Entertainment

Gang of Four | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (August 8, 1995)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Warner Bros / Wea
• ASIN: B000002M9X
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (107 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #343,786 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

This is what happens when academic Marxists pick up guitars: a debut album whose every lyric is acutely conscious of theory and economics, from a song organized around the dictum that "history's not made by great men", to pounding disco about consumer culture anomie, to the classic feedback rant "Love Like Anthrax," where Jon King chants "I feel like a beetle on its back." (The homonym was intentional.) But theory is nothing without praxis, and Gang Of Four got their tracts across with Andy Gill's splintering, spitfire guitar attack, as well as a rhythm section that had listened to enough dub to have picked up some unusual tricks of rhythm and arrangement (like King's Augustus Pablo-influenced melodica parts). --Douglas Wolk

Product Description

Some of the most powerful, energized, and memorable music of the U.K.'s potent post-punk era of the late '70s and early '80s came from the trailblazing band Gang of Four, and it all started with 1979's stellar Entertainment! Dave Allen, Hugo Burnham, Andy Gill, and Jon King fused punk, funk, explosive prog-rock, and literate and often incendiary lyrics into a signature, groundbreaking sound that would influence countless bands to come. The original album's brilliant 12 tracks are now remastered and bolstered with four tracks from the rare Yellow EP, plus four never-before-released-songs-making this watershed disc sound bigger and better than ever. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The foundation of most of what we listen to today., June 2, 2005

By 

franistek "Franistek" (Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Entertainment (Audio CD)

Whatever might urge someone to give this album one star out of 5 cannot possibly be validated. This is a ground breaking record - countless bands since have completely ripped off the Gang Of Four's sound - which, by the way, was entirely innovative at the date of its release. If you don't find it so innovative now, chances are you don't have a clue about what was happening in 1979, which makes me wonder why you'd even bother with this album.

Entertainment! stands up with Pink Flag, London Calling, Unknown Pleasures, all those albums that emerged from the post-punk scene to redefine what music was, and to influence so many alternative bands throughout the next 25 some years.

The reissue of this album comes at a perfect time, when bands like the Futureheads and Bloc Party are flourishing, while borrowing heavily from the sound of Entertainment!

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars GOF's Musical and Thematic Insight needs Rediscovery., January 11, 2002

By 

Alan Koslowski (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Entertainment (Audio CD)

Take stripped-down punk, add some funky grooves, and top it off with some leftist proselytizing and you have GOF's, "Entertainment!". GOF took the urgent minimalism of Wire's first album ("Pink Flag", 1979) added tight, funky grooves (the guitars sometimes sounded like machine guns, the drums like artillery). This created the perfect environment for GOF's trenchant, oft funny songs describing the dehumanization of modern life. "Entertainment!" could have easily digressed into tedious rhetoric, but for all their ideals GOF swing and have fun; GOF recognize the irony of being part of the commercial system they're criticizing (if you haven't guessed, the album title is ironic).

GOF let you know right off that they're out to expose the myths promoted by commericalism. On the opener, 'Ether', vocalist Jon King knows there's no "happy ever after at the end of the rainbow", and endeavors to expose the "dirt behind the daydream". The choppy guitars and bomb-like drums let you know their inflammatory intentions. On 'Natural's Not in It', they pose the problem, "The problem of leisure, what to do for pleasure", then recognize the quandry of relationships; "Your relations are all power, we all have good intentions, but all with strings attached". On the bleakly comical 'Damaged Goods', King likens a relational break-up to receiving faulty merchandise, and berates his ex with lines like, "Open the till, give me the change you said would do me good, refund the cost, you said you're cheap, but you're too much". 'I Found That Essence Rare' has giddy, sing-along chorus to go along with a spiteful comments about relationships ("See the happy pair smiling close like they're monkeys, They wouldn't think so, but they're holding themselves down"). On the genuinely despairing, '5:45', King watches a military conflict on TV and laments how it becomes morosely enjoyable ("Watch new blood on the 18 inch screen, The corpse is a new personality... Guerilla war struggle is the new entertainment!"). Against post-psychadelic noise, on the closer "Anthrax" King equates love to being "like a beetle on it's back", while guitarist Andrew Gill speaks cynically (like Moe Tucker and Lou Reed) of how most groups use love to sell records.

"Entertainent!" was a profound influence (musically and ideologically) on artists such as REM, Rage Against the Machine, Fugazi, and Red Hot Chili Peppers. But, what makes a historic album is it's prescience: In 1979 GOF exposed the myths commercial culture was just starting to sell and also recognized that everything was becoming entertainment. Now, "Entertainment!" might seem less prescient and more like reportage, but that's a testment the record's brilliance. GOF's vision of a dystopia where everything (even war) is treated as entertainment has sadly become reality. If the record doesn't seem trenchant anymore it's because we've been engulfed by the world it describes. "Entertainment" might be the most cynical album ever made. And it's also one of the best (and most entertaining).

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars their least likely fan writes..., July 7, 2007

By 

Thomas Plotkin (West Hartford CT, United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Entertainment (Audio CD)

i'm a vehement anti-communist loather of the Frankfurt School who think's Jean Luc Godard (GoF's primary inspiration) was the worst thing that happened to cinema, which means I hate pretty much everything these guys stand for ideology-wise, and yet I love this album. It absolutely rocks, even if their class analysis is for the birds. This just goes to show that in rock 'n roll, as with Italian opera, lyrical content counts for little, sound is more powerul than sense. GoF don't write lyrics, they write slogans, but they're as hooky and memorable as Andy Gill's scraping James Brown meets James Blood Ulmer guitar noises. Less like songs than funky ideological football cheers. And Hugo Burnham is an amazing drummer. If you really want to know what this band was all about, hunt down a copy of the video (don't think it's on DVD) "Urgh! A Music War," a multi-artist punk/new wave medley of concert footage from the very early '80's. GoF are utterly riveting, absolute madmen. Though The Cramps out-do them, as Lux's leather pants are only held on him by his member, and he sings an entire song with the mike stuck between his teeth. But that's for another review.