483: Gang Of Four — Entertainment! (EMI/Warner Bros., 1979)

Overall Rating: 4.5

Level of Prior Familiarity: 1

How I Listened: Spotify, once through at the office, once through at home on Echo, and once through on a real sound system in my living room

It’s always the punk bands that make you feel like an uneducated prick.

I’d never heard this album until now. And after my first listen, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was completely misunderstanding everything about the music.

So I started digging.

The lyrics are so full of political nuance, I didn’t really know where to begin. Wikipedia took me down a rabbit hole of English/Irish history and politics, Marxism, Maoism, European capitalist criticism, and a whole lot of other things that seem incredibly pertinent and overwhelming given the political landscape of the United States in 2017.

But this album came out in 1979.

There’s a thing that happens in every music lover’s life where they hear an album recorded many years earlier and wonder how it can feel so fresh, so modern, so thoroughly new, while being many years removed from the present.

The last time this happened to me was the first time I heard The MC5’s Kick Out The Jams (#294 on the RS500), an album released in 1969 that felt 100% new when I first heard it in 2006.

The guitars and bass on Entertainment! are as in-your-face as any I’ve heard, so tight in their percussive, punctuated riffing. And the drums feel like the best work of Stewart Copeland, as if The Police were actually a punk band, and not just pretending to be one (I love The Police, but Sting is pretty much the least punk dude that ever lived).

So much punk music is disposable, political epithets wrapped up in short bursts of musical rage. This album is anything but disposable, an album that stands up to repeated listens, innovative then as it is now, and ultimately relevant.