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"A long journey always begins with a small step".
The journey of the Gang of Four does not start with a small step; to be honest, not even with a step. It starts with something harder, much harder, violent, bloody if you will. A well-landed kick in the balls, a slap in the face, one of those stinging ones, the kind that lingers. A Molotov cocktail in the gardens of power, an armed action, an attack, a coup. A revolution. And the revolution "is not a dinner party, it is not a banquet, it is not something that can be done with elegance or delicacy: the revolution is an act of violence". Power, as the Great Helmsman said, always comes out of the barrel of a gun, but it can also come out of an amplifier, it can take shape on a guitar neck, on the drums. In the grooves of a record not even 40 minutes long, the sharpest and most radical 40 minutes I have ever heard.
Raw metal, fire and flames, sweat blood and anthracite: this is "Entertainment!". The anthem par excellence of the New Left and the working class, in music the missing link between Hendrix and "Remain In Light", one of the cornerstones of the whole British "new wave"; anarchy...? Death to the queen...? Go to bed, kids... this is stuff for adults. This is not confused anger, this is not simple teenage venting, here the ideas are clear - all too clear. The words are not accessories, the words are boulders. Caustic. Halfway between concrete and visionary, the visions of a wild and urbanized Yorkshire, which is not that of "Wuthering Heights", where everything is mechanical and nothing is natural - it's called alienation, technically. Including Northern Ireland, banana republic guerrillas, commodification of the body in service of palace hedonism. A treatise on political philosophy, neither more nor less. A social contract. To the rhythm of an inexorable, bristly Funk, to call it "minimal" - as they indeed will call it - is to say far too little. Because it doesn't say anything about comrade Dave Allen's drilling bass, and it says nothing about comrade Andy Gill's sulfureous sick estranging guitar. But who cares. The bomb has been dropped, whether people like it or not. And who was and will be able to defuse it?
And that red cover, that cowboy and that Indian...? Far too clear to appear as anything less than a manifesto. A manifesto within a manifesto, so much so that nothing else needs to be added. So much so that when I listened to this record for the first time, it was the first time I doubted the existence of "art for art's sake" that they had (roughly) told me about at school.
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