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We're going to give the Gang of Four/Warner Bros credit for this idea--putting two 1980s albums --"Hard" & "Solid Gold"--by this "post-punk" band on one CD. After all, CDs have the space on them. Why waste plastic? It's only a pity that the two albums are so artistically different that they do not play well as songs one through nineteen.
The "Gang of Four" was stuck in an artistic tension where it partly wanted to pull off in a disco-dance direction and partly wanted a hard rock and didactic political message to pound into people's heads. It's tempting to say that "Gang of Four" thus made both right opportunist and ultra-left errors--on the one hand just trying to make money with inane dance music that is nonetheless hugely popular (right opportunist) and on the other hand, using music for what it is not suited for, slogan-chanting (ultra-left didacticism). Music does not need to pander to the currently bad tastes of people and nor does it need to try to substitute itself for books or documentary films. From a marketing stand-point, the band may also have felt that it made its political statements and now it wanted to draw attention to itself with feminist dance music. "Gang of Four" was a hard-core punk band in its soul but with a much greater range of musical talents and polished professional skills, and maybe just a little less drive than the average hard-core punk band. In fact, "Gang of Four" does manage its own central artistic tension in some cases, not by splitting the middle as some might think. "Outside the Trains Don't Run on Time" works perfectly as political rock, because the pointed, disciplined guitar-playing and marching beat go together well. Likewise, "Cheeseburger" was the right subject to imagine a truck-driver on a long-haul to go with music to pound in some alienating thoughts. There are some subjects where that disciplined and in-your-face sound makes sense. We also have to give Gang of Four credit for trying to be one of the most feminist bands around. We don't agree with all of what they say, but we see the effort--and that's much more than we can say for the vast majority of commercial bands. "A Hole in the Wallet" asks why wimmin bother with men sometimes and draws the whole comparison of how a lot of men might look at similar questions--as a question of the wallet. Listeners should keep in mind sarcasm and alienation when listening to the band. There are other songs where the "Gang of Four"'s basic tension does not work. "A Piece of My Heart" just has too many words and comes off awkward. It seemed that some of the will to pound in a message found it's way into "Hard," the more disco-influenced album. Likewise, "It Don't Matter," tries to be disco, but it's not: it's just awkward. Some of the music in "Hard" makes MIM think the band was "trying too hard" to cross over to the "womyn's point of view" in an almost stereotypical way by taking up the disco sound and womynish voices. The attempt to mix in a feminist view was probably doomed to at least some failures, but we at MIM are much more sympathetic to such failures than all the successes of the Britney Spearses of the world. For those looking for a mix of different kinds of music, we can say for sure that this is not a stupid album. It deserves that "alternative" label even being early 1980s music that isn't punk. P.S. "Gang of Four" is an epithet that refers to four political leaders in China who upheld Mao's line in favor of the Cultural Revolution. The whole MIM political line can be summed up as a "Gang of Four" line, so we are here referring in a sense, to our namesakes. See our theory magazine on gender oppression
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