Jeff Chang on Gang of Four

Meeting on the campus of the University of Leeds in punk's Year Zero, King and Gill were soon running the school's film society while studying fine arts and Situationism. They could be comfortable in all-night bull sessions about "complicity", "overdetermination", and "totalities". Their lyrics were like a critical theory seminar, which only then was beginning to become the rage on university campuses. They packed songs with aphorisms that triangulated McLuhan, Marx, and Mao.

Simon Reynolds, whose new book Rip It Up And Start Again was recently released in the UK and will arrive here in February 2006, notes that postpunk emerged from a polarized political and intellectual climate not unlike the current North American blue-red divide. Thatcher's Tories and the racist, ultrarightist National Front and British Movement were gaining ground. At the same time, cultural studies pioneers like Dick Hebdige and Paul Willis were discovering new forms of praxis, while their students joined Trotskyist, anarchist, feminist and Marxist organizations. Reynolds says, "Thinking, talking, singing songs about these kinds of things would have been considered a very consequential activity, a form of resistance. Performing at Rock Against Racism benefit gigs or Anti-Nazi League festivals and tours was de rigeur for postpunk bands.

"In some ways I see the whole postpunk era as a gigantic riposte to the Rolling Stones “It’s Only Rock’n’Roll”—the resignation and underachievement represented by the cop-out sentiment of that song, which basically kissed the Sixties good-bye. Basically insisting, no, it’s not just good times music, it can be a vessel for all this weightier stuff," he adds. "Gang of Four would have been in the vanguard of that move to see how much substance rock could carry and still be rock."

Certainly Go4's lyrics read well as text. *Solid Gold's* "Paralysed" is still stunning, interlocking haikus on late capitalism's desperately emasculating effects. One of their best songs was called "Why Theory?" Songs like "Damaged Goods", "Ether", or "Anthrax" carried on dramatic internal dialogues; figuratively and literally, they read like theater.