My 7th grade band teacher, Mr. Preble, was a slim and elegant man. In retrospect, I can see that he was enormously patient, and we tested that patience considerably.
I liked him right up until the time he made a comparison–a comparison I found insufferably arrogant–between the pop music we liked and the classical music he wanted to teach us about. His point, as I recall, was that while pop music was almost invariably about young romance, classical music evoked a refined and subtle reflection on many aspects of the human experience…
I interrupted him there, and not politely. “It depends on what you listen to,” I said. “Pop songs are about all kinds of things.” Mr. Preble and I couldn’t be friends after that.
If my objection was true in 1969, it was even more true a decade later. While I like a love song or a broken-hearted song as much as the next fan, I was still hanging on to my conviction that there were more important and revolutionary things to be found in lyrics and liner notes and in the rhythm and noise. Something is happening here, but you don’t what it is, do you Mr. Jones?
So in the late 70s I found myself defending my view all over again, this time with older colleagues in my Marxist-Leninist collective. Their tastes had moved on from their early appreciation of Dylan and the Beatles and the Stones, and had ended up in that 1970s place where one’s music was no longer an expression of alienation or revolt but had become mellow background for getting an after-work Rocky Mountain High– which is to say, it could be about romance, or not about romance, but it really didn’t need to be about anything at all.
And then, amazingly, the alienation and revolt came back to rock ‘n roll, this time fueled by Thatcherism. I loved the Sex Pistols and the Clash and most of all I loved the Gang of Four, whose music had things to say about social theory that were considerably more profound (and profoundly Marxist) than what I was getting from the collective’s study group.
Some young hangers-on recruited me into a Marxist-Leninist wannabe punk rock band–we called ourselves the Prols–and I learned how to play drums, sort of. One night Ricky, our leader and guitarist, told us Gang of Four was going to be playing at Hurrahs and we were all going together.
Which brings me to this article by Sasha Frere-Jones in the current New Yorker. She gets the Gang of Four’s contributions to the funk/punk genre mostly right, I think, and she includes a vignette from that show, along with a link to omigod, video:
When Gang of Four came to New York in 1979 and performed at Hurrah, they did a version of “Damaged Goods,” which was already enough of an underground hit that the audience sang along to most of it.
Well, we were singing along to it, all of our bandmembers there in the mosh pit, because we wanted to make that sound and sensibility part of our own. Besides, the lyrics could have been written about my unrequited love for the girl I’d followed out to New York two years earlier:
Damaged goods
Send them back
I can’t work, I can’t achieve
Send me back
Open the till
Give me the change you said would do me good
Refund the cost
You said you’re cheap but you’re too much
Which of course actually is about young romance, but what Mr. Preble wasn’t getting about rock ‘n roll is that it’s always all about young romance, but it’s also about rage and alienation and a burning desire to turn the world upside down. When it’s not about some other aspect of human experience.
Or as the Gang of Four’s lyricist, Jon King, put it in a slightly later song, “Why Theory”
Each day seems like a natural fact.
And what we think, changes how we act.
The Gang of Four’s leader and guitarist, Andy Gill, died Feb. 2 of pneumonia. He was just three years older than me.
