Gang of BORE (Sore, Snore, Whore etc..)

Buick6

too punk to drunk
Just read the Reynold piece on the nu GO4 rec, and it was way, way too polite (paid gig, so you gotta be).

That new po-mo 'joke' is the worst piece of SHIt I think ever released anywhere!!

They have completely FUCKED UP one of the best 80s, whiteboy, dunce dance tracks 'i love a man in uniform', it's played too fast, shitty production, crap drum sound CRAP, CRAP CRAP

And then bloody 'Anthrax' one of the BEST feedback/noise fucks of the 80s and best UK experimental guitar track since Eno's 'skysaw;.. What a BUGGERY HUH?

This 'new' album, a post-moderne trick, represents the total LOW of UK muzak 2005. SHITE SHITE and a INTELLECTUAL RIPOFF.

It's the msucial equivalent of someone fucking you in the arse, and forcing you to felch it back!!

In fact that implies some effort/pleasure, this album represent not even that!

In fact this sort of album justifies illegal downloading. Fuck the fuckers and then delete it to save disc space soon after!
 
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ice bat

(cheshire cat)
Wow, I was sure that I was the angriest person in the world about this album, but I doff my hat to you, Buick6.

My initial reaction was that I wanted to vomit -- I mean I felt actual nausea -- and then to hit Andy Gill very, very, very hard. Such violent impulses are vanishingly rare for me and in any case never acted upon, but this was...special.

They've turned into some awful old whores, haven't they? Clear Channel, VH-1 Classic, Hard Rock Cafe -- apparently there's nothing they won't do now.

I agree that SR was much too nice in the Slate piece, the writing of which was (he tells me via e-mail) prompted in part by the incoherently enraged e-mail I sent asking his opinion after hearing three songs from this atrocity on Gang of Four's Myspace page a couple of months ago. (Incidentally that e-mail of mine is where the "covers / tribute band" notion in the Slate article came from. Not that I really mind. Just sayin'.)

Without knowing SR's exact intent or thoughts, I can also imagine that a writer who considers himself a diehard fan might feel that there's not much of a constructive point in being as publicly scathing about something like this as it deserves. Anyway SR's just said on his blog that outtakes from the article will be posted soon, and I'm very curious to see them.

SR quotes Jon King on Return the Gift: "It is our way of reasserting ownership of our own material" (apparently they earned zero money from their records at the time and still have unrecouped advances, such that a rerelease would earn them nothing). All right, moral high ground and all that, undoubtedly, but to what end, for what artistic purpose, would one reassert ownership of one's work in such a way, if indeed any artistic agenda exists -- that is, any reason apart from the imperative to finally make it pay off, in terms of potential fiscal gain and/or media attention? And DID THEY HAVE TO FUCK IT UP QUITE SO HORRIBLY? This thing isn't gonna sound dated in 2007 -- it sounds dated NOW. Also I can't believe that no one has mentioned how much Jon King's voice has changed since the 90s, nearly past recognition.

At the same time, as an extremely old person myself, I can't help being a LITTLE pleased by Gang of Four's return, even in such degraded form. If I were them I would want to get onstage and scream "WE WERE RIGHT GOD DAMN IT!! SO THERE!! RUBBERS RUBBERS RUBBERS!!" Maybe in a sense that's what they are doing.

I used to be an enormous fan of Gang of Four, going back to 1982 when I was 18. Nowadays I'm more like the loyal opposition, if such a thing can be said to exist -- by which I mean that I still love and respect their original achievements, while being beyond appalled at what they're doing now.

In another interview Jon King noted that two-thirds of their current audience are between 15 and 25. Gang of Four, as far as I can tell, have totally written off their original fans in favor of new ones who haven't got any sort of historical perspective on the band.

They are likely to record something new for the soundtrack to V for Vendetta, and an entirely new album is under discussion. I don't know whether to be hopeful or terrified. Probably the latter.

Even so, I went to see them last week. I found it an incredibly fuckin' cheesy and gross Rock Spectacle(tm), their "severity" now just a selling point. Serves me right for being such a sucker for a nostalgia act. Silly of me, but I left my comment on the stage at the end of their set: a white sheet of paper bearing a photocopied image of a dollar bill.

"Rock and roll swindle...rock and roll swindle...rock and roll swindle...rock and roll!" -- Sex Pistols, "The Great Rock and Roll Swindle"
 
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k-punk

Spectres of Mark
there's unleimich and there's UNHEIMLICH

I wish people would get so angry about the likes of Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party, groups who have never had any ideas of their own yet who act as if they have, who are given a free ride by an indulgent press and a slack critical climate...

Listening to the album, I didn't feel that sense of outrage at all ....

Return the Gift is both canny and uncanny

CANNY: in that what else could the band do? Would it have been better to have simply released the old tracks (yet) again? But the minimally different re-recorded tracks take on a Duchampian quality... they can't but assume the role of a commentary on re-packaging... whereas a simple re-release would have simply BEEN re-packaging... just another commodity.... meaning that, yes, 'Return the Gift' is another commodity but perhaps not JUST another commodity... look, if everyone else is allowed to rip off Go4 in 2005, why aren't Gang of 4 themselves allowed to get in on the act? (I like the fact that Simon talks of the 'eternal returns' of retro-culture, a nice play on Nietzsche plus the idea that there is always money to be made from these revisitings...)

UNCANNY: not for nothing does Simon use the word 'eerie' three times in his blissblog piece on the album. There is something disconcerting and unsettling about the way the band have doubled themselves, about this estranging return to the familiar....

Some of the outrage is plainly without any basis:

'Gang of 4 will do ANYTHING now'... what, like get signed to EMI? Or appear on TOTP?

'The 'new' album required no effort'.... whereas re-releasing the old tracks WOULD have?
 

ice bat

(cheshire cat)
I wish people would get so angry about the likes of Franz Ferdinand and Bloc Party, groups who have never had any ideas of their own yet who act as if they have, who are given a free ride by an indulgent press and a slack critical climate...
I absolutely agree with your assessment of these bands and their reception, but I've never cared for them enough (or indeed at all) to get angry about them.

what else could the band do?
Record new material? (Which apparently they may be deciding to do.)

if everyone else is allowed to rip off Go4 in 2005, why aren't Gang of 4 themselves allowed to get in on the act?
Because their rerecordings sound like crap? Your mileage, clearly, may vary.

'Gang of 4 will do ANYTHING now'
I'm not sure who you're quoting -- my remark was "apparently there's nothing they won't do now." Sure, they were always about contradictions -- EMI, TOTP etc. etc. -- but to me Return the Gift represents some whole new level of artistic auto-cannibalism, one that I couldn't see them doing earlier in their career, though it is quite possible that I am mistakenly attributing far more aesthetic integrity to Gang of Four v.1.0 than I should. They keep on about how they wouldn't censor "At Home He's A Tourist" for TOTP and thus may have sacrificed success for integrity (actually they were quite willing to censor it, but only up to a point), but they went on the Old Grey Whistle Test less than two years later with a blatantly censored "To Hell With Poverty", the lines "In this land right now some are insane and they're in charge" replaced with a repetition of the first two lines.

I can hear the "eerie," "uncanny" aspect very clearly. I don't enjoy it.

Still I will admit that I really did enjoy their cheesy fuckin' show (enjoyment perhaps enhanced by a bunch of vodka and an unstoppable smirk). They played well, and yelling "WOOO!!!" repeatedly during "Natural's Not In It" surely merits some kind of lifetime achievement award for sarcasm. Respect!
 
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k-punk

Spectres of Mark
Gang of 4 will do ANYTHING now'
I'm not sure who you're quoting -- my remark was "apparently there's nothing they won't do now."

lol, hardly a massive misrepresentation :)

Must confess to really enjoying the album, though I'm not sure why, or that I can justify it....

Has Greil Marcus written anything about it, does anyone know?
 

ice bat

(cheshire cat)
lol, hardly a massive misrepresentation :)
Oh all right. You had it in quotation marks, though, and I just was incapable of letting it slide. :)

My point remains, though -- G04's canniness/opportunism now extends to recycling their own best work, and not in a way that I personally find interesting, enjoyable, or justifiable no matter how much or what kind of rhetoric it's wrapped in. To me Entertainment! was all about taking insane risks aesthetically and somehow succeeding wildly -- making it pay off, as it were -- while Return the Gift takes no aesthetic risks at all that I can see, though of course its very existence could be seen as risky. I actually think I might have been...if not thrilled, then at least impressed...had they done something radically different with those songs.

I somehow find both the idea and (so far) the reality of the remixes far less objectionable, even though they're off of the new versions and I can easily think of 50 more interesting/challenging artists who could've been tapped for this project than the ones who wound up doing it, with maybe a couple exceptions. Still I quite liked the one I heard -- Ladytron's "Natural's Not In It" -- and am curious to hear the Tortoise and Melvins ones, of "Paralysed" and "He'd Send In the Army" respectively.

I don't know if Greil Marcus has written anything on this; googling just now turns up nothing. I'd be very interested indeed to know his view.

The packaging of the CD is fucking hilarious and brilliant, with the dollar bill and all; and the sticker says "THE BAND WHO INVENTED ORIGINALITY"! They have GOT to be taking the piss. Nice one.

Somebody needs to do some kind of massive Helene Cixous-based rant on the notions of "the Gift and the Proper" in relation to this thing, is all.
 

dominic

Beast of Burden
gang of four evidently played at nublu last thursday -- i night that i usually go there -- but nobody told me they were playing, and so i (very sadly) missed their show
 

Grievous Angel

Beast of Burden
I never thought Go4 were very good first time round, apart from Love Like Anthrax and Armalite Rifle. (Never saw them live though... and was never a member of the SWP :)).

But if they've done reasonably exact covers of their old tunes, how bad can that be?
 

ice bat

(cheshire cat)
Very bad indeed. See above.

Going into detail about the sonic shittiness of the thing as I perceive it would just be upsetting and, finally, boring, and believe it or not I am not actually out to ruin everybody else's potential or actual enjoyment of nu-Gang of Four, only to come to terms with (if not ameliorate) my own bewilderingly violent negative reaction. Suffice it to say that the remark that keeps coming to mind, swiped from a different context on ILM, is "Welcome to the 90s, bitches. Let us know when you make it to the new century."

About their live show (which as noted I really did enjoy despite everything), two words: fog machine.
 

k-punk

Spectres of Mark
I really regret not bothering to see them now... I'm always a little unsure about these revivals, but they sounded good enough to make it worthwhile...

I'm still enjoying the record, though it is baffling as to why I bother to listen to it... I guess the slightly different angle on the songs is sufficiently interesting to keep me hooked....

Occurred to me that the objections to the album are a little rockist... what Go4 have done might, as Simon noted, have no precedents in rock, but re-recording your own tunes is standard in jazz, blues, reggae surely...
 

Ness Rowlah

Norwegian Wood
I would be surprised if this re-recording business was a first in rock?
(not counting live and unplugged records).

Although the closest I can think of right now is
Bernard Szajner's "Superficial Music" (1981) which is
(Nessie runs down to the living room to get the cover out and it reads),

compiled from selected tapes previously
used as the basis of my recording "Visions of Dune". The tapes in their present
form have been replayed in reverse at half speed without any rerecording and
are enhanced only through the discriminate use of digital and analog devices
Take that GoF, a simple re-recording is school-boy stuff :)
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
k-punk said:
Occurred to me that the objections to the album are a little rockist... re-recording your own tunes is standard in jazz, blues, reggae surely...

oh yes it's totally rockist in that it's part of expecting artists to grow, develop, not repeat themselves

matos claimed there were loads of examples of this in R&b but only cited two

i couldn't think of any specific examples it had been done before but it struck me as something that would be quite common in showbiz, variety, MOR etc -- where artists (or should i say artistEs) are known not so much for recording as for the songs .... they do them on different TV shows, in las vegas, chicken-and-a-basket, Radio 2, etc etc .... so it's not the specific recording that's their signature moment it's their interpretation of the song maybe that they'd do in different places, with different band-leaders and orchestras

so i'm sure like people like ooh i dunno doris day or jack jones or max bygraves on signing to a new label might have done albums later on in their career reprising the best-known songs associated with them...

and that would play just fine with an MOR audience where it is about the Song, sthe top-line vocal melody, so that differences in arrangement, production etc would perhaps not even be that audible to them

whereas in rock (and pop actually--all studio-based musics) it's all about the record not the song , the sound not the song -- the specific arrangmenet, the recording ambience, that's what you fall for

eno commented about this, that remarkable thing where you can identify a song on the radio within half a second purely on its sonority and recording ambience, before enough of the melody has unfurled to recognise the tune -- the timbre of the band-voice

that's where the gang of four rerecording has its disconcerting aspect, that these are songs you love in their original recording ambience, and it's almost exactly the same except for the ambience on return the gift

people also used to get livid, and i understood it perfectly, when the first CDs were coming out, sometimes the more perfectionist artists like todd rundgren would add stuff to the original recordings, like some percussion-- or the mix would be different -- the sound you'd formed cathexis with, subtly tampered with and made not-right
 

owen

Well-known member
'i disapprove of it, and so does john'

blissblogger said:
i couldn't think of any specific examples it had been done before but it struck me as something that would be quite common in showbiz, variety, MOR etc -- where artists (or should i say artistEs) are known not so much for recording as for the songs .... they do them on different TV shows, in las vegas, chicken-and-a-basket, Radio 2, etc etc .... so it's not the specific recording that's their signature moment it's their interpretation of the song maybe that they'd do in different places, with different band-leaders and orchestras

so i'm sure like people like ooh i dunno doris day or jack jones or max bygraves on signing to a new label might have done albums later on in their career reprising the best-known songs associated with them...

and that would play just fine with an MOR audience where it is about the Song, sthe top-line vocal melody, so that differences in arrangement, production etc would perhaps not even be that audible to them

ha that's a nice comparison. or alternatively the 'some tracks have been rerecorded and may not be by the original artists' cds on the hallmark label that you can get for three quid in Asda...

i wouldn't mind hearing this, if only because it seems so utterly perverse...
 
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ice bat

(cheshire cat)
I'm tempted to swear that this is my last post on this supremely-vexing-to-me subject, but experience has taught that making such a pronouncement is the surest way to suddenly find a lot more of VAST IMPORT to say on a given topic, so whatever.

ANYway, I just ran across a piece that seems to me to nail it: a blog entry by Rob Horning at PopMatters.

Without knowing the etiquette of reposting stuff on message boards, here's the key bit:

"I admit to the strong desire to concoct clever rationalizations that excuse my musician heroes for their more perfidious releases, to want to evince the faith that no matter what they’ve done, it’s somehow worthy of careful attention and illustrative at some level of their far-reaching genius. (Much like Bush loyalists must take it on faith that there’s some noble purpose behind his putting a crony on the Supreme Court.) This is what makes the worst Dylan album and even the worst Gang of Four infinitely more interesting to me than, say, Franz Ferdinand. Perhaps squandering credibility is far more fascinating to listen to than a band struggling to earn it in the first place, trying to disguise and transcend their obvious indebtedness to the bands before them and trying to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of hyperbolic press hype and noncritical fans. That is part and parcel, I suppose, with my paean to negative thinking — a band’s failures, in eliciting criticism and idealized thinking of what should be, point the way to utopia far more successfully than a band’s successes, which tend to reinforce what already is, smoothing further the well-worn path to success that society already sanctions. In retrospect, a band’s successful work is that which reified its image and put them in the static firmament of celebrity, nothing can be found there but what has been mythologized, and what has been mythologized has already been smoothly integrated into the culture machine’s method for institutionalizing the status quo.

"When Entertainment! was first released, and when it was just anther deleted album by a little-known British band, it fully retained its power to subvert and startle. But as it’s slowly adopted into the pantheon of the '50 Most Important Albums of All Time' it becomes a hallowed relic, a canonized icon to revere rather than the incendiary blast it’s reckoned to be. That album in particular seems to have been made to make one recognize the deleterious effects of pop music, the variety of ways it smooths over contradictions and forwards consumerist ideology. If it is instead heralded as a brilliant instantiation of pop music, then it has become moribund, and no number of re-recordings of it will make it live again."
 

henry s

Street Fighting Man
this may not apply to this thread, but didn't N*E*R*D re-record their first album, such that it could be marketed differently to Europe (I'm a little bit electronic) and North America (I'm a little bit rock and roll)?...or did they just tweek the mix?
 

ice bat

(cheshire cat)
Wow, dunno about N*E*R*D, but I finally remembered who else in rock music has done it: the Mekons! in 2004! with Punk Rock! and I actually liked it! probably because I hadn't already cathected the hell out of the original versions! probably also because it didn't suck on its own merits!
 
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