Great men

Gang of Four wrote protest music for people who didn't think they had anything to protest. On the surface, the characters in their songs were the very definition of happy, satisfied folk: office workers, blithely ebullient clubgoers, people who were falling in love--or at least thinking they were. The band's subjects were very different from those chosen by their fellow students in the British punk class of 1977; coming from an art-school background, Gang of Four focused on people with career opportunities the Clash didn't believe in and a future that the Sex Pistols had violently dismissed.

But frontmen Jon King and Andy Gill knew that underneath that routine of work-consume-sleep-do-it-again-tomorrow was an emotional chaos as brutal and angry as any punk song. So punk songs were what they came up with, though they laced them with a funk backbeat. Thank goodness for that concession: When you're being confronted with the horrible truth about the emptiness and desperation of your life, it's nice to have something to dance to. But for all their catchy beats, it was the outrage in the band's songs that registered. Across the two discs of a brand-new double-disc retrospective, 100 Flowers Bloom, tracks the sound of urban angst, from panic while waiting in line for fast food ("Cheeseburger") to personal panic while waiting in line to enlist ("I Love a Man in a Uniform").

Not for nothing was Gang of Four's 1990 compilation album titled A Brief History of the Twentieth Century; Gill and King were telling the story of how people struggled to balance their roughly formulated hopes with the harsh realities of consumer culture, and that collision is modern times in a nutshell. The band put that smashup into song: Gill's guitar, a feedback-laden noise that shuddered and stuttered, rained over the beat like Molotov cocktails thrust at shopping malls, and King's vocals sprayed out like shards of glass. The lyrics were built around simple observations, but they came out like miniature manifestoes: "He fills his head with culture / He gives himself an ulcer"; "Sometimes I think that money is my only goal"; "To have ambition was my ambition." Though they traded off on vocals, Gill and King both possessed harsh voices--all the better either to chastise that hopeful fellow bringing condoms to a club or to sound the cry for help that King announced on "It Is Not Enough," damning workaday life. "It is not enough! It is just a habit!"

Churning underneath the vocals was a bedrock of rhythm: If not quite as limber as the P-Funk the band drew from, it was credibly loose. Bassist Dave Allen and drummer Hugo Burnham concocted a martial pound that was half funky groove, half death march. On 100 Flowers, it's most powerful during a live version of "Anthrax" recorded in San Francisco in 1980. After two minutes of tense, piercing feedback, Burnham begins to pummel away, a beat made even more caustic by Gill's vocals, which equate love with a loss of control: "I feel like a beetle on its back / And there's no way for me to get up." It was the world recast as a Kafka story, filled with humans as insects, flat on their backs and flailing to right themselves.

It was a bitter pill to swallow, and one that went over better in England, whose pop audience was more willing to look for itself in a punk song. But for American listeners then trapped in the clutches of Christopher Cross, the consumer chastisements of 1979's Entertainment! were only going to go so far. To underscore the difference across the Atlantic, the liner notes to 100 Flowers Bloom include an amusing 1979 letter to the band's manager from Rupert Perry, then vice president of A&R at Capitol Records. "Whilst we respect the great abilities that the Gang of Four have demonstrated and their success in other parts of the world," he wrote, "[Entertainment!] is too left field for the present marketplace in the USA."