Entertainment
This is what happens when academic Marxists pick up guitars: a debut album whose every lyric is acutely conscious of theory and economics, from a song organized around the dictum that "history's not made by great men", to pounding disco about consumer culture anomie, to the classic feedback rant "Love Like Anthrax," where Jon King chants "I feel like a beetle on its back." (The homonym was intentional.) But theory is nothing without praxis, and Gang Of Four got their tracts across with  Andy Gill's splintering, spitfire guitar attack, as well as a rhythm section that had listened to enough dub to have picked up some unusual tricks of rhythm and arrangement (like King's Augustus Pablo-influenced melodica parts).--Douglas Wolk