Gang of Four

It’s pretty late in the day to be bearing down hard on Gang of Four, but I had a couple of amusing thoughts after catching up with their second album, Solid Gold, only twenty-seven years after it came out. First, I realized they reminded me a lot of The Band. This got funnier when I subsequently came across an old interview in which Andy Gill cites Music From Big Pink and The Band as two of his favorite records ever. How similar? The strategic contrariness and the implicit rectitude that went with it. Public Image Ltd. charmed me a lot more than Go4 at the time just by being lazy pretentious screw-ups who liked Can, Miles Davis, Jah Woosh and Trinity’s “Pope Paul Dead and Gone” (not to mention - shhh! - Yes and Genesis). Of course Lydon & Co. couldn’t follow their own act, and Gang of Four could. But I never played the Gang's records much. Which is not to say I didn’t like them fine then, and maybe like them more now, while my resistance is on all fours with their intentions. They nagged you for betraying the people’s history (I’m doing that right now). They avoided tube amps in order to minimize the expressive character of the guitar sound. Andy Gill told Hugo Burnham to always drum the opposite to how he wanted to. And now I can’t hear Entertainment! without hearing the upside-down-and-backwards rhythms and impossible screeched vocals on Big Pink as a rough analogue. Solid Gold, considered even “drier” than Entertainment! at the time, now sounds to me like a groove album in the properly Brechtian sense (haven’t used that word in eons) – they map everyplace the groove isn’t and you hear it in your head instead. Sometimes, anyway. But it also inspired the second thought that came to me, which is what I think their two moments of greatness are, both somehow beside their ostensible Point: (1) the live version of Solid Gold’s “What We All Want” on the Another Day/Another Dollar EP (nothing Brechtian about it; unequivocal expressive character in the composed guitar line and as sad a song as the Pet Shop Boys’ “What Have I Done To Deserve This?” [“Now I can do what I want to…FOREVER!”]; and the groove takes them over, completely counter to their stated concept; in other words, they succeed by cheating just like Brecht did). And (2) the cover art for Warner’s ex post facto corporate compilation A Brief History of the Twentieth Century (two 1 Franc pieces depicted - one from 1961 saying “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité”, the other from 1943 saying, “Travail, Familie, Patrie.”). After the fact and beside the point is the fact and the point.

P.S. For the record, my favorite track by The Band is “Ain’t No More Cane” from The Basement Tapes.