1979: Gang of Four, Entertainment!

By Sara Jaffe

I was 18 and I had never kissed anyone. My body was a container, the basic frame I needed to cart around my brain, something to dangle my hands off of. I had powerful crushes I rarely revealed, knit through with a desire more for connection, for care, than anything like sex. It didn’t occur to me to masturbate. For most of high school I had tried, more or less, to be girlish, mostly because I wasn’t aware of another option. I had Team Dresch show flyers taped up in my locker but assumed no one knew I was queer. I was nervous, worrying all the time, the kind of anxiety that meant rapid-fire brain chat, a constant wish to transport to an ill-defined elsewhere. To be myself but different.

I shaved my head and went to college, where I joined Queer Alliance, got involved with the radio station. WESU had been around since 1939, and its collection of vinyl was deep. I eagerly took on the volunteer duty of alphabetizing the records in the overcrammed “rock” room. Through some older denizens of the AOL queer punk message board I had recently been turned on to early Rough Trade, the pop-experimental shamble of LiliPUT, Swell Maps, The Slits. As I crouched at the low shelves and reached for the high ones, I pulled out albums whose covers hinted at a similar aesthetic: a certain typeface on the cover, a collage-y layout, no big hair or glamor shots. Entertainment! stood out for the unmistakable irony of its title, pert exclamation on a blood-red background. I added it to the pile. 

Let’s say I brought a stack of records into Studio B at some weird hour when no one was using it. Let’s say the first record I played was too shiny. I wasn’t here for the sheen, for seamlessness. Which is why I might say that the first thing I noted about “Ether,” Entertainment!’s opening track, was how separate it sounded. The bass enters alone. The flat toms beat an answer. When the guitar comes in on the third bar it’s as unblended layer, as scratch on the surface. At the time I might have been able to put into words that the separateness blasted out trad-rock hierarchy, a democratic punkness I couldn’t resist. Now I can also understand that if the song was a body, it was the kind of container I recognized. 

Which is to say—uncomfortable. Andy Gill’s guitar treble scrapes. Melody accrues through static, noise. Hugo Burnham’s drums skitter, more angle than anchor. And Dave Allen’s bass—ominous ground. Jon King sings dramatic and deadpan, “dirt behind the daydream,” explosive and dry. Even if you don’t know (I didn’t) that Long Kesh is a prison in Northern Ireland, it’s so clear it’s political. Its catchiness could be a trap. If the sound is a body it’s useless at best, splintered at best, but it’s sharp. It gives disaffectedness contour and form. 

Then as now, I wanted my noise overlaid with constraint—a flirtation between containment and its breach. In “Natural’s Not In It” Gill drills into a repeated guitar riff for the whole 3 minutes, achieving an almost ascetic minimalism, if not for the rhythmic wrist-flicks that careen, however briefly, toward chaos—as if the friction built up from the repeated riff couldn’t help but toss off errant sparks. It’s because the guitar is so precise almost everywhere that the slide into no-wave clang halfway through “Return the Gift,” the hazy drone on-ramp to “Anthrax,” lands so powerfully. It’s too simple to call it “relief” or “release,” when the riffs coil back tight as ever. 

In November I made out with my best friend because I could. In the winter with an older girl who thought I was cute. I didn’t feel anything, or didn’t feel the right things. I didn’t understand how I was supposed to feel the right things without someone instructing me. I pined for a basically straight, stoic senior I'd kissed at queer Spin the Bottle. The particular, self-squandering paradox of wanting something body-based but not being in your body. I flapped around in the gap between desire and the means to achieve it, got good at that dance—stiff joints, braced hips, hands chopping air.

I was dancing to a song like “Contract”: “These social dreams/ put in practice in the bedroom,” singsonging along to the dub-dipped outro, “Our bodies make us worry...”, the guitar a small plane nosing into the wind. “Contract” and “Damaged Goods” and “At Home He’s a Tourist” joined those cold British songs about sex as commodity, the impossibility of living up to sex in the movies, of achieving anything like authenticity in sex and romance at all. These songs made a neat refuge for someone who could understand cultural politics much better than sex, who could parse Foucault more readily than know how to experience touch. The opacity of the lyrics in “Damaged Goods” made its “lust” something I could hold and examine at a distance, partake in the critique without needing to understand. 

But I’m writing this wrong if it seems like I’m saying Entertainment! let me persist in the illusion that I didn’t have a body. It was almost the opposite. In my dorm room, rewinding the cassette copy I’d taped off the record, every treble-shard of guitar was my circadian static made audible. The syncopation permission to move off-beat. The way the riff stings and collapses at the end of “Guns Before Butter” and the drums gallop on, the sound hailed me, granted me personhood. Its sexlessness saw me. The sound’s insistence fired and cooled my brain and let me move without thinking. What a reprieve.

In her book The Queer Child, Kathryn Bond Stockton writes of “the ‘gay’ child’s fascinating asynchronicities, its required self-ghosting measures, its appearance only after its death, and its frequent fallback onto metaphor (as a way to grasp itself)...”. In a state of utter scriptlessness, one’s queer-child selfhood can only be understood after the fact. As much as I spent my late teen years wearing out my Team Dresch LPs, their dyke-love-and-loss narratives were still aspirational. Gang of Four met me where I was, not yet fully materialized but needing to account for embodiment. It reflected my prickling not-yetness back to me. As an adult I have sex, do stretches, take Lexapro—I’m less anxious, more rooted. Yet that grounding’s shot through with Entertaiment!’s sparks and static. Its treble is my gender. Does that mean it’s a queer record? Maybe. If it is or it isn’t, the gift it gave me is clear: a conduit into my queer body.

Sara Jaffe is a writer, educator, and musician living in Portland, OR. Her first novel, Dryland, was published by Tin House Books in 2015. Her short fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared or are upcoming in publications including Catapult, Fence, BOMB, NOON, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She co-edited The Art of Touring (Yeti, 2009), an anthology of writing and visual art by musicians drawing on her experience as guitarist for post-punk band Erase Errata.