Gang of Four´s Entertainment!
Kevin J.H. Dettmar
Following hard on the explosion of British punk, in 1979 Gang of Four produced post-punk’s smartest record, Entertainment! For the first time, a band wedded punk’s angry energy to funk’s propulsive beats—and used that music to put across lyrics that brought a heady mixture of Marxist theory and situationism to exposing the cultural politics of everyday life.
But for an American college student from the suburbs—and, one expects, for many, many others, including British youth—Jon King’s and Andy Gill’s mumbled lyrics were often all but unintelligible. Political rock ‘n’ roll is always something of an oxymoron: rock audiences by and large don’t tune in to be lectured to. But what can it mean that a band that made pop songs as political theory actively resisted making that theory legible?
Coming to terms with the impact of Entertainment! requires us to take the mondegreen—the misunderstood lyric—seriously. 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. But that’s the title, too, of rock ‘n’ roll’s Greatest Hits compilation—and that strategic inarticulateness itself, which creates such an important role for the listener, has an important politics.
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About Kevin J.H. Dettmar
Reviews for Gang of Four´s Entertainment!
SLUG Magazine
There are not many great Marxist/feminist rock bands, but Gang of Four have a strong claim of being among them. Entertainment was their first album, released in 1979, is innovative both musically and with its lyrics; it was a time of many great albums … Kevin Dettmar aims to address the power of the Gang of Four in his short book on their album Entertainment … The text refers to many different figures and ideas, including Emerson, Don Delillo, James Joyce and Engels. Mostly, his approach is plausible and clever, although he is occasionally eccentric … this book is worthwhile.
Christian Perring, Dowling College, USA
Metapsychology Online Reviews 19:8
Words are at the very heart of Kevin Dettmar’s affectionate retrospective of the Leeds quartet’s first and best-known album, 1979’s Entertainment! - not only because Dettmar is a professor of English but because Gang of Four’s debut is a veritable treasure trove of punning, word play and semantic dissonance.
Houman Barekat
The Quietus