Entertainment!

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Entertainment!
Entertainment! cover
Studio album by Gang of Four
Released 1979
Recorded The Workhouse, Old Kent Road, London, 1979
Genre Post punk
Length 39:53
Label EMI/Warner Bros.
Producer(s) Andy Gill, Jon King and Rob Warr
Professional reviews
Gang of Four chronology
Entertainment!
(1979)		 Yellow EP
(1980)
1995 Reissue Cover
Infinite Zero
Infinite Zero


Entertainment! is the 1979 debut album by English post-punk band Gang of Four. This album was released on EMI in the U.K. and on Warner Bros. in the U.S..

The music on the first album shows clearly the influence of punk, yet also incorporates funk and less-obvious influences of reggae and dub, similar to other bands at the time such as Public Image Ltd., Pere Ubu, and Au Pairs. As with these other influential post-punk bands, the bass is mixed much more prominently than it typically is in rock or punk.

The album has attracted praise from rock musicians. "Entertainment! shredded everything that came before it," R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe has said. Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers stated that the first time he heard the record, "It completely changed the way I looked at rock music and sent me on my trip as a bass player." [1] In 2003, the album was ranked number 490 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In March 2005, Q magazine placed the track "At Home He's a Tourist" at number 52 in its list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Tracks.

Contents

[edit] Artwork

The album's artwork was designed by band members Jon King and Andy Gill, typical of their DIY approach. The cover depicts an "Indian" shaking hands with a "cowboy" in three heavily processed versions of the same image, the faces reduced to blobs of red and white—that is, to the stereotypical racial colors. A text that winds around the images reads, "The Indian smiles, he thinks that the cowboy is his friend. The cowboy smiles, he is glad the Indian is fooled. Now he can exploit him."

In the context of the album, this is less a protest of inter-ethnic conflict in the Old West than it is a commentary on the way that media images like "cowboys and Indians" (which is to say, Entertainment!) can convince people to act against their interests—as in the artwork on the album's back cover, depicting a family whose father says, "I spend most of our money on myself so that I can stay fat," while the mother and children declare, "We're grateful for his leftovers."

On the album's inner sleeve, small photographs depicting scenes shown on television are interlaced with text illustrating what the band suggests are the misleading subtexts of media presentations: "The facts are presented neutrally so that the public can make up its own mind"; "Men act heroically to defend their country"; "People are given what they want." These are the types of social assumptions that Gang of Four seek to challenge with their own version of Entertainment!.

[edit] Lyrics

The album's central theme is set forth at the beginning of its second track, "Natural's Not in It": "The problem of leisure/ What to do for pleasure". Extending the Marxist concept of alienated labor, Gang of Four argue that "leisure" is just as alienated: Far from providing refuge from the economic exploitation of the capitalist workplace, the realms of home, play and especially love actually replicate the same self-destroying forces. As the song goes on to say:

Fornication makes you happy
No escape from society
Natural is not in it
Your relations are of power
We all have good intentions
But all with strings attached [2]

As Gang of Four see it, once leisure becomes a commodity like any other, one's leisure time and one's own self participating in leisure become commodities as well, with no more intrinsic meaning than the profit to be made from them. As the song "Return the Gift" puts it:

It's on the market
You're on the price list...
Please send me evenings and weekends [3]

Being thus reduced to economic tokens, people at leisure feel alienated by the very activities they are supposed to be enjoying. To the complaint "I'm so restless (I'm bored as a cat)", the song "Glass" responds: "If you're feeling all in take some aspirin/Or some paracetamol." [4] "At Home He's a Tourist" describes the condition of everyman: "He fills his head with culture/He gives himself an ulcer." [5]

One of Entertainment!'s best-known songs is "Anthrax", which might be considered an anti-love song ("Love will get you like a case of anthrax/And that's something I don't want to catch"). As Jon King sings, Andy Gill issues what might be considered a spoken-word manifesto of the group's take on romance, which concludes: "I don't think we're saying there's anything wrong with love, just don't think that what goes on between two people should be shrouded in mystery." [6]

Stripping away that "mystery," in the song "Contract", Gang of Four suggest that love is nothing more than "a contract in our mutual interest". Shaped both by economic inequality and media messages ("You dreamed of scenes/Like you read of in magazines"), modern relationships are doomed to re-enact the exploitation of capitalism:

These social dreams
Put in practice in the bedroom
Is this so private
Our struggle in the bedroom [7]

As "Natural's Not in It" notes, "The body's good business," [8] or as "At Home He's a Tourist" puts it:

Down on the disco floor
They make their profit
From the things they sell
To help you cob off
And the rubbers you hide
In your top left pocket [9]

As those lyrics suggest, Entertainment! often presents sexuality in a grim light—sometimes using religious terminology (like "fornication") to express disgust. The song "Damaged Goods" declares:

The sins of the flesh
Are simply sins of lust
Sometimes I'm thinking that I love you
But I know it's only lust [10]

At times, this anger at a socially mediated sexuality can appear as a rather cruel attitude towards lovers in general and female partners in particular. In "I Found That Essence Rare," the band sings: "See the happy pair smiling close like they're monkeys/They wouldn't think so but they're holding themselves down." [11] And in "Damaged Goods" (the title itself a pejorative expression for a sexually active woman), the singer declares, "You said you're cheap but you're too much." [12] The New Trouser Press Record Guide credits the album with "the self-righteous air of someone who couldn't get to first base with his girlfriend the previous evening." [13]

Aside from its critique of leisure and romance, the album does tackle some more conventional political subjects—though with Gang of Four's unique take. "Ether", the album's lead track, is a protest against the British occupation of Northern Ireland ("Fly the flag on foreign soil"), making reference to the Maze prison outside Belfast in lyrics like "locked in Long Kesh" and "H-Block torture", and suggesting that Britain is motivated by economic factors in the lines "There may be oil/Under Rockall" (a barren islet that was the focus of an Anglo-Irish dispute). But, typically, what are seen as the outrages of British rule are presented as a problem for those "trapped in heaven lifestyle", the "dirt behind the daydream" that "breaks your new dreams daily". [14]

The song "5.45" deals with guerrilla warfare, presumably a reference to the bloody conflicts then going on in Central America. But the song, like the album as a whole, approaches the subject from the point of view of the alienated bourgeois spectator: "How can I sit and eat my tea with all that blood flowing from the television." In the end, Gang of Four concludes, "Guerrilla war struggle is the new entertainment." [15]

[edit] Track listing

All songs written by Dave Allen, Hugo Burnham, Andy Gill, and Jon King, except as indicated.

[edit] Original track listing

  1. "Ether" – 3:52
  2. "Natural's Not in It" – 3:09
  3. "Not Great Men" – 3:08
  4. "Damaged Goods" – 3:29
  5. "Return the Gift" – 3:08
  6. "Guns Before Butter" – 3:49
  7. "I Found That Essence Rare" – 3:09
  8. "Glass" – 2:32
  9. "Contract" – 2:42
  10. "At Home He's a Tourist" – 3:33
  11. "5.45" – 3:48
  12. "Anthrax" – 4:23

[edit] 1995 Bonus tracks

The Infinite Zero/American CD reissue includes songs from the Yellow EP:

  1. "Outside the Trains Don't Run on Time" – 3:27
  2. "He'd Send in the Army" – 3:40
  3. "It's Her Factory" – 3:08
  4. "Armalite Rifle" – 2:48

[edit] 2005 Bonus tracks

In addition to the Yellow EP, the Rhino release adds four previously unissued tracks:

  1. "Guns Before Butter (Alternate version)" – 4:25
  2. "Contract (Alternate version)" – 2:48
  3. "Blood Free" (Live @ Electric Ballroom) – 3:17
  4. "Sweet Jane" (Live @ American Indian Center) (Lou Reed) – 3:20

[edit] Personnel

[edit] References

  1. ^ Liner notes to Infinite Zero reissue, 1995
  2. ^ Not Great Men website
  3. ^ Not Great Men website
  4. ^ Not Great Men website
  5. ^ Not Great Men website
  6. ^ Not Great Men website
  7. ^ Not Great Men website
  8. ^ Not Great Men website
  9. ^ Not Great Men website
  10. ^ Not Great Men website
  11. ^ Not Great Men website
  12. ^ Not Great Men website
  13. ^ The New Trouser Press Record Guide, 1989.
  14. ^ Not Great Men website
  15. ^ Not Great Men website

[edit] Charts

Single

Year Single Chart Position
1979 "Damaged Goods"/"I Find That Essence Rare" Billboard Club Play singles 39
1979 "At Home He's A Tourist" UK Singles Charts 58
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