Song of the Week #4 – “Natural’s Not In It” by Gang of Four

They say you shouldn’t judge a book – or indeed an LP – by its cover, but Gang of Four’s Entertainment! (1979) is one of those albums I got into largely on the basis of the album cover. It’s a fairly simplistic cover, really: Blue text on red at the topmost part of the cover reads “GANG OF FOUR” with yellow text beneath it at a jaunty, somewhat playful angle reading “entertainment!” Beneath those there are three pictures of a cowboy – silhouetted in white – and a Native American – silhouetted in red – and Helvetica text snaking around it reading “The Indian smiles, he thinks that the cowboy is his friend. The cowboy smiles, he is glad the Indian is fooled. Now he can exploit him.”

In one stylish cover, which apes the satirical artwork of the 1960s’ French Situationist International art collective, we are immediately introduced to Gang of Four’s program with this project – this is an album with higher ambitions than the mere Entertainment! promised on the cover. Indeed, Gang of Four’s deceptively erudite nature is revealed right from the get-go in their band name, which refers to a small cabal of Chinese Communist Party officials who controlled many of the major organs of the Chinese government in the late Cultural Revolution, and who in the wake of Mao Zedong’s death would be charged with acts of treason. We must note right off the bat, then, that Gang of Four are a Marxist band, to be sure – but they are definitely left-Marxists, scruffy and libertarian, and a far cry from any Red Army.

I was, as is a running theme with me, introduced to Gang of Four as a lovesick teenager through the song “Damaged Goods”, which appears as the fourth track on Entertainment!. It is, like several of the songs on Entertainment! an anti-love-song, and uses the imagery of consumerism and marketisation to discuss love and sex with lyrics like “Sometimes I’m thinking that I love you / But I know it’s only lust” and “Damaged goods, send them back / I can’t work, I can’t achieve, send me back”. It somehow perfectly encapsulates the pain of unrequited affection while also cynically assuring the listener that in a capitalist world, love and sex are little more than market transactions, indistinguishable from the relationship the manufacturer has to the consumer or that the boss has to the worker.

This is a common theme throughout the album. If there is one takeaway or concept behind Entertainment!, it is examining how capitalism corrupts the human ontological and phenomenological experience through relentless marketisation of all that exists. These ideas are nothing new – much of Gang of Four’s lyricism is straight out of Guy Debord’s playbook – that playbook being Debord’s 1967 work The Society of the Spectacle, in which Debord writes that “Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”

The most interesting thing about Gang of Four’s music is by far how danceable it is. Any track on Entertainment! would make good party music. I once read someone describe the guitars on this album as like “an angle grinder attacking scaffolding”. This album consists of jagged guitars, frenetic rhythms, funky basslines and almost-pop melodies masking very philosophically complex lyricism. Some critics – Adornoians especially – might find this a mark against the band’s prestige, for this music aims to be subversive lyrically but is rather conventional musically-speaking. That said, it is still a distance away from being banal pop music, and for that reason I personally consider it very subversive, and when I put Entertainment! on at a party, I always find myself chuckling when I see people dancing to the funky Situationist dialogues that make up the majority of the album’s contents.

My favourite track on Entertainment! is without a doubt “Natural’s Not In It”, the album’s second track, and the first of its multiple anti-love diatribes. The song opens with jagged, stabbing guitar chords before a dance-beat and a funk bassline comes in. Lyrically, much like its successor “Damaged Goods”, “Natural’s Not In It” is about the marketisation of love, but where “Damaged Goods” seems to deal with unrequited love, “Natural’s Not In It” seems to be more about the inherent falseness of modern love and sex in particular. It features lyrics like “Ideal love, a new purchase / A market of the senses” and “Fornication makes you happy, no escape from society / Natural is not in it, your relations are all power”. In the middle there is a chanted call-and-response bridge: “Repackaged sex / Keeps your interest” as well as the repeated refrain “This heaven gives me migraine!” throughout the song.

The song seems to be attacking the idea that monogamy, marriage and forming a family unit are “natural” and the default position of humanity, and is instead taking the position that these are entirely manufactured power-relations created by capitalism, which we are fooled into believing are the natural way of being: “Natural is not in it, your relations are all power”. Further, it is arguing, per Marx, that there is no “natural” state of humanity to begin with, and that these appeals to nature are largely fallacious – it is not enough to say “Marriage and monogamy are unnatural…free love is,” because even if “Fornication makes you happy”, there is “no escape from society”. Alas, sex is just another battleground on which power relations occur: “Ideal love” is little more than a “purchase”, on the “market of the senses” – there is nothing natural about it! It’s simply self-commodification.

This feeds into the repeated line “This heaven gives me migraine” – the utopian aspirations of capitalism can never be realised. In a world where everything is marketed and every apparently “natural” transaction exists within a marketised economy, even the purest happiness is simply a product to be bought, and to be bought it must be earned through labour, and labour wears the worker out and alienates them to the point that the heaven to which they aspire becomes in itself an unpleasant, nagging pain, not unlike a migraine.

Other tracks on Entertainment! follow similar neo-Marxist and left-Marxist ideals cribbed from the Parisian protesters of May ’68 and the Situationist International: “Not Great Men” is a rejection of the “great men” conception of history; “Return the Gift” is about a quiz show contestant who wins a holiday in Scotland and a new set of appliances, but despairingly requests in its place leisure time, harking back to Theodor Adorno’s belief that “free time” is not “free” so long as the worker has to work for it; and “5.45” is about how civil wars in the Third World have increasingly become spectacles that entertain the people of the First World, something to watch while eating one’s dinner. The album ends with “Anthrax”, another anti-love song, in which the left channel features Jon King singing a song that compares falling in love to “…a case of anthrax / And that’s something I don’t wanna catch” while the right channel features Andy Gill giving a brief monologue about the meaninglessness of love songs, occasionally singing a line in unison with King.

Sadly, Gang of Four would never reach the heights they reached with their first album – their second album, Solid Gold (1981) is considered to be a significantly weaker effort, and their most recent album What Happens Next (2015) is considered to be one of their weakest albums to date. Still, Entertainment! is more than enough to solidify the band’s reputation as one of the greatest post-punk bands of their era. Kurt Cobain of Nirvana cited Entertainment! as one of his favourite albums, and it’s not hard to see why – Gang of Four pioneered the angsty and jagged yet melodic and danceable punk-rock sound that would come to be favoured by grunge artists. I dare say Kurt’s own anti-love song, “Heart-Shaped Box”, from In Utero (1993) owes a lot to Gang of Four.

Put on Entertainment! at your next party for the rhythms and the basslines – then when everyone has gone home, put it on again, and listen carefully to the lyrics. Albums don’t get much more simultaneously introspective and danceable than this.