Gang of Four's Entertainment! - Brossura

Dettmar, Kevin J. H.

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1623560659 ISBN 13: 9781623560652

Casa editrice: Bloomsbury USA Academic, 2014

Riassunto

Following hard on the explosion of British punk, in 1979 Gang of Four produced post-punk's smartest record, Entertainment! For the first time, a band wedded punk's angry energy to funk's propulsive beats—and used that music to put across lyrics that brought a heady mixture of Marxist theory and situationism to exposing the cultural politics of everyday life.

But for an American college student from the suburbs—and, one expects, for many, many others, including British youth—Jon King's and Andy Gill's mumbled lyrics were often all but unintelligible. Political rock ‘n' roll is always something of an oxymoron: rock audiences by and large don't tune in to be lectured to. But what can it mean that a band that made pop songs as political theory actively resisted making that theory legible?

Coming to terms with the impact of Entertainment! requires us to take the mondegreen—the misunderstood lyric—seriously. The old joke has it that the title of R.E.M.'s debut album should have been not Murmur, but Mumble: true, so far as it goes. But that's the title, too, of rock ‘n' roll's Greatest Hits compilation—and that strategic inarticulateness itself, which creates such an important role for the listener, has an important politics.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Kevin J. H. Dettmar is W. M. Keck Professor of English at Pomona College. He is the author of Is Rock Dead?, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan, and co-editor of Reading Rock & Roll: Authenticity, Appropriation, Aesthetics.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Bloomsbury USA Academic
• Data di pubblicazione: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1623560659
• ISBN 13: 9781623560652
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 144