Entertainment! (1979)

Entertainment! is the debut album by the English post-punk band Gang of Four. It was released in September 1979 through EMI Records internationally and Warner Bros. Records in North America. Stylistically, it draws heavily on punk rock but also incorporates the influence of funk, reggae and dub. Its lyrics and artwork reflected the band's left-wing political concerns. Entertainment! became a seminal album in the post-punk movement.

In 2020, Entertainment! was ranked at number 273 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time".

Music

Entertainment! has been recognised as a seminal post-punk album, and an example of dance-punk, art punk and funk-punk. The album was co-produced by Jon King and Andy Gill along with Rob Warr, the band's manager at the time. King's lyrics were heavily influenced by Situationism, the work of philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan, feminism, and Marx's theory of alienation; a unifying notion is that "the personal is political". Topics include commodification ("Natural's Not in It", "Return the Gift"), proletarian life ("At Home He's a Tourist"), great man theory ("Not Great Men"), the treatment of Special Category Status prisoners at Long Kesh during The Troubles ("Ether"), and the cognitive and moral dissonance of watching media images of terrorism and guerrilla warfare in distant conflicts ("5.45"). A number of songs apply these themes to subvert love song tropes, challenging traditional concepts of love ("Love Like Anthrax", "Contract") and sex ("Damaged Goods", "I Found That Essence Rare"). In his 2014 monograph on the album, Kevin J. H. Dettmar likens the album to James Joyce's Ulysses, saying: "both are concerned with the importance of narrative, of storytelling, as a mode of experiencing the world... that the stories we tell ourselves about 'the way things are'—a body of stories that in another context we might call ideology—profoundly shape our experiences of the world."

Artwork

The album's cover artwork, designed by King, shows the influence of the Situationist International, a left-wing organization which became famous for inspiring the events of May 68 in France. It depicts an "Indian" shaking hands with a "cowboy" in three heavily processed versions of the same image, based on a still from one of the Winnetou films starring Lex Barker and Pierre Brice, which had once been popular in East Germany as narratives critical of capitalism. Their faces are reduced to blobs of red and white: that is, to their stereotypical skin colours. A text that winds around the images reads: "The Indian smiles, he thinks that the cowboy is his friend. The cowboy smiles, he is glad the Indian is fooled. Now he can exploit him." In this way, it approaches themes of exploitation, but may also criticize simplistic popular depictions of ethnic, social or political conflicts as "cowboys and Indians".

The album's back cover depicts a family whose father says, "I spend most of our money on myself so that I can stay fat", while the mother and children declare, "We're grateful for his leftovers". On the album's inner sleeve, designed by Gill, small photographs depicting scenes shown on television are interlaced with text illustrating what the band suggests are the misleading subtexts of media presentation: "The facts are presented neutrally so that the public can make up its own mind"; "Men act heroically to defend their country"; "People are given what they want".

Release

"At Home He's a Tourist" reached number 58 in the UK Singles Chart, the highest position of any Gang of Four song. The band were originally asked to perform the song on Top of the Pops. However, when the show's producers heard the line "And the rubbers you hide in your top left pocket" they asked the group to change the word "rubbers" to "rubbish" for fear of causing offence; the band refused, and the appearance was cancelled.

In 2005, the band performed the album live in its entirety as part of the All Tomorrow's Parties-curated Don't Look Back concert series. In 2009, King wrote a track-by-track commentary on the album for Clash. Hugo Burnham's memories of making the album were published in 2014, on the 35th anniversary of its release.

Reception

Entertainment! was ranked the fifth best album of 1979 by NME. Reviewing the album in Rolling Stone in 1980, David Fricke regarded Entertainment! as "the best debut album by a British band – punk or otherwise – since the original English release of The Clash in 1977". Creem's RJ Smith, looking back on Entertainment! in 1984, found it to be "the most difficult Gang album, because it's so damn hard to find the front door to the thing. The ugly emotions Entertainment! dredges up are almost freakish, and all the more unsettling for the way they poke unexpectedly through the record's detached, architectonic front."