The Daily Deep Cut

The editors at JamsBio like to think of ourselves as music fans first, not critics, and that’s the sensibility we strive for at JamsBio and that we seek in other sites as well. That’s why we’re so jazzed about Damn Fine Day, a site that each day profiles a deep album cut that’s been overlooked, but deserves a place in everybody’s collection. In the name of spreading the gospel about great music, we present “The Daily Deep Cut,” where we add our two cents about the songs featured on Damn Fine Day. Once you read our unique take, we’ll send you over to Damn Fine Day so you can stream the full track and download it if you like. Sometimes we might even suggest another deep track from the same album or present some other novel twist on what their hawking.

Gang of Four took its name from the group of flunkies who ran China for Mao Zedong after the Cultural Revolution. Band members were not Maoists themselves—Maoists, after all, despised theoretical Marxism—and the name was plainly a provocation, decided upon during yet another epic drinking night with the Mekons. Gang of Four boasted the most accomplished musicians of the Leeds post-punks, the sorts of guys you can imagine taking thirty minute-long guitar solos. The ideological purity of their music, however, precluded any sort of jamming.

Gang of Four performed a détournement on British pub music, transforming the raucous, working class sound of bands like Dr. Feelgood into mutant funk. It’s a funk devoid of swing, however; the route to the “one” is always direct and angular. The result is a compositional tautness that doesn’t bend where it should bend. Melodies don’t resolve the way you think they should and come wrapped around a rhythm that is unrelenting. It’s the perfect setting for propaganda music.

The mystery of Gang of Four is how the band could make incoherent and nearly incomprehensible political theory into hit singles and classic albums. The answer was summarized nicely by drummer Hugo Burnham, whom Simon Reynolds quotes in Rip it Up and Start Again, a chronicle of post-punk: “Countless times in the States, people would come up to me after gigs and say, ‘I’d read the NME interviews and I thought you’d be really boring.’ They were taken aback because we fucking rocked.”

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