Gang of Four's Entertainment!

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.

Product details

• Authors: Kevin J H Dettmar, Kevin J. H. Dettmar, Kevin J.H. Dettmar
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 22.05.2014
• EAN: 9781623560652
• ISBN: 978-1-62356-065-2
• No. of pages: 160
• Dimensions: 120 mm x 164 mm x 10 mm
• Series: 33 1/3; 33 1/3
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Music > Monographs; Punk, Individual composers & musicians, specific bands & groups, MUSIC / Genres & Styles / General, MUSIC / Individual Composer & Musician, MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Punk, Popular Music, Punk, New Wave & Indie, Musicians, singers, bands and groups, Composers and songwriters