Arts and Entertainment,The album's central theme is set forth at the beginning of its second track, "Natural's Not in It": "The problem of leisure/ What to do for pleasure". Extending the Marxist concept of alienated labor, Gang of Four argue that "leisure" is just as alienated: Far from providing refuge from the economic exploitation of the capitalist workplace, the realms of home, play and especially love actually replicate the same self-destroying forces. As the song goes on to say:
- Fornication makes you happy
- No escape from society
- Natural is not in it
- Your relations are of power
- We all have good intentions
- But all with strings attached [2]
As Gang of Four see it, once leisure becomes a
commodity like any other, one's leisure time and one's own self participating in leisure become commodities as well, with no more intrinsic meaning than the profit to be made from them. As the song "Return the Gift" puts it:
- It's on the market
- You're on the price list...
- Please send me evenings and weekends [3]
Being thus reduced to economic tokens, people at leisure feel alienated by the very activities they are supposed to be enjoying. To the complaint "I'm so restless (I'm bored as a cat)", the song "Glass" responds: "If you're feeling all in take some aspirin/Or some
paracetamol."
[4] "At Home He's a Tourist" describes the condition of everyman: "He fills his head with culture/He gives himself an ulcer."
[5]
One of
Entertainment!'s best-known songs is "Anthrax", which might be considered an anti-love song ("Love will get you like a case of
anthrax/And that's something I don't want to catch"). As Jon King sings, Andy Gill issues what might be considered a spoken-word manifesto of the group's take on romance, which concludes: "I don't think we're saying there's anything wrong with love, just don't think that what goes on between two people should be shrouded in mystery."
[6]
Stripping away that "mystery," in the song "Contract", Gang of Four suggest that love is nothing more than "a contract in our mutual interest". Shaped both by economic inequality and media messages ("You dreamed of scenes/Like you read of in magazines"), modern relationships are doomed to re-enact the exploitation of capitalism:
- These social dreams
- Put in practice in the bedroom
- Is this so private
- Our struggle in the bedroom [7]
As "Natural's Not in It" notes, "The body's good business,"
[8] or as "At Home He's a Tourist" puts it:
- Down on the disco floor
- They make their profit
- From the things they sell
- To help you cob off
- And the rubbers you hide
- In your top left pocket [9]
As those lyrics suggest,
Entertainment! often presents
sexuality in a grim light—sometimes using religious terminology (like "
fornication") to express disgust. The song "Damaged Goods" declares:
- The sins of the flesh
- Are simply sins of lust
- Sometimes I'm thinking that I love you
- But I know it's only lust [10]
At times, this anger at a socially mediated sexuality can appear as a rather cruel attitude towards lovers in general and female partners in particular. In "I Found That Essence Rare," the band sings: "See the happy pair smiling close like they're monkeys/They wouldn't think so but they're holding themselves down."
[11] And in "Damaged Goods" (the title itself a pejorative expression for a sexually active woman), the singer declares, "You said you're cheap but you're too much."
[12] The New Trouser Press Record Guide credits the album with "the self-righteous air of someone who couldn't get to first base with his girlfriend the previous evening."
[13]
Aside from its critique of leisure and romance, the album does tackle some more conventional political subjects—though with Gang of Four's unique take. "Ether", the album's lead track, is a protest against the British occupation of
Northern Ireland ("Fly the flag on foreign soil"), making reference to the
Maze prison outside
Belfast in lyrics like "locked in Long Kesh" and "H-Block torture", and suggesting that Britain is motivated by economic factors in the lines "There may be
oil/Under
Rockall" (a barren islet that was the focus of an Anglo-Irish dispute). But, typically, what are seen as the outrages of British rule are presented as a problem for those "trapped in heaven lifestyle", the "dirt behind the daydream" that "breaks your new dreams daily".
[14]
The song "5.45" deals with
guerrilla warfare, presumably a reference to the bloody conflicts then going on in
Central America. But the song, like the album as a whole, approaches the subject from the point of view of the alienated bourgeois spectator: "How can I sit and eat my tea with all that blood flowing from the television." In the end, Gang of Four concludes, "Guerrilla war struggle is the new entertainment.
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