Late Christmas Present?
On January 25, not December 25, Gang of Four’s first new album in more than fifteen years, Content, is scheduled for release. I love what I’m assuming is the pun presented in the title: it’s hard to image G4 as either “content,” is in happy, or as content providers. Though (to ruin my conclusion) I’m worried that they have turned into—or rather, failed to stop serving as—lyrical and ideological content providers. Which makes me very dis-content.
When pressed, as I sometimes am, this is the band I avow my favorite of all time; certainly they played the best show I’ve ever seen, at the 200-seat—er, rather, 200 spots-to-stand—UC Davis Coffee House in what, maybe 1979? (If Ken or Steve is reading, one of them may remember.) All I remember was Andy Gill’s searing, desperate guitar playing, and Jon King’s eerie melodica. Forget The Clash: it was pretty clear to me that this was the only band that mattered. And I still think Entertainment! (1979) is one of the most consistently great rock albums ever recorded.
The just-released video for their new single, “Never Pay for the Farm,” conveys well the excitement of seeing them live. They’re currently touring again, though I’m not sure I’ll have the chance to see them, and am not entirely sure that I want to: yet another re-assembled Wonderband from the late 70s?
But here’s the new video (and with apologies for the obligatory commercial: just hang in there!):
Can a band that made its reputation by fusing strident guitar with strident (and explicitly Marxist) lyrics survive on still angry (though now middle-aged) guitar and angular vocals alone? Not sure. I do like the sound of the song; but I was pretty distressed by the A–A–A–A / B–B–B–B rhyme scheme; I’m not sure lyrics of much urgency or import can be carried on such a banal prosodic raft.
It is pretty amazing, I think, that the opening riff, twice repeated in the first ten seconds, says “Andy Gill” unambiguously more than thirty years after the release of Entertainment! Listen to that instrumental intro, and you know instantly that you’re listening to Gill or one of his myriad imitators. But the song ultimately runs into the trouble as all of their post-Solid Gold (1981) stuff—in fact, half of Solid Gold is pretty wretched, too. At their best, Gill, King, Dave Allen (bass), and Hugo Burnam (drums) were able to wed throbbing, angry music that propelled you on the dance floor with rather sophisticated lyrical content that played and replayed in your mind. “At Home He’s a Tourist”: there’s no better 3½-minute introduction to the Marxist concept of alienation. But you don’t feel like you’re listening to a lecture; these were mini-Marxist soap operas, with late-punk post-funk beat.
Whereas when the songwriting doesn’t work—and though I only heard it for the first time yesterday, my early gut feeling is that “Never Pay for the Farm” really doesn’t—well, the ideology just feels forced. I’ll confess I’m not even entirely sure what the song’s meant to be about; I’m assuming it’s a vaguely post-Goldman Sachs, “don’t be greedy,” global economic meltdown parable: you know the kind of thing. It might even gesture toward real-estate speculation, toxic assets, and the American sub-prime crisis: and surely “Toxic Assets” is a song just waiting to be written, or if not, a boffo name for a band.
Here’s hoping they can find that old magic again: at their best, the Gang of Four really brought to life the George Clinton/P-Funk dictum, “free your mind and your ass will follow.” Seems to me that “Never Pay for the Farm” still gets half of that equation right, without quite trusting your mind to do its work without hectoring. I love reading Matt Taibbi skewering the cupidity of our corporate and political and religious leaders in his investigative reporting for Rolling Stone: but I don’t want to listen to him sing.
It’s funny to hear GoF’s “Natural’s Not In It” in an ad for X-Box at Target on their closed circuit commercials.
BTW, having missed the show, I have no clear recollection of their Coffee House gig, but ’79 – or possibly ’80 – sounds about right.
(Welcome back!)
I’m inclined to say 1980 on the concert, which was just astounding. I confess that I more or less bought the canned Marxist rhetoric in those early songs. Things seemed less gray and more black-and-white back then. When I listen to “Entertainment,” as I do pretty frequently, I’m still tempted to go out and scrawl “Smash the State” on something.
I almost bought a ticket to go see Gang of Four at the beloved Fillmore in SF, but tix are $45. So much for proletarian solidarity….
I’d actually considered e-mailing you when I first heard “Natural’s Not in it” in that XBox Kinect commercial–there certainly seems to be some irony in the implied “problem of leisure” that leads to things like motion-sensing video games. “The body is good business,” after all.