The charge, of course, is that mass-marketing dollars spent on behalf of an LP as radical (even in rock & roll terms) as Entertainment! merely reduces both the album and its message to just that: entertainment–no different from a Beatles reissue or the latest Doobie Brothers release. Like their namesakes (the four top Communist officials purged from the party in China’s post-Mao upheaval), the Gang of Four have drawn scorn from their more extremist New Wave brethren in England for their ties with major labels. in America), the Gang of Four undoubtedly fancy themselves cultural guerrillas based in the heart of the beast, using its oppressive but efficient offices to issue an encouraging revolutionary word. Contracted to two of the biggest corporations in the music business (EMI in Britain, Warner Bros. “Guerrilla war struggle is a new entertainment,” rails Jon King in demagogic sing-speak set against a wall of Gatling-gun guitar chords and snowballing bass and drum patterns. The power, the glory and the paradox of the Gang of Four’s mission on Entertainment! is neatly, if unconsciously, capsulized in the last line of “5.45,” a typically kinetic dance tract about television news. It’s also the first real political partying record since the MC5’s booty-shaking 1969 broadside, Kick Out the Jams. Stripped of its own pretensions and the burden of sociopolitical relevance forced on it by a knee-jerk leftist English music press, Entertainment! is a passionate declaration of discontent by four rock & roll agents provocateurs naive enough to believe they can move the world with words and music.
WILKO JOHNSON ANDY GILL FREE
Nor is it simply a fierce, emotionally taut dramatization of youth’s loss of innocence as seen through the clouded lens of neo-Marxist dogma and ambitiously obscure free verse. This excellent review is of the classic punk-funk debut by the Gang of Four…Įntertainment! isn’t just the best debut album by a British band – punk or otherwise – since the original English release of The Clash in 1977. Augat 3:23 pm ( David Fricke, Music, Reviews & Articles)Īnother album review by David Fricke from Rolling Stone issue #323 (Aug.
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