"The problem of leisure"

My wonderful girlfriend got me a fantastic (and wonderful) birthday present a couple of weeks ago. I had mentioned that Gang of Four were playing in Northampton that weekend, and that I might like to take her. When I asked her if she wanted to go, she turned the tables and offered to take me. I enthusiastically accepted. I'm sure I spoke of their importance in late 20th-century popular music, and I probably even admitted that I felt like a total geek-boy when faced with the possibility of seeing such a seminal band. What I didn't and couldn't really speak about was whether they were any good. I had Entertainment! on Vinyl, and had given it a few listens, but the somewhat flat quality of the recording kind of turned me off--a topic deserving a longer post at a later date.

However, what I, and most everyone else I know understood was that so many bands that we loved (and plenty that we didn't) would not exist without this band. Although it pains my "indie cred" to say it, my friends and I didn't go to hear music. We came to hear a legacy, a tradition--we were looking for the source.

(Just an aside--Somebody needs to write a book about indie rock and the importance of tradition. Endless referentiality in the form of influences and styles forms an entire discourse among a huge group of people in North America, and as far as I know, that seems like a relatively modern phenomena. I want to know the circumstances, history, and the power dynamics involved in this particular cultural form).

For better or worse, a legacy is what we got. Most of the set came from Entertainment! and Solid Gold , Gang of Four's first two records. A few new songs were sprinkled in, but this was a reunion show, first and foremost, and like all reunion shows, the hits had to be trotted out for the kiddies. How different was this than seeing Bachman-Turner Overdrive play "Taking Care of Business" at the Hawkeye Downs Speedway in Iowa?

Let me be very clear--I had a tremendous time at this show. The band were ferocious (but how much of a pose was that?), and all of us danced our hearts out, even break out into an exuberant mosh pit during "At home he's a tourist". Jon King danced around the stage, pounding the air with his fists in time with the beat, and Dave Alexander and Andy Gill thrashed their instruments across the stage, playing at times in barely tolerable registers of noise, and all through, the tribal pounding of Hugo Burnham's drums, locking all the chaos in place, tying the morass of the experience into something knowable--a pulse, jagged and disjointed though it often was, like the pulse of our collective heartbeats.

Dancing is certainly part of Gang of Four. Their post-punk jitters and funk paved the way for an incalculable amount of more recent music of numerous sub-genres (insert trendy name here). But from their name on down, their music was always incalculably political. In the late 1970s, especially at British universities (where Gang of Four first met) social theory was undergoing one of its many radical transformations. Simplistically, the "post-punk" in the cultural world was prefaced by a whole series of "post-"s in the academic and philosophical world. The structuralist approaches of the 1950s and 60s were giving way to new understandings of the way that power was mobilized in social relationships, and what is now known as "cultural studies" was burgeoning in academic departments everywhere.

What this field of knowledge argued (at least as I understand it), was that Western cultural forms, especially popular culture, needed to be interrogated and understood as part of interal power dynamics within societies. People wrote books on punk rock and mod subcultures, television, Disneyland, and romance novels, anything that had previously been considered worthless, ephemeral, and vulgar by the academic gaze.

Gang of Four were part of this world, and they consciously espoused its theories and politics consciously. Their songs touched on the vague relationships between appearances and essences, the mysterious nature of love in the traditional pop song, the stultifying air of suburbia, and numerous other topics within the purview of the (explicitly Marxist) field of cultural studies. What they, and the fields of knowledge they represent argue for was that the aesthetic experiences we associate with popular culture are molded and shaped by unequal power
relations inherent in society.

Which is why it's hard for me to write a glowing review of the Gang of Four show that I saw. The show was powerful, certainly one of the best live concerts I've ever been to, and the band was everything I'd hoped they'd be. But what does that mean? Would I have felt the same if I had never heard of Gang of Four? If I hadn't read about their influence on the Dismemberment Plan, the Liars, Rage against the Machine, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and hundreds of other bands who, at various times in my life, had meant so much to me? Would I have felt the same if they had only played songs no one knew?

How can I trust my own feelings in a world where, at every turn, I'm told how to feel by the pop-culture I love (what does that mean?). My personality is a process of cultural apparatuses acting upon my being, trying to get me to respect the authority of governments, treat myself as more valuable than others, and above all BUY!!!! BUY!!!! BUY!!!!! I certainly partake of all those things at various times during the day--where is the real "me" in all of that? Or to conclude by paraphrasing, if our essence is rare, as Gang of Four seem to argue, what room is there for appreciating something as simple as a great rock and roll show by a great rock and roll band?