Gang of Four

Entertainment! (1979)

Gang of Four's debut is both a musical manifesto and a Marxist textbook — the funk rhythms stripped of all decorative excess, the lyrics annotating the commodity relationships inside everyday desire with a precision no other rock band has matched. Hugo Burnham's drums and Dave Allen's bass lock together like machine components while Andy Gill's guitar attacks in sharp, percussive stabs; 'Damaged Goods' is the most concentrated expression of this, four minutes of controlled aggression set to a jagged riff. Its tension — between dancing and thinking, pleasure and critique — has never been resolved because the band deliberately refused to resolve it.

Sleeve notes

Entertainment! · 1979

Gang of Four arrived from Leeds in 1977 with a manifesto disguised as a rock band. Their music — dry, percussive, the bass occupying the space where the rhythm guitar usually lived, the guitar itself used as a noise-source rather than a harmony instrument — was explicitly Marxist in its critique of consumer culture and its refusal of pleasure-as-distraction, and yet paradoxically it was one of the most physically compelling sounds of the era. You could dance to it, and the dancing felt politicized.

Entertainment! (1979) is their founding text: songs about alienation that alienate the listener not through difficulty but through the intensity of their physical address. Hugo Burnham's drumming and Dave Allen's bass created a pocket that was simultaneously funky and anxious. The influence on what would become alternative dance — LCD Soundsystem, Interpol, Bloc Party — is immense and, unusually for post-punk, widely acknowledged. When the rest of the genre was making music to stare at the floor to, Gang of Four were making you move.