GANG OF FOUR
Gang of Four
Three years after Jimmy Buffett released his 1978 single “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” Gang of Four unveiled its own “Cheeseburger,” a song that envisioned the centerpiece of American cuisine in terms closer to Hades than Valhalla. The song opens with audio of a drive-thru request for a burger to go. After a few seconds of Hugo Burnham’s martial drumming, Andy Gill’s guitar enters the mix, shattering in aggressive ribbons before settling into an XTC-like dance groove, punk and disco commingling with surprising consonance. You can almost see the sweat flying like shrapnel from singer Jon King’s face as he barks out the lyrics, which question the workaday rat race of money in/money out, a cycle of mandated consumption and mindless leisure.
Every great Gang of Four tune from those halcyon years of 1979 to 1983 sounds like a mission statement. Influenced by Brecht, Godard and Dr. Feelgood, the Gang critiqued societal norms and establishment ethos in their seminal songs, through funk-inspired post-punk music that was as simple, stripped-down and dangerous as King’s lyrics were literary and oblique. Nobody had heard anything quite like the group’s astonishing debut EP, 1978’s Damaged Goods, a kind of disarmingly catchy mutant disco that simultaneously alienated audiences and hooked them at the same time. As the U.K. music journalist Simon Reynolds wrote in his book Rip it Up and Start Again, the music made “the listener flinch from the shards shooting out of the speakers.” Though they opposed the bombast of arena rock, Gang of Four’s concerts were as much driven by performance spectacle as Joy Division’s, with King convulsing and gyrating like a possessed tent-show revivalist.
Unbeknownst to many, Gang of Four has soldiered on—and sometimes off—for more than 30 years after 1983’s Hard, its last LP to chart anywhere. Most of its original members have left, with guitarist Gill the last Gang member standing, prompting critics and nostalgists to dismiss the current incarnation as Gang of One. Certainly, Gang of Four’s 2015 album What Happens Next sounds like an entirely different band, with a sonic palette decidedly more produced, atmospheric and soulful than the chilly, menacing austerity of the early work. But purists should know that as the band winds up its North American tour in South Florida, material from the early years dominates the set lists, including “Anthrax,” “At Home He Feels Like a Tourist” and “To Hell With Poverty.”
The tour stops at Culture Room at 8pm Oct. 29 with The New Regime and Astari Nite. Tickets cost just $20; pick them up at ticketmaster.com, or call 954-564-1074 for more information.
~ John Thomason
