Popular Music and Society
Fall, 1998

Pop Music and the Limits of Cultural Critique:
Gang of Four Shrinkwraps Entertainment.
Author/s: Michael Hoover

A half century ago Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno published their critique of the culture industry in which they argued that modern technology had produced a debased "mass culture" (131) that silences criticism. In contrast to Walter Benjamin's assertion that "mechanical reproduction" (30) could have revolutionary implications by destroying the elitist "aura" (30) of art, Horkheimer and Adorno maintained that culture and entertainment had been fused. Moreover, they claimed that advertising had triumphed in its quest to manipulate human desire and need. Thus, modern culture was commodity culture-production and exchange under capitalist social relations. As the Frankfurt School theorists' essays suggested, diversion, distraction, and amusement had become the norm.

Adorno undertook a broad range of studies in the sociology of music. In his view, most twentieth century music was manufactured for the marketplace. Decrying what he called popular music's standardization, pseudo-individualism, and rationalized production, promotion, and distribution, Adorno lamented the loss of autonomous art. His contention was that the music industry took authentic cultural expressions out of their context, developed programmed melodies and songs, and integrated them into the latest fashion. Or, as Herbert Marcuse wrote, "What had once been part of the permanence of life, now becomes a concert, a festival, a disc in the making" (Counter-Revolution and Revolt 115).

Such pessimism runs counter to the more recent populism of Dick Hebdige, who sees in consumption an active process in which meaning is constantly recreated. Rather than the dialectical trap of a one-dimensional commodity culture, Hebdige theorizes social difference - multiple audiences differentiated by class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, locality, and age. These factors, in turn, make possible different "readings" of the same cultural objects. According to Iain Chambers, "the vivid languages of ... pop music ... are translated into personalized styles, manners, tastes and pleasures" (185). In other words, what the consumer does following the act of exchange is open. As use value reenters the picture, the potential for resistance to market domination is always present because corporate hegemony is always incomplete.

If pop music is viewed as contested terrain, musicians can play with the spaces between production and consumption, words and meaning, and the individual and social. Theoretically, this approach attempts to account for both cultural pessimism and cultural populism by acknowledging the coexistence of domination and resistance at the same site.

The British pop group Gang of Four has been operating in this way and exploring such themes in late capitalism since the 1970s. With backgrounds in the fine arts, lyricist Jon King and guitarist Andy Gill initially strove to combine the structuralism of Louis Althusser and Roland Barthes with "fast R&B" music. Over the course of almost twenty years, and amidst personnel turnover, group breakup, and musical style changes, the two have had--in the words of Jon King--a "strained relationship with the mainstream."(1) King continues to believe that "participation in commodity culture [does not] automatically invalidate alternative propositions."

Gang of Four offers valuable insights into the dialectical tension between art and commerce as well as progressive social change and popular entertainment. The band members' origins as art students and political activists in a working-class industrial city played a prominent role in shaping their sensibilities regarding social class. Their decision to sign a major-label recording contract in spite of their cultural and ideological understanding created a paradoxical situation in which they attempted to bite the hand that fed them. Their evolving political consciousness included a sensitivity to gender relations while raising new questions about whether politics mattered. The group's decline in popularity by the mid-1980s mirrored the weakening of social movements of which the band members had been a part. After the band's dissolution in 1984, founding members King and Gill reemerged in the early 1990s during a time of neoliberal market hegemony. Their post-1980s reinvention was signaled by musical and thematic changes rather than by a leftist political resurgence.

Gang of Four's origins are instructive. Gill and King fit the mold of many British art students turned pop and rock and roll musicians. The duo had studied at the University of Leeds with former Situationist and socialist art historian T. J. (Tim) Clark. Clark's book on Courbet resonates with the view that "bourgeois society is efficient in making all art its own" and asserts that the "avant-garde ... [is] an unabashed form of social climbing" (6, 14)--cues for the future musicians. Gill and King would find affinity with feminist Griselda Pollock, as reflected by the band's awareness of sexism in daily life, for example, "It's Her Factory" (1980) points to the hypocrisy of viewing women as housekeepers. King also cites the influence of structuralist Fred Orton as well as Terry Atkinson, whose attention to art and language would have a profound influence: "Music and lyrics, the one always analogous to the other, impossible to separate sound and meaning," says King today. The other important factor would be the rest of the University of Leeds art department faculty, against whom King and Gill would rebel. As King says, "[They] were traditional art historians outraged by the suggestion that art might in a major way be affected by social conditions."(2)

Gill and King were also campus activists. They ran the student film group and were associated with the university's radicals. In a 1991 interview, King reminisced about: "events surrounding the organized occupation of my old university administration offices, agreed [to] by the Students Union and the university, to protest cuts. It was a pathetic exercise guaranteed to give the semblance of action where there was only passivity. A bunch of us sabotaged this "demonstration" of "reasonable" students, spoiling the event in a variety of ways, which got out of hand, of course, and a lot of damage was done. This led to an extraordinary meeting on campus, where 6,000 students turned out and voted to withdraw funding, facilities, etc. to the university's anarchist society in a mass kangaroo court. No one from this unlucky bunch was allowed to speak, nor the guilty man, a friend of ours (who became the first manager of the Mekons), shouting that he had done it, but these "reasonable" students weren't interested. He was a mining engineer and didn't fit into the troublemaking stereotype".

If their school experience, on one hand, offered opportunities to develop consciousness of themselves in artistic-ideological terms (King notes that "Hobbesian ideas of atomic individualism and its relationship to craft-based activity was something that Terry [Atkinson] was particularly interested in"), incidents such as the one described above provided evidence that the traditional left wing had been reabsorbed into late capitalism as its "respectable opposition."

While three of the original members met while students (drummer Hugo Burnham was a Leeds drama student who tired of agit-prop theatre), bassist Dave Allen was a truck driver-musician who came to Leeds wanting to play in a punk band. Leeds, a manufacturing city of more than 700,000 residents, serves as home to workers in clothing, electrical equipment, paper, and metal factories, and the landscape freely mixes working class neighborhoods and student ghettos. In the mid-1970s, music clubs spread throughout the industrial district in a pattern common to the youth subcultures that flourish in the grit of urban decay. Formerly empty warehouses became gathering places for disaffected youth and small alternative storefronts catered to the hip milieu. Benefit gigs and festivals were commonplace. Allen and King met in these streets at an anti-National Front (British fascists) demonstration where King was clubbed by police. Obviously the roots of rock and roll lie in workingclass youth culture. But the effect of the Leeds environment on the band members crystallized social relations which could have remained abstract theorizing of their education. As Greil Marcus has noted, Gang of Four's "stance is not that of the cultural politician, of someone denouncing or criticizing, but of an ordinary person struggling to make sense of his or her life" (128).

Clearly, the punk scene was also significant for the members of Gang of Four. To the band, punk was an expression confirming that corporate-bureaucratic culture is socially constructed, as suggested by numerous of their songs. "Natural's Not In It" (1979) unmasks the power relations hiding behind market-manipulated sex; "Why Theory" (1981) is what King calls the bands's "pulp mumbling on hegemony"; "Cheeseburger" (1981) collapses space and time in a drive-through society; and "The History of the World" (1982) deconstructs the relations of production. Punk's starting point, according to Peter Wicke, was the "worthless, banal, and trivial ... the secret horror images behind the normality of bourgeois respectability" (138). Punks created a negative aesthetic, turning alienation and unemployment into art, fashion, and music. But in many ways punk was an apolitical, even antipolitical, rebellion, in contrast to the publicly avowed socialism of the Gang. Early on the group aligned itself with overt political-rock activism, organizing and performing at both Rock Against Racism (RAR) and Rock Against Sexism (RAS) events in Britain.

Known variously as "post punk" and "second generation punk," bands for whom the political arose from the cultural coexisted in the RAR milieu with Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) members. The orthodox Marxist left had long rejected rock as--at best--petitbourgeois protest and--more often--as an opiate that dulled political consciousness and commitment to the class struggle. So while RAR concerts, literature, and marches were substantive expressions of artistpolitico collaboration, the latter remained wedded, say Simon Frith and John Street, to the belief that "the value of a musical form lay in the proletarian authority of its performers" (76). For many musicians, however, identifying the enemy, creating awareness about issues, and having fun for a cause were not signals of interest in vanguard party building or a democratic-centralist program. In answer to reporter Amy Linden's question, for example, about whether or not Gang of Four were "card-carrying" socialists, then bassist Dave Allen responded by saying "No one's a member of anything" (8).(3)

But even the choice of the band's name--Gang of Four--resonates with the radical politics of the 1970s. Consider the manifestations: (1) questionable linkage between the Western counterculture and the Chinese Cultural Revolution; (2) emergence of Maoist ideology among the late New Left; (3) death of Chairman Mao Zedong in 1976; (4) arrest and trial of Mao's widow and alleged counter-revolutionaries dubbed "the Gang of Four" and the consequent negative connotations culturally and politically circulating around them. What's in a name?

Despite the mythologizing ("four Maoist art students," "taking their name from a group of dissidents in Maoist China"), Jon King explains that: "to try to link it to post-Maoist China, there generally is [no link], particularly [not] to those people who were repressive and authoritarian, not the kind of thing anyone would want to be associated with--their ideas. But in the sense that it promotes something, it's very self-descriptive.... There's nothing so rich as calling something by its real name".

Burnham told music historian Martin Aston: "We were the most aptly named band.... One of our strengths is that we were four different people pulling in different directions" (124). King's literalness and Burnham's directness appropriately describe the band's anarchy. Heated political discussions based on strongly held individual beliefs led to knockdown, drag-out arguments, often unresolved, but leading to creative impulses reflected in their songs.

Other agit-pop bands flourished in Leeds at the same time, including the Mekons, Au Pairs, and Delta 5. But it was the Gang of Four that drew attention and created controversy among their peers when in 1978 the band signed with EMI in Britain and Warner Bros. in the United States, large and powerful transnational corporations. The Gang's critique of commodity culture was informed by Marx's idea of "fetishism" as described in Volume One of Capital: "a definite social relation ... that assumes ... the fantastic form of a relation between things" (72). "Damaged Goods" (1979) is about how people are encouraged to consider everything, including their personal relationships, as objects to possess. "Capital, It Fails Us Now" (1982) sketches a life dependent on revolving credit. "Call Me Up" (1982) portrays consumerism as hedonism. Emerging from these songs is the contradiction between rejecting and becoming a part of that system. For example, the song "Armalite Rifle" (1980), by describing a weapon British soldiers were using in Northern Ireland, critiqued militarism. Yet EMI, the band's label company, was heavily invested in the armaments industry. Fans and the music press charged the Gang with "selling out" (Harron 206).

Years later Jon King would defend the band's position this way:
"We're musicians. That's what we do for a living. If you make music for a living in a craft-based way, then you have to accept that employs a certain exchange system. I don't think it's a meaningful criticism to say--I can't imagine a system in which you make music ... [where] you didn't want the music to be sold. Otherwise you couldn't do it. It would then only be like a hobby. The vast majority of musicians don't actually get paid; they in fact have day jobs and they don't do it professionally, or perhaps only on a semiprofessional basis." King's conception of himself is in contrast to the myth that portrays pop musicians as eccentric individuals.

In reality, they earn a living by selling a service--their ability to make music. And their endeavors are made possible by the "purchasers, record companies, and concert promoters who turn the musician's ability into a commercial product" (Wicke 94).

Did the Gang make a Faustian pact with the devil? Mary Harron contends that they were naive to think that they could maintain their integrity while marketing themselves (206). And David Fricke, in his Rolling Stone review of their initial major-label album, wrote that they "undoubtedly fancy themselves cultural guerrillas based in the heart of the beast" (47). The band's 1979 release was self-mockingly entitled Entertainment, suggesting that they were aware of the complications involved. Of course, recognizing the contradictions of being a left-wing band in a capitalist system is no guarantee that they--or anyone else--would be able to negotiate the minefields of the art/sales dialectic without self-destructing.

Obviously they wanted their music to be heard. King voices concern about access to audience and raises a question about a performer's financial ability to "go it alone." Perhaps most importantly, King takes issue with those who would claim that the "do it yourself' decentralization of small independent firms spawned by the "punk revolution" represented an alternative to the established music business. After all, a rock band is a capitalist enterprise. The problem is one of sales and--as the old adage goes--you've got to spend money to make money.

Gang of Four had complete artistic control over their creative output. Band members functioned as a worker-owned production team. They supplied EMI and Warner Bros. with advertising copy, cover art, sleeve design, liner notes, and recorded music. Thereafter, the companies used their public relations departments and their monopoly positions in retail trade to sell as much "product" as they could.

It was in their function as commercial product, not artists, that Gang of Four was booked to appear on the influential BBC television program Top of the Pops. Their performance of "At Home He's a Tourist" was canceled after the band refused to change the word "rubbers" to "rubbish" in a line about condoms. Ironically, King could have easily sung "rubbish" because the tune tells how nonstop circulation of cultural commodities robs people of their leisure time. Harron has pointed to this incident as an example of the band's naivete, and she, among others, has highlighted the negative effect it had on record sales early in their career (206). But this either-or scenario ignores a moment of mediation in which the Gang decided to sing the lyric "packets [instead of rubbers] you hide in your top left pocket." Jon King argues that "the idea of a compromise--there's nothing wrong with that, as long as you retain the idea that you put over.... What they objected to [fornication] was proven to us; they banned even the word `packet'" (Linden 9).

Musically, the Gang was a frontal assault on the senses--Parliament Funkadelic meets Velvet Underground. According to Andy Gill, "We weren't really interested in melody, but with making different drum patterns" ("Gang of Four Surrender"). Metallic-like guitar hammering and plunking (courtesy of Gill) and industrial-strength bass and drums mimicked the rhythms of daily life. Instruments entered and exited through the rise and fall of the musical line, changing tempo, dynamics, and timbre, creating, in King's words, "perverted disco." Onstage Gill, motionless and e-motionless, personified alienation in counterpoint to King's manic whirling-dervish persona. Lyrics were desperately shouted out in a way that established King as a vocal stylist but diminished his presence as a front man for a band; Gill plaintively spoke his lyrics when singing. Coupled to the noise and histrionics were the Gang's messages requiring the audience to listen, think, relisten, and think again. The band nurtured conflict through multiple contradictions and ambiguities and thereby prevented the emergence of a unified, single statement. The music and words do not stand apart. Relates Jon King:

The whole thing is of a piece. It's impossible to separate the significance of the guitar break, say, in "FMUSA" [1990] from the context in which the words occur. They live in the same thought or idea.... This black GI who comes from an exploited, totally poverty-stricken world who is sent off to shoot Vietnamese people. And the Vietnamese woman, who tells her story like an American would: "My husband was just a regular guy".... We try to describe these characters as having a symbiotic relationship.

"FMUSA"'s Hendrix-like guitar break recalls the song's opening sounds of incoming helicopters, creating an effect similar to the description Michael Herr uses in Dispatches, and visually produced in movies like Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. Given the conservative revisionist version of the Vietnam War, Reagan's "noble mission," the story told here reflects the fact that more bombs were dropped on the Vietnamese than on the Europeans during the second world war. Using a multiple perspective trope, the song gives voice to those usually silenced. King continues: "If you had an orthodox structure with complicated ideas, I don't think it would work. I don't think you can describe life like that properly. You would imitate worn-out, boring forms of art. But that is not our sound."

And what is their sound? "Neo-Marxist funk," according to Greil Marcus's liner notes to the Gang's compilation A Brief History of the Twentieth Century (1990), whatever that means. Jon King himself draws a blank. While the "funk" may be right, the "neo-Marxist," he feels, undermines what the label conveys. Accordingly, King says: "One of the reasons why I [King] couldn't say I was a Marxist, though I probably would have ... at one time, is because Marx completely left out culture. ... He dismissed it with something like, `conditioning creates consciousness.' He was a nineteenth-century philosopher" (Brazier 23).

Thus King identifies Marxism with "mechanistic materialism" and "scientific socialism." While not absent from Marx himself, these tenets were developed from Engels's summaries of Marx's writings. Second International leaders such as Kautsky were taught to be almost exclusively concerned with an economic analysis of capitalism. And Lenin's view that consciousness reflects being did not deviate from this (despite his political differences with Kautsky and others). Stalin's later denunciation of the suggestion that there could be any autonomy of the political-cultural superstructure from the economic base became the Comintern's official line and made ossification inevitable.

In contrast, King emphasizes the significance of cultural operations, in all their ambiguity and resistance to dogmatic identification and compartmentalization:

Certainly I used to think that all human experience was to a greater extent governed by dominant social practice. Now I'm not so sure. All cultural production is political in the sense that it comes out of everyday life, and, so clearly, in cultural production it is determined by the culture on which it stands. But I think in the sense that necessarily there might be a very clear agenda or program or such, no.(4)

Given the political commitment of the band, King's statements reflect their determination to avoid falling into a prescribed agenda. Despite the group's anti-" cock-rock" stance, they were skeptical of the political acumen of the feminists who organized Rock Against Sexism (RAS) because the acronym was associated with Rastafarians infamous for their subjection of women. This, in turn, was a dilemma because Rock Against Racism (RAR) activists viewed reggae as Afro-Caribbean working-class music. On top of these issues, Gang of Four's opposition to fascism did not prevent them from rejecting the analysis of RAR Trotskyists who reduced anti-Nazi activism to simplistic sloganizing. Finally, to reporter Chris Brazier, the band defined socialism through vague references to "a decentralized consensus, where people have more control of their own lives ... where as far as possible you treat other people fairly and don't exploit their labours" (23).

Gang of Four's attention to gender and sexual relations--both in their music and in interviews--has often been noted. They tell stories about couples engaged in a struggle in the bedroom in "Contract" (1979), consign women's place to the bed and the kitchen in "Hole in the Wallet" (1981), and identify women who claim no need for men in "Woman-town" (1983). A husband in "Outside the Trains Don't Run on Time" (1980) expects his wife to wait on him hand and foot. In one tune, "It Is Not Enough" (1982), a male falsetto voice yells about wanting to be a good wife while, in another, "I Love a Man in a Uniform" (1982), a female soprano voice mocks a military recruit. Inversion and irony run throughout the melody of "Uniform" as the band recounts how the young enlistee has convinced himself that he and his girlfriend were good together, that he was protecting her by joining the army, and that she finds the military romantic. The woman's constant refrain in response to all this is: "You must be joking, O man you must be joking."

Yet, when asked if he considers himself a feminist, Jon King equivocates by saying that the:"role of women isn't something old fashioned socialism had many answers for. ... [The] redundant, boring politics of the traditional authoritarian Left didn't accept feminism (or Green issues).... The complexity of post-industrial life has thrown up all sorts of possibilities and problems.... It's a central part of the new European socialism."

Not until bassist Sara Lee (later of the B-52s) joined the band on Songs of the Free in 1982 did the Gang feature a woman.(5) Interestingly enough, the Gang's musical comrades in Leeds were mostly gender-mixed bands. Asked whether the "boys" made a conscious decision to include a woman in the band, King responded:

Well, she actually got the job because we knew her very well and she was a good musician. But at the same time, with her, once she was in the band, it was found to be far more pleasant to have a woman in the band. From that point onwards, we always had two women singing with us--Alyson Williams and Edie Reader. ... The two of them became more of the normal scenario. In the band at the moment [1991], we've got two women. But the only women on the entire package, and virtually the only women on the whole road tour, are Gail Ann Dorsey, who plays bass and sings for us, and Amanda Vincent [keyboards]. I think there's one other woman in the entire entourage who's doing, typically, wardrobe.

If indicative of current circumstances, the picture that King's latter remark paints reaffirms Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie's description of power in the music industry--men in charge and as active participants.

As for love and sex, King admitted to music critic Jim Sullivan that "we started off [in a band called Sevenoaks] ... doing classic, slightly tongue-in-cheek songs about picking up girls" (16). Something obviously changed, because the early Gang compare love to a disease in "Anthrax" (1979) and sex to a business transaction in "Natural's Not In It," "Damaged Goods," and "Contract" (1979). Criticized at times for being cold and distant about personal relationships, the band sings about them as if they wish to flatten the concept of romance beyond recognition.

Again, Jon King: "If you, say, look at the published agenda of music which limits itself to a very small set of subjects and the way it approaches these subjects (which in its most extreme identity is a sort of Bryan Adams-style song), about missing or making up with your girl, driving the car, in some sort of all-white, midwestern high school, which is an incredibly common motif ... I don't know anything about that. That is something which is a very specific American topic, but it seems to be exhaustively gone around. I had a chance to describe it the other night, like a dog returning to its own vomit.
In other words, pop songs as false emotional advertising and ideology as everydayness are themselves grounds for inquiry", as King told Greil Marcus, because "unless you have an awareness of your views as political manifestations, you won't believe you can change them" (118). Or as Gill's stoic voice recounts in "Anthrax," "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 in mystery."

Have any of Gang of Four's politics really mattered? Critic Mark Rowland's commentary on the band complained that "in pop music, politics has become the opiate of the people" (18). He proceeded to note, however, that the Gang "swing" and that the dance floor was packed when he saw them live. More than anything else, Gang of Four was a dance band trapped in a prison-house of leftist-intellectual language. There always existed the possibility that they did not communicate their politics well except to people like themselves. But the music works at various levels and the Gang's "punk-funk" was rhythmically closer to James Brown than to Johnny Rotten. If they did not always achieve a lyric-sound synthesis that made sense as the crowd danced to the "tension of a world on the wane" in "I Will Be A Good Boy" (1982), the result was creative release for both performer and audience. Maybe this is not subversion, but King comments, "in the sense that what we do is to some extent oppositional, I would say that we have become a reference point."

King maintains that he and Gill have always attempted to write original and challenging material. While there has generally been thematic continuity, over time the music has become more melodic. And Gill, whose harmonic guitar style has been much imitated, has moved on to a more chordal approach. The two may not think about audience when they are writing; still, they are aware of the sort of people to whom their music appeals.

Of their 1991 U.S. tour that came after a seven-year layoff, Jon King said: "Something that's been very noticeable ... playing club dates of our own and then going into these package dates, is that the package dates tend to be an overwhelmingly male audience, and our club date audiences tend to be one-third to one-half women; in other words, it's more balanced. So that it's something that we do, [which], quite clearly, doesn't communicate that kind of boys' culture which I think is very much associated with metal music and rap. I think it's very adolescent, suburban teenagers who like that kind of thing, that cathartic, masturbatory play."(6)
King is obviously pleased that the band was drawing a female audience, and attributes the effect to the socially favorable milieu known as Gang of Four, in contrast to typical rock environments where unaccompanied women can be subject to male harassment.

And so it goes with Gang of Four. The political-rock movements against racism and sexism were little more than slogans by the early 1980s. What King calls the "unstable" music, al avant-garde was passing into the "dustbin of history." No issue on the magnitude of Vietnam emerged to sustain various efforts at using the music industry against itself to promote social change (although Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament [CND] badges were an insignia for alienated British youth and the Red Wedge tour was a musician-led effort to bring young voters into the Labour Party). As some have said similarly about the antiwar movement, "it was a good party," but it was over. With Thatcher in power and Reagan preparing to carry out the U.S./NATO decision to deploy Euromissles, what had changed?

Even before a supportive social infrastructure had begun to collapse around them, the band took to the road, doing what recording acts do--touring in support of their product--enduring travel, bad food, motel rooms, the grind. Undoubtedly, the Top of the Pops incident had cost them record sales. The business of music began to get in the way. Coupled to this, the pressure of producing a respectable follow-up to Entertainment, which had garnered almost universal acclaim, weighed heavy. The second release, Solid Gold (1981), was almost two years in the making and met with far less critical approval. Mediocre sales underscored the playful irony of its title.

By the Gang's third release, Songs of the Free (1982), bassist Dave Allen had departed (and with him went a connection to the working class).(7) Generally more melodic and softer in sound on this album, King's vocals move beyond despair. Most evident in "We Live as We Dream, Alone," lyrics and voice combine to convey the band's recognition of their dilemma--what Greil Marcus describes as "no acceptance, no rebellion" (217). The condition of their lives, and ours--fragmented, desirous, searching, solitary, remote- is laid bare in a 3-minute, 38-second pop song.

A year later, the band recorded their final major-label release, Hard, in the United States, using "hit machine" producers. Nineteen hundred eighty-three also marked Hugo Burnham's departure, and his replacement for a time by an electronic drum machine.(8) Critical reception of the album was negative. Commentators judged the music too slow and moody and likened Gill and King to the soulful Europop of the Thompson Twins. The album closes with "Independence," which, in light of the band's experience, serves as a swan song. The Four had been reduced to two (Gill and King), and "Independence" reflects the thoughts and emotions of one (King). Weary, resigned, realistic, Jon King croons, "I'm alright, I'm alright/Though it's a contradiction/It's enough but less than I imagined/I'll get used to this." What do listeners make of this confessional? Pronouns lack antecedents, so they're left with questions. The contradiction is never stated. Whatever is "enough" remains unnamed, and why it is less than imagined is never explained. Listeners never know whether the singer is all right, or whether "he's alright" is a contradiction. What is enough is never answered. Possibilities include the band's level of success, their role as political activists, their impact on music, or, simply, enough is enough (we've had it!). Remaining lyrics of the song pose more questions: "You always promise more than you can deliver." Who promised? The band, the record companies, the audience, the singer? What was promised? Fame and fortune? Social change? Art? And how about the larger question of independence? Disassembling the opposition of independence/dependence, King suggests appearances can be deceiving-- what "looks like" the wrong decision (to sign with a corporate label?) was actually the appropriate one.

Notes

(1.) Authors' telephone interview with Jon King, 29 July 1991. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes attributed to King are from this source or from written correspondence, 7 December 1991.

(2.) Griselda Pollock, Fred Orton, and Terry Atkinson were all professors at the University of Leeds during King's and Gill's tenure as students. Pollock has written, among other books, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and the Histories of Art. She has also edited and coedited several collections, including Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Readings. Fred Orton's works include coeditorship of Modernism, Criticism and Realism and co-authorship (with Pollock) of Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed. A collection of artist Terry Atkinson's works have been published in Work 1977-1983.

(3.) The authors would like to thank Ms. Betsy Sherman, correspondent for the Boston Globe, for her generosity in sharing her Gang of Four files (which included the Linden article) and for her love of the music.

(4.) King, in a 1980 letter to Greil Marcus, wrote that: "Situationism [sic] was good in the development of its revolutionary tactic: `reinvesting' the cultural past. Situationism conspicuously used popular imagery in order to subvert it--to make the familiar strange rather than rejecting the familiar out of hand" ("Gang of Four Surrender").

(5.) Lee had previously played with Robert Fripp's League of Gentlemen and, more recently, she has backed the Indigo Girls, including the pair's 1997 Lilith Fair tour appearances.

(6.) The 1991 package with Public Enemy, Sisters of Mercy, and Warrior Soul was ill-fated in the summer of the first Lollapalooza tour and ended after only a few dates had been played.

(7.) Allen has since played in the bands Shriekback, King Swamp, and Low Pop Suicide. He has also worked for Capitol Records' World Domination label.

(8.) Burnham has since managed pop music groups and worked in A&R for the Island, Imago, and Qwest record companies.

(9.) In the seven-year interim, both King and Gill wrote music for film and television, including a track on the Karate Kid soundtrack and the score for Derek Jarman's The Last of England. King spent time as a music group tour manager, a recording studio engineer, and singer for the band King Butcher. Gill worked as a record producer, his list of credits including the Red Hot Chili Peppers' debut album.

(10.) Some of the tracks on Shrinkwrapped are featured in Peter Hall's film Delinquent, for which Gill and King wrote the score. More recently, Gill has completed production work for the Stranglers and the Jesus Lizard. As for King, he was cowriting and coproducing Michael Hutchence's solo project when the INXS singer committed suicide in late 1997.

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Fricke, David. "The Gang of Four Make War." Rolling Stone 7 Aug. 1980: 47-48.
Frith, Simon, and John Street. "Rock Against Racism and Red Wedge: From Politics to Music, from Music to Politics." Rocking the Boat: Mass Music and Mass Movements. Ed. Reebee Garofolo. Boston: South End, 1992.67-80.

This story by Michael Hoover was reprinted from FindArticles.com, located at http://www.findarticles.com

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