of its songwriting and the consumptive fervour of its performances. In fact, its musical fabric is cut from the same cloth as the barricade-punk of early Clash, fused with George Clinton's sense of groove. A crucial language for the future of rock: Flea's bass in Red Hot Chili Peppers is already fully formed here (Dave Allen docet), but Minutemen and Rem (“I stole a lot from them,” Michael Stipe would admit) also owe something of their sound to the four musicians from Leeds, not to mention the new wave of 2000s bands like Franz Ferdinand, Rapture and Interpol, all (illegitimate?) offspring of Jon King (vocals), Andy Gill (guitar), Dave Allen (bass) and Hugo Burnham (drums).

King and Gill were fine arts students at Leeds University, where they deepened their knowledge of Marxist theory as well as, naturally, artistic avant-gardes. All of this shaped their music on two distinct levels of a single element: the lyrics. In terms of content, Gang Of Four's lyrics are explicitly political, offering a clear-eyed analysis of the damage rampant capitalism inflicts on the quality of human life. There are no slogans or parochial anthems here, just a keen-eyed snapshot of the ways of life within a mass society.

There's a total greyness to the everyday existence painted by Gang Of Four, a greyness that is real and to which mankind has nonetheless grown numb: history isn't what we learned from books, because it's written solely by the victors (“No weak men in the books at home,” from “Not Great Men”); love trades the passion of the flesh for the commodification of sex (“Sometimes I think that I love you, but I know it's only lust,” from “Damaged Goods”); war is treated as a spectacle to watch on TV (“Watch new blood on the 18 inch screen,” from “5.45”).

Formally, on the other hand, those same lyrics come across as the result of applying the collage technique to language itself, decontextualising phrases lifted from newspapers and weaving them into the syntactic fabric of their songs.

Musically speaking, finally, the album offers a sequence of highly neurotic tracks, built on an equal footing between the band's different elements: the essential, mathematical sound, which abhorred improvisation, sprang from an anti-spectacular conception of rock: Gill, for instance, despite playing the instrument most suited to pyrotechnic flourishes, rarely resorted to feedback or distortion effects. In this way, the torrid funk that had once belonged to black musicians gained in sonic power while losing in human warmth.

Even so, it's fair to say that, thirty years on, there isn't a single track on “Entertainment!” that shows any structural weakness or lets the tension slacken.

Most of the twelve tracks making up the tracklist are built around a scheme in which Gill's guitar serves an essentially rhythmic function, one that at times is literally torn apart by flashes of belligerent soloing. This structuring of the songs creates sonic spaces of fullness and emptiness, then stormed by a positively explosive rhythm section. Songs like “Natural's Not In It”, “Damaged Goods”, “Glass”, “Contract” and “5.45” are prime examples of this kind of musical construction.

The austerity of this formula doesn't rule out excursions into more “danceable” territory, as in the martial “Not Great Men” and in “Return The Gift”, with its breathtaking crescendo; while “I Found That Essence Rare” is an irresistible slice of p-funk, where “p” stands for... pop!

There's also no shortage of standouts, tracks devastating in both sonic power and creative sharpness: the opening “Ether”, pure nitroglycerine set to music; “At Home He's A Tourist”, which crumbles under blows of vitriolic dissonance; and “Guns Before Butter”, laid waste by Gill's jagged, off-key guitar and the rhythmic juggernaut driven by the firm of Allen-Burnham.

The closing track is the brilliant "Anthrax": it opens with a concert of Gill's berserk feedback, soon joined by Burnham's blunt rhythm, Allen's deflated grooves and King's enervated vocals. Working from these stylistic rudiments, Gill keeps piling on pugnacious distortion, saturating what's left of punk and funk. And what's left has survived to the present day alive and vivid, no thanks to the countless current bands aping the Fab Four, whose names people have already forgotten.

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14/09/2008