Kevin J. H. Dettmar - Gang of Fours Entertainment!

ENTERTAINMENT!

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We arent naive enough to think that were your only

source for reading about music (but if we had our way

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Smile by Luis Sanchez

Biophilia by Nicola Dibben

Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha

The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild

Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Mike Foley Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy

Live Through This by Anwyn Crawford

Donuts by Jordan Ferguson

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves Dangerous by Susan Fast

Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven

Blank Generation by Pete Astor

Sigur Ros: ( ) by Ethan Hayden

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Entertainment!

Kevin J. H. Dettmar

Track Listing

Side One

1. Ether3:52

2. Naturals Not in It3:09

3. Not Great Men3:08

4. Damaged Goods3:29

5. Return the Gift3:08

6. Guns Before Butter3:49

Side Two

1. I Found That Essence Rare3:09

2. Glass2:32

3. Contract2:42

4. At Home Hes a Tourist3:33

5. 5.453:48

6. Anthrax4:23

To my gang of four: Emily, Audrey, Esther & Colin Contents

Acknowledgments x

Introduction 1

Keyword #1: Keywords 23

Keyword #2: Ideology 29

Ether/Guns Before Butter

Keyword #3: Nature 51

Naturals Not in It/Contract

Keyword #4: Theory 69

Not Great Men/Glass

Keyword #5: Alienation 87

At Home Hes a Tourist/5.45

Keyword #6: Consumer 100

Return the Gift/I Found That Essence Rare

Keyword #7: Sex 117

Damaged Goods/Anthrax

Conclusion: An Apology; an Epiphany

ix

Acknowledgments

Im grateful for the cooperation of the original four

band membersAndy Gill, Jon King, Dave Allen, and

Hugo Burnhamwho each met with me to discuss

Entertainment! and answer my questions. I hope that this small book can in some measure repay the great pleasure their music has given me. Thanks are due, as well, to

two of my colleagues in the Department of English at

Pomona College, Jonathan Lethem and Joe Jeon, who

read an early version of the proposal for this book, and helped to make it much stronger. Finally, my thanks to

the good people at BloomsburyDavid Barker, who

picked me, and Ally Jane Grossan, who helped me across

the finish line.

x

Introduction

When Im pressed (as one sometimes is), Gang of Four

is the band I avow my favorite of all time. Certainly they played the best show Ive ever seen, at the 200-seat

or, rather, 200-standingU.C. Davis Coffee House on

November 9, 1980. (When I spoke with him, drummer

Hugo Burnham even claimed to remember that gig

just being polite, perhaps.) It was my second senior year ( thats a long story that polite people dont ask me about), and since Gang of Four was coming to campus, they

were being played pretty heavily on KDVS, the campus

radio station. I found what I heard thrillingintoxi

catingand went to the local record store to buy the

album, Entertainment!

All I remember now of that concert, at this distance

of more than three decades, is Andy Gills searing,

aggressive, spare guitar playing, alongside Jon Kings

flat, affectless singing and haunting melodicaand the

fact that the lead singer, guitarist, and bass player were careening around the small stage and caroming off one

another like molecules in an overheated vessel, in a

way that seemed unscripted, unpredictable, and fright

ening. Forget The Clash: it was pretty clear to me that

E N T E R T A I N M E N T !

this was The Only Band That Mattered. I still think

Entertainment! (1979) is one of the most consistently great rock albums ever recorded; at their best, Gill,

King, Dave Allen (bass), and Hugo Burnham were able

to wed throbbing, angry music that propelled your body

to sophisticated lyrical content that played and replayed in your mind. (And misplayed, but more on that later.) Side Two, Track Four, At Home Hes a Tourist: could

there be a better 3-minute introduction to the Marxist concept of alienation? But you dont feel like youre

listening to a lecture; if these were mini-Marxist soap operas, they were leavened with a late-punk post-funk

beat, and a narrative and linguistic sophistication and ambiguity that belied any charges of vulgar Marxism.

On Entertainment! , if only unevenly thereafter, Gang of Four embodied the George Clinton/P-Funk dictum,

free your mind and your ass will follow (as well as its waggish, chiasmic corollary: free your ass ). King and Gill, ideologists-in-chief, were there to free your mind: but your ass, my friend, belonged to the rhythm section of Burnham and Allen.

In his recent book on Talking Heads Fear of Music

for the 33 seriesanother 1979 album, as fate would

have itmy colleague and good friend Jonathan Lethem

returns regularly to the figure of the boy in his room,

15 years old, trying to make sense of that album andby means of that albumto articulate himself to himself and understand his world. Im a bit of a slow study but the following year, though it was my second senior year of

college, I was doing the same thing with Entertainment! : in my case, it was the boy in the studio apartment, and hed just turned 21. When Jonathan and I recently listened

K E V I N J . H . D E T T M A R

together to Entertainment! , he remarked how powerfully it recalled to him his freshman year at Bennington. For that 15-year-old boy had finished high school, left his room, and gone off to college, and Entertainment! was already there, waiting for him; whereas I got to college and had to wait four full years for the record to arrive, to find meand, musically, those years of waiting were