Gang of Four's Entertainment!

Following hard on the explosion of British punk, in 1979 Gang of Four produced post-punks smartest record, Entertainment! For the first time, a band wedded punks angry energy to funks propulsive beatsand 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 suburbsand, one expects, for many, many others, including British youthJon Kings and Andy Gills mumbled lyrics were often all but unintelligible. Political rock n roll is always something of an oxymoron: rock audiences by and large dont 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 mondegreenthe misunderstood lyricseriously. 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 thats the title, too, of rock n rolls Greatest Hits compilationand that strategic inarticulateness itself, which creates such an important role for the listener, has an important politics.