Talk:Entertainment!

<^>v!!This album is connected!!v<^>

• All song titles serve as redirects to this album, have their own pages, or have been placed at the appropriate disambiguation pages.--Hraefen ^Talk 17:14, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Added Info to Live Tracks

The Rhino website reveals where the live tracks were recorded, so I figured it would be worthwhile to add that information here.

Some great critique of the album and its artwork, but...

Is this really relevant for a WP article? see WP:NOR 146.101.142.43 13:35, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

WP is not the proper forum for opinion articles, nor original research, I'm moving the lyrics & artwork sections into the talk page. Maybe this stuff can find a home on a fansite? DiggyG 21:49, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Artwork

The album's artwork was designed by band members Jon King and Andy Gill, typical of their DIY approach. The cover depicts an "Indian" shaking hands with a "cowboy" in three heavily processed versions of the same image, the faces are reduced to blobs of red and white—that is, to the stereotypical racial colors. A text that winds around the images reads, "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 the context of the album, this is less a protest of inter-ethnic conflict in the Old West than it is a commentary on the way that media images like "cowboys and Indians" (which is to say, Entertainment!) can convince people to act against their interests—as in the artwork on the album's back cover, depicting a family whose father says, "I spend most of our money on myself so that I can stay fat," while the mother and children declare, "We're grateful for his leftovers."

On the album's inner sleeve, small photographs depicting scenes shown on television are interlaced with text illustrating what the band suggests are the misleading subtexts of media presentations: "The facts are presented neutrally so that the public can make up its own mind"; "Men act heroically to defend their country"; "People are given what they want." These are the types of social assumptions that Gang of Four seek to challenge with their own version of Entertainment!.

• The artwork is based on the movie poster for the Sauerkrautwestern Winnetou III (Winnetou_-_3._Teil). The original picture can be found here while the IMDb shows the edited picture from the DVD box. 81.191.195.10 (talk) 22:51, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

• Perhaps it should be noted that for Germans like me the artwork looks kind of embarrassing, cause I am part of the generation that is very familiar with the works of German author Karl May. The image depicts his most popular literary characters: Winnetou, chief of the Apaches, shaking hands with his white blood brother Old Shatterhand (who actually is Karl Mays alter ego). For anyone familiar with Karl Mays novels it looks like absolute foolishness to talk about "the Indian" (Winnetou is quite more than the average Indian, he is a well respected and mighty chief, famous for his sense of justice), "the cowboy" (Old Shatterhand is a well-educated traveller always willing to side with the Indians when it comes to fight white racism) and exploitation. 87.139.28.211 (talk) 08:42, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Lyrics

The album's central theme is set forth at the beginning of its second track, "Natural's Not in It": "The problem of leisure/ What to do for pleasure". Extending the Marxist concept of alienated labor, Gang of Four argue that "leisure" is just as alienated: Far from providing refuge from the economic exploitation of the capitalist workplace, the realms of home, play and especially love actually replicate the same self-destroying forces. As the song goes on to say:

Fornication makes you happy

No escape from society

Natural is not in it

Your relations are of power

We all have good intentions

But all with strings attached

As Gang of Four see it, once leisure becomes a commodity like any other, one's leisure time and one's own self participating in leisure become commodities as well, with no more intrinsic meaning than the profit to be made from them. As the song "Return the Gift" puts it:

It's on the market

You're on the price list...

Please send me evenings and weekends

Being thus reduced to economic tokens, people at leisure feel alienated by the very activities they are supposed to be enjoying. To the complaint "I'm so restless (I'm bored as a cat)", the song "Glass" responds: "If you're feeling all in take some aspirin/Or some paracetamol." "At Home He's a Tourist" describes the condition of everyman: "He fills his head with culture/He gives himself an ulcer."

One of Entertainment!'s best-known songs is "Anthrax", which might be considered an anti-love song ("Love will get you like a case of anthrax/And that's something I don't want to catch"). As Jon King sings, Andy Gill issues what might be considered a spoken-word manifesto of the group's take on romance, which concludes: "I don't think we're saying there's anything wrong with love, just don't think that what goes on between two people should be shrouded in mystery."

Stripping away that "mystery," in the song "Contract", Gang of Four suggest that love is nothing more than "a contract in our mutual interest". Shaped both by economic inequality and media messages ("You dreamed of scenes/Like you read of in magazines"), modern relationships are doomed to re-enact the exploitation of capitalism:

These social dreams

Put in practice in the bedroom

Is this so private

Our struggle in the bedroom

As "Natural's Not in It" notes, "The body's good business," or as "At Home He's a Tourist" puts it:

Down on the disco floor

They make their profit

From the things they sell

To help you cob off

And the rubbers you hide

In your top left pocket

As those lyrics suggest, Entertainment! often presents sexuality in a grim light—sometimes using religious terminology (like "fornication") to express disgust. The song "Damaged Goods" declares:

The sins of the flesh

Are simply sins of lust

Sometimes I'm thinking that I love you

But I know it's only lust

At times, this anger at a socially mediated sexuality can appear as a rather cruel attitude towards lovers in general and female partners in particular. In "I Found That Essence Rare," the band sings: "See the happy pair smiling close like they're monkeys/They wouldn't think so but they're holding themselves down." And in "Damaged Goods" (the title itself a pejorative expression for a sexually active woman), the singer declares, "You said you're cheap but you're too much." The New Trouser Press Record Guide credits the album with "the self-righteous air of someone who couldn't get to first base with his girlfriend the previous evening."

Aside from its critique of leisure and romance, the album does tackle some more conventional political subjects—though with Gang of Four's unique take. "Ether", the album's lead track, is a protest against the British occupation of Northern Ireland ("Fly the flag on foreign soil"), making reference to the Maze prison outside Belfast in lyrics like "locked in Long Kesh" and "H-Block torture", and suggesting that Britain is motivated by economic factors in the lines "There may be oil/Under Rockall" (a barren islet that was the focus of an Anglo-Irish dispute). But, typically, what are seen as the outrages of British rule are presented as a problem for those "trapped in heaven lifestyle", the "dirt behind the daydream" that "breaks your new dreams daily".

The song "5.45" deals with guerrilla warfare, presumably a reference to the bloody conflicts then going on in Central America. But the song, like the album as a whole, approaches the subject from the point of view of the alienated bourgeois spectator: "How can I sit and eat my tea with all that blood flowing from the television." In the end, Gang of Four concludes, "Guerrilla war struggle is the new entertainment."

References

Track Numbers

Is it possible to renumber the tracks from the reissues? on cd they aren't tracks 1-4, but rather tracks 13-20... not sure how to do that though.DiggyG 21:50, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

Return the Gift Goes Here?

Why does Return the Gift redirect to here? It shouldn't. 68.59.18.184 (talk) 14:47, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

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