Gang of Four

Seize the Time: Gang of Four and the eternal returns of retro rock.
By Simon Reynolds. Slate.com

Gang of Four return

In an early Ian McEwan short story, a novelist struggles with the follow-up to her acclaimed best seller. The tale has a grotesque psychological twist when the writer’s lover discovers that the manuscript the writer has been working on is actually a painstakingly composed, word-for-word repeat of the debut. This isn’t precisely what post-punk legend Gang of Four has done on Return the Gift, the first release by the group’s original lineup since 1981, but it’s not far off. Instead of recording an album of new material like most reformed bands do, they’ve rerecorded 14 Gang of Four classics cherry-picked from albums such as Entertainment!, Solid Gold, and Songs of the Free.

It’s hard to think of a precedent in rock history for Return—essentially, a band recording its own tribute album. The decision has bemused many Gang of Four fans, who wonder why the band didn’t just put out a compilation of the definitive versions. Some see Return as proof that the group’s reformation was purely opportunistic, an attempt to reap the rewards of post-punk’s ultrahip status these last couple of years. The renaissance has involved a swarm of new bands—from the Rapture and Radio Four to Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand—drawing heavily on the Gang’s jagged and minimalist punk-funk. Surely, the argument goes, if the group really felt it had a relevant contribution to make beyond being a nostalgia act, it would write an album of new material.

But there are other ways of looking at Return the Gift. The title itself hints that the whole project might be an oblique commentary on retro culture’s “eternal returns.” That kind of meta-rock gesture was always Gang of Four’s signature. When the band formed in 1977, singer Jon King and guitarist Andy Gill were enrolled in the University of Leeds’ fine art department, then a hotbed of conceptualism and leftist critiques of institutionalized art. Absorbing this sensibility and bolstering it with extracurricular immersion in Marxist theorists like Gramsci, Gang of Four approached every aspect of their “intervention” in pop culture—songwriting, album packaging, interviews, internal band relations—in the spirit of demystification.

Return the Gift places in plain, unavoidable sight the redundancy and reconsumption involved in rock’s nostalgia market. When fans buy new albums by reformed favorites of their youth, at heart they’re hoping for a magical erasure of time itself. They’re not really interested in what the band might have to say now, or where the band members’ separate musical journeys have taken them in subsequent decades; they want the band to create “new” songs in their vintage style. Such consumer bad faith is precisely the kind of phenomenon that the old Gang of Four enjoyed skewering. Could it be that Return is saying, “You want a Gang of Four resurrection? Here you are, then, exactly what you secretly, deep-down crave: the old songs, again.”

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or visit the Gang of Four web site.

Simon Reynolds is the author of Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84.