Gang of Four's Entertainment! |
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Author:
| Dettmar, Kevin J. H. |
Series title: | 33 1/3 Ser. |
ISBN: | 978-1-62356-065-2 |
Publication Date: | Mar 2014 |
Publisher: | Bloomsbury Academic & Professional
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Book Format: | Paperback |
List Price: | USD $14.95 |
Book Description:
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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...
More Description
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.