Punk in the Present Tense *
Gang of Four at the Chapel, May 23rd, 2025
This is the week I grade my student’s final papers, so you know what’s on my mind? Artificial Intelligence. Open AI. Chat GPT. On the one hand, the new technology simplifies my life because I can now give everyone an A. But does that make us all happy? No, it does not – nor does the fact that the English departments where I work are always encouraging us to go to workshops where Open AI ‘assists’ us with ways to ‘ethically’ teach with its help.
The fact is, the AI-written papers break every one of George Orwell’s rules for good writing, as listed in “Politics and the English Language,” most especially stale language and extra verbiage. Also? They lack all sentient thought. In the aforementioned essay, George states, “It is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes”; then he adds that the English language “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts,” and this is incontrovertible when it comes to papers written with the help of Chat GPT. After a week of grading, I needed to clear my head of slovenly thinking, and what better way then to go see Gang of Four?
For few bands are more clear-thinking than Gang of Four. Their debut record “Entertainment” (1979) translated Marxist thought and Situationist gestures into 3 minute stories that laid bare the tenets of capitalism in action. Songs like “At Home He’s a Tourist,” and “I Found That Essence Rare” depict the way that capitalist processes drop a veil over all our activities, so that we happily fall victim to it. Shopping, advertising, sex, and so on are all just ways it uses to convince us to capitulate to its nefarious system. Songs like ‘Contract” and “Anthrax” and “Damaged Goods,” even clarify that romantic love is just a strategy to trap workers into reproducing the workforce. Popular music’s emphasis on romantic love does make it seem like a force we must participate in, but is it a steamroller, a plot, or a manifesto?
It goes without saying that these were thoughts I never had at the time I first heard Gang of Four lo these many years ago. It was at California Hall on Polk Street and I had won my tickets on the radio, and I had to beg and beg and beg to be allowed to use that car that night. And then! I just remember being galvanized by them utterly – it was like they threw a switch and an electric shock coursed into the room I saw them in, and when it hit us we all popped off the ground, like kernels of corn in a grill – and like kernels of corn, we became something different, something fuller, and better, and more substantial. It was transformational.
To me, what was fantastic about Go4 at that time was their difference from everything I’d heard before. For one thing, they had no tunes! It was all just rhythm and catch phrases and a kind of speed-driven sonic truthfulness: it felt like music, even if it didn’t quite sound like what I knew as music at the time. And it seemed so doable, too. It didn’t feel musicianly. It felt primitive, scholarly, imaginative, and danceable, but most of all, it just felt like freedom. It was hard after hearing it to go back to seeing the world in the same way.
And it still is! That’s the crazy thing! Seeing them again, at the Chapel, had the exact same effect on me. How great is that? Sadly, Go4 have lost two of its original members, Andy Gill, who died in 2020, and Dave Allen who passed away just a few weeks ago, but they’ve been replaced by Ted Leo and Gail Greenwood, and there is still the drummer, Hugo Burnham, who was playing with a broken leg. And then there is the singer Jon King, who cranks the audience’s engine, as energetic now as he was when he began. The band played two sets, the first one being “Entertainment” in entirety, and the second set a sort of greatest hits, and finished with a reprise of “Damaged Goods” so we could all chant “Goodbye Goodbye Goodbye GoodBYE, Goodbye Goodbye Goodbye”, over and over, while waving our sticky hands and our gooey hearts at the stage, and they waved theirs back at us. It was as explosive as it ever was, all these years later, and I’m not the only one who thought so. This is what Greil Marcus wrote about their set a few weeks ago in New York City:
In the band’s first years, King, Gill, and Allen would rush across the stage past each other, or nearly smashing into each other, song after song, like people shot out of the cannon of hegemony or marionettes jerked by the Invisible Hand. I once went behind the curtain immediately after a show in San Francisco; the four of them were still on the stage, sitting in folding chairs, covered with sweat, their heads back, eyes closed, unable to talk, looking like they could barely summon the energy to breathe. Now all the movement came from King, who a few weeks short of 70 jerked and gestured—who seemed to be attempting to call out the demons in his own songs—with the same fervor he did at 24, in 1980, when I first saw the band. He opened with “Ether,” the first song from Entertainment! in a weird sort of crouch dance, hopping deliberately, but fast, from one end of the stage to the other and back again, and he did the same dance at the end. He seemed incapable of slowing down.
Still, when you exercise the concept, the idea, of PLAY THE ALBUM, there’s a way in which you’re taking a picture, playing the idea before you’re playing the music. You’re playing to something the people before you have brought to the event as much as you have, and that may be why the second half of the show took on a different cast. The presence of Kaye and Paternoster was part of it, but I don’t think they were the only reason why, when the band took on “What We All Want,” “I Parade Myself,” and “To Hell With Poverty,” each song felt bigger than any time I’d heard them before. They expanded. With the music a hovering specter, their social critique, their words of frustration and blockage, exclusion and marginalization, humiliation and hopeless refusal, took in more time and space, as sound in the room and in the room as history, history playing itself out, into the future the band was promising it would no longer address. The songs demanded more from the people playing them and they got it. (From Real Life Rock Top Ten, May 5, 2025)
I just love that. Shot out of the cannon of hegemony, that was me, at California Hall. Yes: back in the day, Go4 warned us of the danger of alienation and capitulation to capitalism, but here we are people, and now thanks in part to AI we are now enmeshed beyond escape. I know this because I know my students, who are only slightly older than I was when I first heard “Entertainment.” They like all the same things I did then – music, movies, video games; in other words, stories, and bodies, and fun. But they just don’t have the language or skills to articulate that love anymore and the crap that they are being fed, and that they are feeding back into the machine, is all so crass and meaningless.
My poor students all fear technology and they hate their phones – or at least, they hate their enslavement to them, of which they are well aware, -- but they are like automatons, plugged into TikTok, or like Murderbot without the override button; they are all characters in a Gang of Four song who can’t rid themselves of feelings of inadequacy and alienation and fear. Why do you think we have such an epidemic of gun ownership? “I need an order – SHOOT SHOOT.” It just makes me feel so lucky to have grown up when I did, in the world I did, for this is what shaped me, and shaped me for the better. To have heard Gang of Four at the right age is not to become radicalized, it is to become immunized. It doesn’t mean you won’t also be sucked into capitalism’s gaping maw, but understanding what it is doing to you – and yelling back at it at the top of your lungs – is the only way we have left to resist.
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*I wrote a book called that once. It’s out of print now. Thanks go Kevin Dettmar’s 33 1/3rd book on Entertainment for the reminder.