GANG OF FOUR: HARD MEN IN GOOD CARS

"All we have in common is the illusion of being together. And the only resistance to the illusions of the permitted painkillers come from the collective desire to destroy isolation..."

—The Vindicator, a shady figure in Brave Commandos, #17.

"I've got ants in my pants, and I've got to dance!"

—Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

Consider two dance scenes from the movies. In Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill, a kitchenful of wimped-out '60s veterans have just finished eating a pictureperfect dinner. Somebody puts an old Motown record on, and the sound immediately organized the moment: as the table is cleared, everyone sways with the music, caught up in its "magic." The music was made at the same time as their nowdeflated dreams, and their sentimental attachment to the song mimics their attachment to what they were. The music condemns them, as they dance, to confirm their fears that they are failures.

Contrast that with the old Godard movie in which three young people dance in a line, with exactly the same motions, to pop music. Suddenly their thinking is expressed via voice-over: while the music inspires them to move in harmony, the thoughts it inspires are utterly unlike. The music generates consensus, but it also masks what the individual thinks.

The difference here is in what these movies claim music does. In The Big Chill music makes mood—it knits the atmosphere, it composes the listener's thinking. But in the Godard film, music is at war with itself. Its meanings are both personal and collective, and they can never agree.

At their best, the Gang Of Four make music at total war with itself. Since forming in Manchester at the time punk's first wave (and greatest moment) was crashing, the Gang have only become sharper and more case-hardened. Their latest album, Hard, marks the third major change in direction in their career. And like everything else they've put out, its point of view shifts unpredictably from the mass of people on the dancefloor to the private thoughts of one person moving to the beat. person

I just referred to dancing, but I might just as well have talked about standing in line for a movie or riding a city bus. Musically and lyrically, the parts of Gang songs butt heads or hold hands, a listener never knows which beforehand. In the beginning they built music the way a bomb builds a rubble heap; now the songs are factory-tooled machines of radically disparate parts. The Gang play off the voices of the group against the individual, because opinions are thrust from one to the other in the world. Those opinions form a consensus, and power. And power is the Gang's own bitch.

"I've always thought of what we do as realism, and a desperate optimism," Gang singer and co-songwriter Jon King says, with a sudden grimace, looking from an office window over Manhattan's 57th Street. "Of course, horribly, we've got zillions of cruise missiles on the way..."

One can see now that the optimism was always present. But when their first album, Entertainment!, came out in 1979, optimism was not what came to mind at first. It's still the most difficult Gang album, because it's so damn hard to find the front door to the thing. The ugly emotions Entertainment! dredges up are almost freakish, and all the more unsettling for the way they poke unexpectedly through the record's detached, architectonic front. Playing Entertainment! for the first time, the experience was like looking at a single spot and seeing with one eye a monster and with another a social democrat. The images merge; the head aches.

After Entertainment! came Solid Gold the next year. Solid Gold was an attempt to push the frenzy of the first record even further. It failed mightily, but it also hesitatingly created a wall of disposal-noise and sound that was to be explored, to infinitely better ends, on 1982's Songs Of The Free.

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On the surface, Songs Of The Free usurps the band's early interest in a throttling sound, one constantly rounding the bend and heading for new ground. Songs' songs were monumental, slab-like, and yet at a second glance one noticed how successfully they encapsulated the wildness of the earlier records. The sound was layered now, and what had been laid end-to-end—Andy Gill's stutter-stun guitar playing, an opposing reggoid drum beat, a bass line with a hand in Bootsy's pocket—now pretty much went on all at once.

"I think Songs Of The Free is my favorite Gang Of Four record," King says. "What we finally came to the conclusion of is that you don't need to have an incredibly difficult form to say complicated things.

"If the premise is that you're com-

municating, you are contradicting the idea if you make it so difficult only musicians can follow you."

When King says it like that, the move to a simpler style sounds like a concession. But Songs and Hard prove otherwise. On Hard, the most impressive things are the things the band doesn't have to say. They are playing with lopped-off beats, with passages so controlled . and barren that they aren't bulit around the open holes in the rhythms, but built of those holes.

Suddenly, the whole group is playing like above-average funkate^rs. Drawing on the clean, terraced Chic sound they've always respected, and the pop melodies showcased in English dance music, they've opened onto a whole new area. And they decorate the clock plenty well, the proof being that I heard Detroit's Electrifying Mojo line up the Gang twice in a half-hour, along with the S.O.S. Band and Rick James. It was obvious he wasn't asking if it was love.

Now lately some homeboys-come-lately have been moralizing about the scattered lover's questions Andy Gill asks on Hard, as if old razor-larynx should stay like a beetle on his back and just stick to bad-rapping the more familiar powers-that-be. But sexual politics is still politics. And it's a hoot to hear the Gang get browbeaten for sinking some capitalist bucks into stage lighting by somebody who laps up David Bowie's shtick.

On a song like the album's first single, "Is It Love?," King says, "It doesn't sound like an imitation of American black music, but it kind of summons up the idea of American black pop."

The Chic sound that hovers over the record isn't accidental. The Gang tried to get Chic's Nile Rodgers to produce Songs, and, failing in that, to work on Hard. "It was confirmed with Nile, Andy was speaking with him on the phone every day," King explains. Only two weeks before they were set to go into the studio the liason was called off for reasons King didn't clarify.

"My favorite record, almost, is 'We Are Family,' which is by Sister Sledge but which is really a Chic song. I think they were so original that even today so much New York black pop depends on them. Their influence is often underrated by people."

At the last minute the Gang enlisted as producers the brothers Ron and Howard Albert. Their previous experience includes studio work with the politically correct Aretha Franklin and the Rascals; sweating out a lot of effort in a short time, the Gang and the Alberts fleshed out the demos King and Gill had built from the ground up using rhythm machines and tapes.

Hard is a good piece of work, and yet it's as slight as anything they've done. The achievement is rhythmic and structural. The lyrics, though, have become stylized. The sudden shifts and rough edges have been smoothed, and they are often unusually evasive.

King says the lyrics are "cinematic," referring specifically to the song "Woman Town," in which it's high noon for some oldfashioned kind of guy in a town full of righteously indignant women. Cinematic, mebbe; trying too hard to be poetry, fersure.

As unsettling as this may be, the release of Hard was concurrent with the release of drummer Hugo Burnham—and that's really bad news. Swapped for rhythm machines on Songs, the Gang kept him on for live playing. Now he doesn't even do that, replaced by former Rumour-mongerer Steve Goulding.

What's saddest about Burnham's departure, following the leave-taking of original bassist Dave Allen after Solid Gold (the capable Sara Lee now playing bass), is that the Gang was originally as tight as a band could be. They were comrades, and reading about them in interviews and features made it obvious that they cared an awful lot about each other.

They had a legendary rep for their roundthe-clock political haggles, and I remember being touched to read about one of them crying after a gig because of something another of the Gang had said, and of the subsequent comforting. Now the Gang is Gill & King Inc., and if something is lost it's not sure yet what's been gained.

The Gang Of Two And A Half you can call them, and they do, as always, put on a great show. At New York's Ritz for two nights in September, they brought along some white lights and smoke—the gesture was affectionate and funny. Solid gold, indeed.

"The only way we've survived as a band," King says, "is by playing concerts." One would hope that the gigs they're playing these days keep them, at least in beer. There's something of an uneasy transition live between the new songs, accompanied as on record by the honey-voiced Alfa Anderson and Brenda White, and the more cyclotronic earlier stuff. But once King starts moving around in ways that should hurt, and when Gill detonates a shrapnel bomb, and when that rhythm starts catching in your Adam's apple, well, everything is just OK. Shit, jet them eat duck pate backstage if they keep playing the way they do now. To paraphrase dialectician James Brown, they may be tired, but they're clean.