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33⅓ Main Series #91
Entertainment!
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.
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.
- GenresMusicNonfictionPunk
160 pages, Paperback
First published March 20, 2014
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274 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
October 1, 2020
Though this album was a favorite of my college days, I don’t know much about the band. That’s a benefit, I think, when reading any of the books in this series. A professional review I read of this work beforehand seemed to love it, even while saying he didn’t quite understand it all. The latter wasn’t my experience. I know basically nothing about Marxist theory, but I think anyone who’s grown up in a consumer capitalist society will understand Dettmar’s points.
One thing Dettmar wants to make certain of is that his readers comprehend the irony behind the band’s lyrics. Maybe it’s because my favorite Gang of Four song (not on this album) is “I Love a Man in a Uniform,” but I always thought their irony was obvious.
One thing Dettmar wants to make certain of is that his readers comprehend the irony behind the band’s lyrics. Maybe it’s because my favorite Gang of Four song (not on this album) is “I Love a Man in a Uniform,” but I always thought their irony was obvious.
July 22, 2014
A 3-star book for a 5-star album. I respect the author's hyper analytical and intelligent approach to the legendary 1979 album, but it just comes off too dry and stiff. I would rather read more about the making of the music and songs than what Foucault says about Marxism.
August 5, 2019
I have to admit that I came to Gang of Four's album Entertainment! late. I suspect that I tracked down the album after hearing the track "Natural's Not It" on the soundtrack fro Sofia Coppola's film Marie Antoinette. I'm pretty sure the album was featured in Simon Reynold's Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 as a prime example of the genre. Anyway, I really enjoyed Kevin J.H. Dettmar's take on 33 1/3: Gang Of Four's Entertainment! (2014). I think his approach may strikes some readers as pretentious, but I do think there was much more behind the lyrics than I was getting from my listenings. Dettmar calls it one of the "lodestars of my intellectual life"-the other being James Joyce's Ulysses. Dettmar approaches the album with the rigor of cultural analysis using theories from the likes of Raymond Williams, Marx, Engels, Foucault, Zizek, and others. His references range from Jay Z, Nirvana, Elvis Costello, to Arthur Miller, E.M. Forster, and other more high brow references. Dettmar alternates between discussions of key words (such as Ideology, Nature, Theory, Alienation, Consumer, and Sex) and explains how they are applied to the songs from the album. His discussion of the songs do not follow the track listings on the original album but are from the author's own design: "Ether"/"Guns Before Butter", "Natural's Not It"/"Contract", "Not Great Men"/"Glass", "At Home He's A Tourist"/"5.45", "return the Gift"/"I Found That Essence Rare", and "Damaged Goods"/"Anthrax". It was an entertaining and informative analysis of a seminal postpunk (the author would bristle at this label-but here it is).
February 3, 2015
"It's more of a history of the writer and his first experience with the album. He writes like the college professor that he is."
June 2, 2024
In my teens, I had a kind of fascination with the idea of punk: the DIY ethos, the critical spirit, the desire to burn down and reinvent. When I started listening to the British punk rock of the late 70's and to the American hardcore punk of the early '80s, I found the execution considerably less thrilling: three or four power chords played at breakneck speed, with a vocalist shouting over top of it all and lyrics that seem to have taken him all of five minutes to think up. In Hegelian terms, this was purely negative freedom — the freedom not to. What I wanted was positive freedom — the freedom to create something new and interesting out of the wreckage.
Evidently, this need was felt by participants in both the British punk and American hardcore scenes themselves. Unsatisfied with the limits of their respective scenes, they quickly began to push the excessively strict boundaries of their respective genres. Accordingly, it took British punk all of two or three years to spawn the movement that critics now retroactively call post-punk (roughly 1978-1984). Where punk rock had merely sped up rock 'n' roll and made it louder, post-punk bands like Public Image Ltd., Gang of Four, The Slits, Au Pairs, Pere Ubu, The Pop Group, Pylon, and This Heat positively deconstructed it and re-invented it, infusing their compositions with influences drawn from such unlikely sources as reggae, dub, disco, and funk.
This music was still thrilling and terrifying to me when I heard it for the first time decades later at the age of 17. I vividly remember my first time listening to Gang of Four. "Damaged Goods" was the first song I heard of theirs. I'm also fairly certain that it was the slower, live-sounding one from the Damaged Goods EP. Interestingly, despite Andy Gill's unmistakable percussive guitar work — which has since been shameless emulated by the likes of Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party — and the surprisingly danceable rhythm provided by Hugo Burnham (drums) and Dave Allen (bass), I remember being struck by the lyrics above all else. Something about the bad faith displayed by Jon King's protagonist, something about the sheer brutishness of the terms in which he described his relationship really struck a nerve with me:
The change will do you good,
I always knew it would.
Sometimes I'm thinking that I love you,
But I know it's only lust.
Much like my teenage self, Kevin Dettmar seems much more taken with Gang of Four's lyrics than with the oft-imitated but rarely paralleled sonic template constructed by Gill, Allen, and Burnham. Right from the introduction, Dettmar announces his angle. On his view, modern criticism is not so much concerned with the object of criticism "as it is in itself", but as apprehended in aesthetic experience; consequently, the object of criticism is irreducibly self-referential: "There are some elements of my Entertainment! that aren't [...] part of Entertainment! — but I'll be exploring them here anyway" (p.7). For Dettmar, this leads to an interest in what Sylvia Wright called "mondegreens": mishearings that gives a lyric a new meaning. For Dettmar, the mondegreen is so interesting because it represents a space where the performer and the listener come together to create meaning.
Though interesting as a thesis in the study of popular music, Dettmar's angle imposes a number of unfortunate constraints on his book. The first and most obvious, to which I've already alluded, is that he is primarily interested in the lyrical dimension of Gang of Four's debut album — an approach entirely appropriate to, say, a Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen record, but less so on an album containing as much sonic innovation as Entertainment!. The second, for which Dettmar apologizes in the concluding chapter (the phrase "Too little, too late" comes to mind here), is that he takes on each song in isolation in order to analyze their lyrical content. Although he does allow for thematic bridges between songs, this approach precludes a broader look at the peculiar blend of punk, funk, and dub that defines the sonic landscape of Entertainment!. I also confess that I am not entirely sold on the irreducibly self-referential character of modern criticism. Perhaps Dettmar would say that I am not modern (or postmodern?) enough.
For all my misgivings, I will say that I find the division of the book pedagogically sound and analytically interesting. The book is divided into short chapters analyzing one thematically linked pair of songs. Following each one is an even shorter "Keywords" chapter shedding some light on the central concept of the pair of songs to come: "Ideology", "Nature", "Theory", "Alienation", "Consumer", "Sex". This makes for a rich look at the lyrical themes of the album and makes up somewhat for the lack of a big-picture view in Dettmar's approach. His writing throughout is fluid and engaging and he does manage to illuminate the subject matter to a considerable degree. However, I often found myself wondering how anyone is supposed to understand some of his more complex verbiage without a degree in philosophy. Luckily, I have two (now bordering on three). As to what exactly that says about the legacy and potential of popular culture as an agent of social change, I invite you to duke it out with Mssrs. Adorno and Sartre
Evidently, this need was felt by participants in both the British punk and American hardcore scenes themselves. Unsatisfied with the limits of their respective scenes, they quickly began to push the excessively strict boundaries of their respective genres. Accordingly, it took British punk all of two or three years to spawn the movement that critics now retroactively call post-punk (roughly 1978-1984). Where punk rock had merely sped up rock 'n' roll and made it louder, post-punk bands like Public Image Ltd., Gang of Four, The Slits, Au Pairs, Pere Ubu, The Pop Group, Pylon, and This Heat positively deconstructed it and re-invented it, infusing their compositions with influences drawn from such unlikely sources as reggae, dub, disco, and funk.
This music was still thrilling and terrifying to me when I heard it for the first time decades later at the age of 17. I vividly remember my first time listening to Gang of Four. "Damaged Goods" was the first song I heard of theirs. I'm also fairly certain that it was the slower, live-sounding one from the Damaged Goods EP. Interestingly, despite Andy Gill's unmistakable percussive guitar work — which has since been shameless emulated by the likes of Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party — and the surprisingly danceable rhythm provided by Hugo Burnham (drums) and Dave Allen (bass), I remember being struck by the lyrics above all else. Something about the bad faith displayed by Jon King's protagonist, something about the sheer brutishness of the terms in which he described his relationship really struck a nerve with me:
The change will do you good,
I always knew it would.
Sometimes I'm thinking that I love you,
But I know it's only lust.
Much like my teenage self, Kevin Dettmar seems much more taken with Gang of Four's lyrics than with the oft-imitated but rarely paralleled sonic template constructed by Gill, Allen, and Burnham. Right from the introduction, Dettmar announces his angle. On his view, modern criticism is not so much concerned with the object of criticism "as it is in itself", but as apprehended in aesthetic experience; consequently, the object of criticism is irreducibly self-referential: "There are some elements of my Entertainment! that aren't [...] part of Entertainment! — but I'll be exploring them here anyway" (p.7). For Dettmar, this leads to an interest in what Sylvia Wright called "mondegreens": mishearings that gives a lyric a new meaning. For Dettmar, the mondegreen is so interesting because it represents a space where the performer and the listener come together to create meaning.
Though interesting as a thesis in the study of popular music, Dettmar's angle imposes a number of unfortunate constraints on his book. The first and most obvious, to which I've already alluded, is that he is primarily interested in the lyrical dimension of Gang of Four's debut album — an approach entirely appropriate to, say, a Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen record, but less so on an album containing as much sonic innovation as Entertainment!. The second, for which Dettmar apologizes in the concluding chapter (the phrase "Too little, too late" comes to mind here), is that he takes on each song in isolation in order to analyze their lyrical content. Although he does allow for thematic bridges between songs, this approach precludes a broader look at the peculiar blend of punk, funk, and dub that defines the sonic landscape of Entertainment!. I also confess that I am not entirely sold on the irreducibly self-referential character of modern criticism. Perhaps Dettmar would say that I am not modern (or postmodern?) enough.
For all my misgivings, I will say that I find the division of the book pedagogically sound and analytically interesting. The book is divided into short chapters analyzing one thematically linked pair of songs. Following each one is an even shorter "Keywords" chapter shedding some light on the central concept of the pair of songs to come: "Ideology", "Nature", "Theory", "Alienation", "Consumer", "Sex". This makes for a rich look at the lyrical themes of the album and makes up somewhat for the lack of a big-picture view in Dettmar's approach. His writing throughout is fluid and engaging and he does manage to illuminate the subject matter to a considerable degree. However, I often found myself wondering how anyone is supposed to understand some of his more complex verbiage without a degree in philosophy. Luckily, I have two (now bordering on three). As to what exactly that says about the legacy and potential of popular culture as an agent of social change, I invite you to duke it out with Mssrs. Adorno and Sartre
April 6, 2015
Fantastic album, dullish book. Like all of us, the author hears what he wants to hear in his favourite things. In this case it means that he hears the things a W.M. Keck Professor of English at Pomona College, USA, will hear. He has the phrasing of a post-theory leftist academic in an English department, and that's not a good thing, especially 40 years after the whole theory wave swelled up (around the time of "Entertainment!"). Sure, the Gang of Four were teenage Marxists, but they were also spunky and individual. Any book of pop criticism that boasts, yes boasts, of being influenced by Raymond Williams' "Keywords", promises to disappoint. In that sense, Dettmar delivers.
Anyway: skip the book, but hear the record.
Anyway: skip the book, but hear the record.
April 27, 2015
Ugh. Where did the passion go in writing about music you love? I thought after the first few moments that this book might possibly go towards the light of caring about a record...but no. It's another piece of academia, which seems to be where 33 and 1/3 wants the series to go. There's no passion, just analysis, and sometimes to a fault. It shouldn't be about who's interpretation fits best, or where one believes the lyrical content is directed, it should read about why we care, or should...and this book just doesn't offer that.
February 13, 2020
An academic poses the idea that the ways he misheard the lyrics from the album as a youth--misheard lyrics are apparently called "mondegreens"--are just as relevant as the actual lyrics, since in a Marxist sense the words/art belong to the people...or something. Extremely overwritten, but not without some informative parts.
...I'm beginning to worry that there are more bad books in this series than good ones.
...I'm beginning to worry that there are more bad books in this series than good ones.
May 11, 2015
One of the best of the 33 1/3 series, mainly because this record formed so much of my political thinking through slapping guitars. Marxist theory, Situationalism, anti-consumerism, and the fact that no gift comes without strings. Sign me up...
July 25, 2020
A deep dive into the political theory and cultural context beyond one of the greatest pieces of post-punk ever made. Recommended if you love the album and want to try to understand the Marxist theory that is fundamental to it's messages.
February 26, 2022
This is the seventh book from the 33 1/3 series and the one I like the least. This isn't to say it's bad... Dettmar has made some moves that I think are not fully successful. And it seems he knows that his choices might be idiosyncratic enough to not be as convincing as he might have wished them to be. He writes: "I've structured this book in a way that gives primacy to the integrity of individual songs, and then attempts to highlight common themes and through-lines between songs" and in doing so, he obviously disrupts the structure of the artifact, the album itself. He structures the "themes" and "through-lines" according to the British Marxist literary critic Raymond Williams concept of "keywords" as popularized in Williams' 1976 book, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. The "keywords" Dettmar has chosen to pair with complementary pairs of songs are: Ideology for "Ether" and "Guns Before Butter"; Nature for "Natural's Not In It" and "Contract"; Theory for "Not Great Men" and "Glass"; Alienation for "At Home He's A Tourist" and "5:45"; Consumer for "Return the Gift" and "I Found that Essence Rare"; and Sex for two of the strongest cuts on the album: "Damaged Goods" and "Anthrax."
This is the successful strategy. The other, an hyperbolic importance to the mondegreen. If you are unfamiliar with this term, it's the phenomena of hearing something other than what is actually being sung. A famous example is Jimi Hendrix singing "Scuse me, while I kiss this guy" rather than the actual lyric: "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky." Perhaps, my favorite is "There's a bathroom on the right" for "There's a bad moon on the right" in Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Bad Moon Rising". The back cover says: "Gang of Four produced post-punk's smartest record, Entertainment!" and 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 Situationalism to exposing the cultural politics of everyday life." But, because the lyrics are -- like in so much of rock -- unintelligible, the question arises: "What can it mean that a band that made pop songs as political theory actively resisted making that theory legible?" Dettmar takes it as an excuse and rationale to take the mondegreens that he heard seriously, and at times that becomes way too much of a stretch for me to accept.
That said, while I got the thrust of the counter-lyric to "Anthrax," all those years ago when I first heard it, I am delighted that Dettmar includes the full "dissertation on The Love Song as a Staple of Pop Language."
All that said, though... if you ever loved the sheer power and energy of Gang of Four's first -- and arguably best album -- then you will want to read and think with this book, for as Dettmar concludes: "Entertainment! isn't an album to think about.... There are probably a dozen albums I think about more.
This is the successful strategy. The other, an hyperbolic importance to the mondegreen. If you are unfamiliar with this term, it's the phenomena of hearing something other than what is actually being sung. A famous example is Jimi Hendrix singing "Scuse me, while I kiss this guy" rather than the actual lyric: "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky." Perhaps, my favorite is "There's a bathroom on the right" for "There's a bad moon on the right" in Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Bad Moon Rising". The back cover says: "Gang of Four produced post-punk's smartest record, Entertainment!" and 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 Situationalism to exposing the cultural politics of everyday life." But, because the lyrics are -- like in so much of rock -- unintelligible, the question arises: "What can it mean that a band that made pop songs as political theory actively resisted making that theory legible?" Dettmar takes it as an excuse and rationale to take the mondegreens that he heard seriously, and at times that becomes way too much of a stretch for me to accept.
That said, while I got the thrust of the counter-lyric to "Anthrax," all those years ago when I first heard it, I am delighted that Dettmar includes the full "dissertation on The Love Song as a Staple of Pop Language."
All that said, though... if you ever loved the sheer power and energy of Gang of Four's first -- and arguably best album -- then you will want to read and think with this book, for as Dettmar concludes: "Entertainment! isn't an album to think about.... There are probably a dozen albums I think about more.
July 4, 2022
one of the best 33 1/3 i've read for many reasons. Dettmar, with not just his arguments and observations but also his interviews with every member of Gang of Four (!), absolutely nails it, understanding exactly what it is that makes Entertainment! such a crucial entry in the punk canon; namely, its politics-of-everyday-life lyricism's undidactic manner of conveying marxist concepts and its punchy, sparse-yet-vigorous instrumentation's sense of urgency.
"love crops up quite a lot as something to sing about, 'cause most groups make most of their songs about falling in love, or how happy they are to be in love - you occasionally wonder why these groups do sing about it all the time, piss down a drain. it's because these groups think there's something very special about it. either that or else it's because everybody else sings about it and always has, you know, to burst into song, you have to be inspired, and nothing inspires quite like love. these groups and singers think that they appeal to everyone by singing about love because apparently everyone has or can love, i said to myself - or so they would have you believe anyway - but these groups... to go along with what, the belief that love is deep in everyone's personality - i don't think we're saying there's anything wrong with love, we just don't think that what goes on between two people should be shrouded with mystery."
"love crops up quite a lot as something to sing about, 'cause most groups make most of their songs about falling in love, or how happy they are to be in love - you occasionally wonder why these groups do sing about it all the time, piss down a drain. it's because these groups think there's something very special about it. either that or else it's because everybody else sings about it and always has, you know, to burst into song, you have to be inspired, and nothing inspires quite like love. these groups and singers think that they appeal to everyone by singing about love because apparently everyone has or can love, i said to myself - or so they would have you believe anyway - but these groups... to go along with what, the belief that love is deep in everyone's personality - i don't think we're saying there's anything wrong with love, we just don't think that what goes on between two people should be shrouded with mystery."
February 17, 2023
An insufferable morass of egotistical Ivory Tower twaddle, this is not so much about the record as it is about the author's experience of the record--the music criticism equivalent of self-insert fan fiction. For every sentence that actually stays on topic and explicates some aspect of this cultural touchstone for the alienated, there are two or three paragraphs of autobiographical digression and/or academic posturing (frequently interrupted by cringey self-referential parenthetical metacommentary). Dettmar literally devotes more space to interpreting his initial mishearings of the lyrics than explaining the actual lyrics. This is intended as a big-brained rhetorical gimmick in support of a contrived thesis but it comes off as a poseur's desperate attempt to upstage the band.
To get a sense of how he centers himself over his nominal subject, look no further than the very first sentence: "When I'm pressed (as one sometimes is), Gang of Four is the band I avow my favorite of all time." Dude, no one cares.
The author has some interesting insights to share but there's just too much self-centered sludge to trudge through to bother teasing out the glimmery bits. Could not finish.
I blame the publisher. They should have exerted more editorial control and reined in these narcissistic fanboy ramblings. Gang of Four and fans of Entertainment! deserve better.
To get a sense of how he centers himself over his nominal subject, look no further than the very first sentence: "When I'm pressed (as one sometimes is), Gang of Four is the band I avow my favorite of all time." Dude, no one cares.
The author has some interesting insights to share but there's just too much self-centered sludge to trudge through to bother teasing out the glimmery bits. Could not finish.
I blame the publisher. They should have exerted more editorial control and reined in these narcissistic fanboy ramblings. Gang of Four and fans of Entertainment! deserve better.
August 18, 2022
An album like Entertainment! needed an erudite fan, a reader, to do it justice and here manages to get just that in the form of Kevin Dettmar. He is locked into this album and has been since he was a student. In effect, a lifetime of communing with this collection of songs. Be warned that some of his digressions based on mondegreens end up being rather frustrating and that there is occasionally of missing the wood for the trees, but overall this is a solid entry which does justice to a highly versatile postpunk classic.
Proof of the album's prescience can be seen in how the spiky Go4 sound drove several hits by other bands in the Noughties which sold far more than the source album managed (e.g. Franz Ferdinand, Interpol et al). Cerebral and deeply engaged, Gang of Four managed for a moment to encapsulate the postpunk fusing of mind and spirit and riff and rhythm on this album and its follow-up, Solid Gold. They asked barbed questions of themselves and humanity, couching these enquiries in trebly guitar and busy basslines. It has remained vital, if still something of an acquired taste, but the possibilities of popular music were pushed onwards and outwards.
Proof of the album's prescience can be seen in how the spiky Go4 sound drove several hits by other bands in the Noughties which sold far more than the source album managed (e.g. Franz Ferdinand, Interpol et al). Cerebral and deeply engaged, Gang of Four managed for a moment to encapsulate the postpunk fusing of mind and spirit and riff and rhythm on this album and its follow-up, Solid Gold. They asked barbed questions of themselves and humanity, couching these enquiries in trebly guitar and busy basslines. It has remained vital, if still something of an acquired taste, but the possibilities of popular music were pushed onwards and outwards.
October 5, 2021
hit it out of the park kev! with humor and intelligence elaborates the facts, fictions, and ideas bubbling from what's no doubt the smartest (and among the best) "postpunk" records. brings up ideas and schools of thought i'm already very keen on ; situationist ideas, Brechtian devices, unpacking the ideological frame of mind and sociological conditioning that helped and still helps capitalism and consumerism etc. to dominate our lives and the limits of the possible. by pointing to and examining Entertainment! Dettmar is able to show how a piece of art, popular art no less, can playfully and effectively throw a wrench in the gears of the status quo.
September 25, 2021
Good book
Read
March 8, 2017I came for non-fiction storytelling and stayed for its literary theory background. Dettmar's deconstruction of several Marxist concepts (or keywords) is as unexpected as resourceful. However, that doesn't forgives his work of its preposterous and absolutely unnecessary connections between "Entertainment!" and several anachronical/lame popular approaches (Elvis Costello, really?). Besides, it's a bummer there's no historical revision of this fantastic record; 33 1/3 Books usually shine for their meticulous historical research but this one stands in a different (although acceptable) category.
September 6, 2015
Read my in-depth review of this book at: http://2bitmonkey.wordpress.com/2014/...
April 20, 2014
Probably the most intellectual entry in the 33 1/3 series!
Read
November 18, 2016The book started out really well and just trickled out by the end. I felt that it could have more analysis of the album and the individual songs than it did.
November 18, 2015
Smart stuff here. A good entry into the series, enjoyed this one.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews