remake/remodel

natural’s not in it

A Gang of Four performance works like this: The music is chopped up funk, and the lyrics a juxtaposition of the everyday and the dreadful, like death’s heads pasted onto the Sunday newspaper advertisements. Andy Gill is the Straight Man, his gaze fixed dead ahead, pointing the neck of his guitar into a roiling crowd he probably can’t see. Jon King is The Fool. He scrambles and falls up and down the stage, but always finds the microphone on cue, like a silent comedy star, every pratfall and seeming misstep perfectly in accordance with the rhythm and logic of a constructed situation. But King’s no Buster Keaton, who can hold an expression of deadpan seriousness while he, for example, obligingly runs up a spinning waterwheel like a gerbil, his only concern to keep his hat on straight — King is a man backed into a corner, and his expression is one of terror.

Writing that gives me the uneasy feeling that I’m parroting something I’ve already read about the band somewhere else. After seeing the Gang of Four live, it’s hard not to suspect that they too might have read, say, the liner notes Greil Marcus had written for one of their anthologies and made sure to play their roles to the letter. During “He’d Send in the Army,” somebody wheeled out a battered microwave oven, which Jon King then whacked intently with a baseball bat for the duration of the song. I spent the song anxiously eyeing the girl leaning on the stage directly in front of the microwave, worried that it would finally burst into a hundred glass and plastic fragments, but nothing happened. King beats on the prop oven on every show of the tour; I had even already read that. Later, or maybe earlier, I don’t remember, they played “Anthrax,” and Andy Gill tossed his shrieking guitar around the stage while a roadie scrambled around after it, the feedback meanwhile sounding exactly as it does on the record. He looked the whole time as if he was going through the motions, playing the part of a rock guitarist, which is of course precisely what he was doing. The entire show was near perfect; the performance was exactly as I had read in accounts from 1980 or 1984. At the merchandise booth, a disc consisting of rerecordings of their old songs were being sold.

There’s a certain kind of music fan that recoils at this kind of expertly executed professionalism. They insist on spontaneity and “honesty,” and this has the stink of a rock star. I’m stupid and naive, think like this all the time, and thought it a few times during the show. But if the Gang of Four seemed at times as if they had been reduced to common entertainers rather than teachers or agitators, it’s partially a consequence of what they have set out to do and how they’ve set about doing it, and partially the fault of an audience that can’t seem to tell the difference. When the band played “Ether,” the crowd heaved with zeal. Andy Gill shouted out lyrics that should be chilling, the most specific and explicitly topical lines in the band’s repertoire — “LOCK DOWN LONG KESH,” “H-BLOCK TORTURE,” “WHITE NOISE IN A WHITE ROOM,” “THERE MAY BE OIL UNDER ROCKALL” — and the audience shouted them back, stripped bare of any meaning and intent, in a kind of rapture by rote. This is what an audience does. The crowd moved like a centipede on its back.

(Between every song a young man yelled out, loudly, persistently, “We Live As We Dream, Alone!” Somebody finally snapped and said: “They’ll play whatever they want to play!” He looked at the floor abashedly but muttered, “It’s a fucking punk rock show.” I have no idea how to judge that exchange.)